Who says curb cuts help?

Today during RantWoman's quest to cool herself, she reprised an absolutely gut-wrenching walk she did a couple weeks ago along 5th Avenue in downtown Seattle. The only difference: last time RantWoman and a buddy were travelling along the W side of Fifth. Today RantWoman was travelling on the east side of the street.

RantWoman's buddy on the first trip uses a large power wheelchair. RantWoman's buddy does not see any better than RantWoman and has a habit of regaling RantWoman with the thrills and spills of her commitment to independent living as defined by interaction with the built environment, civic infrastructure, etc. RantWoman finds some of these thrills and spills far to unenviable to repeat, but one journey will do nicely.

RantWoman and Travelling Buddy needed to go only a few blocks from City Hall to the library. RantWoman and TravellingBuddy, neither one of us can see across the street enough to evaluate without going there whether the curb cuts are any better on one side than on the other.

The point: our journey was only a few blocks. There were stoplights. Fifth Avenue is one way going opposite the direction we were headed. Every single intersection had two curb cuts oriented orthogonally. The problem is that in every single case, the curb cut oriented in our forward direction was set off-center, shortened, or otherwise misaligned so severely as to render the curb cuts useless for people in actual wheelchairs.

Instead, RantWoman and Travelling Buddy would arrive at each intersection. We would wait for the light to change in our forward direction. Then Travelling buddy would turn Right, use the perpendicular curb cut and then zip along again traffic nearly in the traffic lane. Think oncoming traffic. Think drivers probably cursing our very existence. Think stark raving terror. Think person with a hearing loss who cannot hear to change ourse in the fact of oncoming traffic. Alas, when we got across the street, Travelling buddy would again have to use the ramp facing perpendicular to the direction we wanted to go while traffic was whizzing by at her back.

To say the least, this was a hair-raising adventure, one that neither RantWoman nor Travelling Buddy want to repeat anytime soon. So today instead, RantWoman made the same walk along the East side of the street. This walk offered safe wide sidewalks through MOST of the walk--well, except for one weird hunk of some kind of giant electrical system switch protruding into a sidewalk already severely narrowed by the demands of a freeway onramp.

RantWoman and Travelling Buddy were out on a mission for the Friendly Neighborhood Center for Extreme Computing. For the time being RantWoman is just filing this experience in her things that need to be mapped file. At this point RantWoman soberly appreciates being alive to tell about it and will now be strategizing about Travelling Buddy's unique transportation issues. Sigh.