STAR is supporting the Slow Streets Sacramento movement. This effort, started by WALKSacramento and Sacramento Area Bicycle Advocates (SABA), has been joined by a number of local organizations (16 as of the moment).

People are out walking for essential trips and for physical and mental health, but except for a few locations in the central city, sidewalks are too narrow for people to pass and maintain six feet of physical distance. In fact, large areas of the city, particularly ones built in the 1970s, lack sidewalks at all. So people are walking in the streets. This works OK in some places, but not in most places because, though traffic is a fraction of what it was, there are sociopathic drivers out using our streets to speed, to joy ride. So, the movement aims to restrict vehicles on some streets to emergencies, residents of that block, and deliveries. Different cities have adopted different names for this practice, and the detail of opening/closing streets varies, but the lead city in the US, Oakland, adopted the term ‘slow streets’ and this is the term being used in Sacramento.

The movement prioritizes streets that are on or close by high injury corridors identified in the Vision Zero program, streets that provide parallel routes to busy arterial streets for essential trips, and access to parks and healthy retail.

What does this have to do with transit? Long before the pandemic, transit users accessing light rail and bus stops had to deal with unsatisfactory roads, narrow sidewalks, broken sidewalks, no sidewalks. Because of the way and timing of development in different parts of the city, low income neighborhoods are much less likely to have sidewalks, and are much more likely to have sidewalks that haven’t been maintained. The cities and counties claim that it is the responsibility of the adjacent property owner to maintain sidewalks, which is a crazy idea. Do they claim that the roads must be maintained by adjacent property owners? Every bit as much as transit and roads, sidewalks are part of our transportation system. Government has always preferenced fixing things in higher income neighborhoods, and one only need spend some time in low income neighborhoods to see the result of this disinvestment.

If we want people to use transit, and we do, we must provide them a safe and comfortable way to get to transit stops. This access to transit is often called ‘first mile/last mile’, the distance people walk or bicycle to get to and from their homes and destinations to transit stops. For some people, the distance is shorter and along good walking and bicycling routes. For for many people, particularly low income people, the distance is longer and the route is not safe or comfortable. The least we can do for them is provide them a safe and comfortable way to get to transit. One of the goals of a quality transit system is that all people living in urbanized areas are within a half mile of high quality (frequent) transit.

We hope that you will individually join the movement, and encourage organizations of which you are a part, to join the movement. The Slow Streets Sacramento page lists three action you can take, and provides a lot of great background information.

If you are an essential worker using transit to get to work, or any person using transit for essential trips, thank you. And if you are out walking and bicycling, thank you.

• walkability