Do things with wheels belong on downtown sidewalks?
I’ve recently been working on a blog post about Liz and Curtis over at Vault of Midnight. One of the things I learned while researching the article is that we have a skateboard law in downtown Ann Arbor. You might know this, but I didn’t. Apparently skateboarders were a real issue in the 80’s and 90’s so City Council put forward a resolution banning skateboards from certain sidewalks in downtown Ann Arbor.
This issue is relevant to the work that I do because some of the employees at Vault of Midnight (and probably other downtown stores) use skateboards as a way to get to work. So effectively if they do decide to skateboard to work and are caught on certain sidewalks (such as Main from Huron to William) they could get a ticket. Currently this law doesn’t apply to bikes or rollerblades or other things with wheels. However, I have been at meetings where people talk about banning bikes from downtown sidewalks as well.
I think this is a tricky issue. In an ideal world, we’d all use the sidewalks with the same degree of care, regardless of if we were on a bike or skateboard or wheelchair. But as I’m sure many of you know, this isn’t an ideal world and there are people who bike on sidewalks so fast they end up crashing into pedestrians. I’m sure the same goes for skateboards, although I’ve never seen this happen. At the same time, I’m not sure making certain types of sidewalk traffic illegal is the way to go. When I hear people talk about banning bikes from sidewalks, I am quick to point out that if we decide to do something like this, we must also find ways to show where bikes do belong. The same goes for skateboards and other things with wheels. Only right now if someone wanted to skateboard to work downtown they might get a ticket for doing so. I know this isn’t the intention of the ordinance, but it does happen.
So what’s the solution? The folks at Vault of Midnight would like to see the skateboard law amended. Maybe there could be a way to show you are using your skateboard to get to work? But this still doesn’t solve the challenge of people using all sorts of wheeled things on the sidewalks in an unsafe manner. In some ways, this is a cultural problem as well. In the US, it seems like some people don’t really think about how their reckless behavior (be it biking too fast or driving while drunk or texting while walking) might endanger the lives of others. The same is true for cars as well. And I’m not even going to start to figure out how to change the culture.
I am sure urban areas all over the country deal with this same issue. It would be interesing to know what happens in other communities and how they address this situation.