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August 27, 2006

Rant: Greenlake Park Goers

You can probably guess by the title and category of this post where I'll begin. Greenlake park goers do not keep it real. Also if you are a frequent reader, you know what is coming next. A quick concession. I had a *great* time at Greenlake this morning. It is a Seattle institution, and the people we saw there were overwhelmingly nice and cool. I always have a fun time there.

But there is one thing that drives me crazy. We'll start with a little context for those who don't live in Seattle. Greenlake is a small body of water in the Northern part of the city with a great running/walking/rollerblading trail around it. There are paddle boats, lots of people playing volleyball, and great stuff for the kinds (we especially liked the wading pool this morning). Your basic nice urban park. The trail, however, has a major problem:

Imagine a 2.8 mile trail around a lake with a ~8 foot paved trail around it. Running/wheel traffic is only allowed to travel counter-clockwise, and walking/stroller traffic is in the other lane, but can travel either direction. There are signs at eye level and on the trail that propose a reasonable traffic flow for this. They look something like this (going counter-clockwise):

WALK | WHEELS (SLOW)
^ | | ^ ^
| V | | |

and this: (clockwise)

WALK | WHEELS (SLOW)
| ^ | XXXX
V | |

Oh man, that ASCII art is bad, but I think you get the point.

Going counterclockwise, this is counter-intuitive (pun intended). It is hard to walk in the left portion of the left lane. But it makes sense if you figure that you can see the wheel traffic coming before it mows you over. Problem is, NO ONE FOLLOWS THE RULES. AT ALL. I don't mean that there is a small percentage of people walking in the wrong side of the walking area, there is fewer people following the rules than you would expect given a random distribution of traffic. The trail would be more usable if it was a free-for-all. I don't get it. Every time we go, I try at first to stick to the left side of the left lane and let people go around, but after running into people (literally) I give it up and join the chaos. And I do mean chaos. On a given weekend morning, there is as much traffic as your average Monday at 8:00 AM urban sidewalk. Especially with the stroller, you have to constantly be on your game. Dodging left, dodging right, running off the trail on the left. You name it -- I had to do it today.

So I ask you this. Why would people disregard the rules like this? I'm not one of those drive-the-speed-limit-always-come-to-a-complete-stop-types, but I understand that a civilized society can't function without some reasonable rules. I'm just a cog in the engine of our fair city and I get that we'll all be better off if I take less than 15 items into the supermarket express lane. Utter disregard for the rules at Greenlake really bugs me.

So I leave you with this. Park goers of Seattle -- please keep it real. Begin obeying the signs. We'll all enjoy our trail more. Thank you. That is all.

Posted by Mike at August 27, 2006 12:59 PM

Comments

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