Dear Mr. Ochenduszko, I understand that you are a very busy man and decided to send you an e-mail after I tried to connect with you by phone, because our schedules could not meet. It has the appearance that “Pedestrian” has been a buzz word around City Hall recently, while It should have been one all along! You know I am reporting only what I see, its all REAL and I document it. I intend to give your engineers an opportunity to FIX STUFF THEY FORGOT or some of their mistakes! Your Engineering and Project Development (sorry I used Management instead of Development last time) Department can’t think of a way to mitigate the very obvious omission of pedestrian contingencies during construction, ALSO IN THE GLOBAL SENSE AT THE ROUNDABOUT TEST SITE ON POMONA & 7th. While we are approaching the opening of the pedestrian path across the plaza, it is painful to see no guidance from your engineers to show a pedestrian path (absent an original plan) and leave it entirely up to the contractor to deal with this dangerous dilemma. The picture of the elderly lady falling and the boy stumbling must have hit home on the LIABILITY button and as a result the contractor blocked the continuation from the Tent City corner with red posts and yellow ribbon with a “CLOSED SIDEWALK AHEAD” sign. Perhaps to deny liability for injuries by anyone crossing that barrier. Here are two illustrations of the situation:
The missed, but very obvious, temporary path is on the far right!
The tape ends and leaves the passage to the “danger zone” wide open. Also there is no suggested path, as on the opposite side of the Plaza. Let your eyes follow the ‘south/west-bound pedestrian….
make a decision to either walk on Orange Avenue in a traffic lane (as many do!) or continue on the sidewalk down Isabella. You decide on Isabella and come to this:
The PEDESTRIANS CROSSING HERE sign points, well, to a vehicle only intersection but NO “CROSSING” to the other side! See the lady on the left, cell phone at the ear in the middle of the lane where traffic comes from behind?
Another view, this picture also has a humorous aspect to it! The lady on the right, asked me which one of the two parking meters she should feed. It looks like the city bought and installed one too many, since the one on the left is apparently missing its parking space!
See the folks with the stroller that just walked into my picture?
Would you agree that this is a dangerous situation? Mark, if I were writing COMEDY, I could just observe the Keystone engineers to furnish me my material, this must be the unintentional dream team for any comedy writer (not that I intended to write comedy). I know the Rotary Park will take on a whole other dimension when it becomes “Operational”. Hopefully we can chat and help the progress!
