How to Survive: Your Commute
Foot traffic Getting used to Missoula’s pedestrian-friendly ways by Robert Meyerowitz • photos by Chad Harder When I moved to Missoula in the spring of 2011, I came to believe, with the kind of tacit certainty that attaches to completely unfounded assumptions, that there had to be a home for developmentally disabled adults somewhere near the Independent, which is at the top of South Orange Street. At this point, I should say, I’d lived and worked—and driven—in Managua, Nicaragua; Anchorage and Fairbanks, Alaska; South Florida; Honolulu; and in and around St. Louis. Yet it wasn’t until I got to Missoula that I saw grown men and women stepping into intersections and roundabouts—into traffic—without so much as looking one way.
Here, they were doing it around Cottonwood and Hickory streets and South First and Second streets, and even at Orange and First as cars came cruising around the curve south of the Orange Street bridge at 30 or 40 mph—stepping oh-so-slowly into the oncoming southbound traffic without glancing north. It was as though these pedestrians just magically believed cars would stop for them. Or bounce harmlessly off them. That the cars did indeed stop did nothing to convince me there wasn’t something seriously wrong with the pedestrians. This doesn’t just happen around South Orange Street, of course.Take West Main by Ryman, which seems like a dan-
gerous intersection. It’s not because of motorists’ speeds—cars are typically traveling at most 20 to 25 mph there— but because the intersection is uncontrolled and pedestrians routinely stroll through it without checking for cars, while other drivers, parked diagonally along both sides of West Main, often are backing out, or attempting to, while unable to see other vehicles or pedestrians, a problem compounded when people are attempting to back up extra-long rigs that they cannot see behind. Add a dollop of summertime’s transient bluegrass hippies and their inevitably accompanying dogs seeming, well, blissed out, and it all looks like a recipe for medium-speed dis-
Fresh Facts 2012
Missoula Independent
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