The Disconnect Between the Citizen and City Hall: Crosswalk Edition

[XLFD]

Municipal governments can often be reluctant to do the right thing when citizens point out deficiencies that are not being addressed within city hall.  A great divide can form when a well-intentioned citizen points out a problem with existing traffic infrastructure that the city/township has allowed to remain.  These battles over public safety often require court action to resolve, even when remedial action would be a negligible expense to the budget. 

We will look at a Charlottesville Virginia activist currently being persecuted and prosecuted by city officials for his attempts at getting a crosswalk in an unsafe area where a pedestrian was recently killed simply because the city refused to throw white paint on the pavement.  But first we will look back at a couple of crosswalk disputes in Ludington involving a couple of citizen activists whose pleas for safety were ignored until the courts got involved.  The end result in both cases went in favor of the citizens, just like we expect will happen down in Virginia.

Back in 2017, Diane Seelhoff, along with this reporter, filed suit with the City of Ludington (COL) over a variety of issues primarily concerning the proposed installation of a splash pad at Copeyon Park and the city's apparent violations of several protocols and laws in order to achieve it.  By the time the COL would resolve the issues in a 2019 settlement by implementing reforms of their standing committees so that they would be compliant with the Open Meetings Act, paying court costs, and agree to concessions that would improve public safety issues around the entrance and within Copeyon Park.  

One of those were putting in curb cuts and crosswalks at Second and Third Street where they terminate at Washington Avenue.  Seelhoff, who resided between both streets, regularly saw very young kids from the local school then located just a block away line up in her driveway to cross the street to get over to Copeyon Park.  The reason they didn't cross at the streets was that the opposite side of the streets featured no curb cuts or easy access to the sidewalk, while the driveway was directly across from the park entrance.  Seelhoff advanced this basic safety issue as a requirement for settlement and the hard line she took resulted in this that was finished some time in 2020:

Sometimes crosswalks exist but they are not in conformance with the law, leading to potential safety issues.  Before this reporter became XLFD, I was fighting a battle over a civil infraction in court where I was given a ticket for not coming to a complete stop at the stop sign below (located at Loomis and William Streets) while on my bicycle.  

The main argument I used for my defense dealt with explaining how Michigan law treated bicycles and motor vehicles differently, how the warrants for erecting stop signs dealt solely with motor vehicle traffic, and the negative safety implications of a bicycle coming to a complete stop even when they can determine the intersection is completely free of opposing traffic (as it was with my case). 

My secondary defense was with the legality of the sign shown above, and how it was illegally placed beyond the crosswalk.  The traffic engineer's bible, the Manual for Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD), says quite plainly:  "Where there is a marked crosswalk at the intersection, the STOP sign should be installed in advance of the crosswalk line nearest to the approaching traffic."  The vehicle code for the state indicates in MCL 257.611 that stop signs must be placed in accordance with the law, otherwise they are unenforceable.  

This impasse over the placement of the stop sign went on for years as a tertiary issue in what would evolve into a federal lawsuit filed against the COL for measures taken against me by city hall to prevent me from exposing their corruption, a hobby taken up after I resigned from the fire department.  In a matter of four years this intersection, just a block away from the fire department, was quietly corrected by city leaders in order to be compliant with the manual and promote the safety of pedestrians.

One shouldn't have to file a lawsuit against your local municipality to have them correct their oversights or outright mistakes.  But what do you when your city government turns a blind ear towards all of your pleas and demonstrations for having safe crosswalks?  Kevin Cox of Charlottesville, Virginia took matters into his own hands and in the process showed just how sick his city government was.

See additionally Guardian article, CBS 19 coverage, and this Strongtowns article.  From the latter:

On a quiet Saturday morning in Charlottesville, Virginia, Kevin Cox did what the city wouldn’t: he drew a crosswalk. Armed with spray chalk, he marked out white stripes on a dangerous intersection where, just months earlier, a 64-year-old woman was hit and killed while walking to work. It was a simple act of public care—meant to draw attention to a deadly gap in the city’s pedestrian infrastructure. But it has landed Cox in legal trouble.  He now faces misdemeanor charges for the "intentional destruction of property under $1,000".

Cox had long urged city officials to address speeding along this stretch of road. The lack of response—even after the latest fatality—was the final straw. On the same day he chalked the crosswalk, he sent an email to the City Manager that read: “There is a marked crosswalk now at Second Street and Elliot Avenue in spite of you… It’s chalk, not paint. Please replace it with a real one.”

But instead of responding with action—or even acknowledgment—the city charged Cox with vandalism. His temporary crosswalk was quickly painted over, and there's still no indication that a permanent one will take its place...

In Cox’s case, the data isn’t buried in spreadsheets or crash reports—it’s in the obituaries. A 64-year-old woman lost her life trying to cross that very stretch of road last October. She wasn’t the only one. The intersection is known for excessive speeding, frequent near-misses, and, in the worst cases, fatalities.

What’s needed is not punishment, but a more responsive system—one that recognizes resident insight as a form of expertise, and sees community-led action not as a threat, but as an opportunity for collaboration.

ANALYSIS:   The city's ease in making this a criminal matter and their reluctance to make a statement about their actions should send a chill to the spine of the rest of their city's denizens even if they do not agree with Cox.  The city has already lost this battle in the court of public opinion, they may as well start laying down the paint and dropping the charges against Cox before they become a bigger joke than they already are.

For that MUTCD bible mentioned earlier talks of crosswalks in section 7C.03 and says under their support:  "Crosswalk markings also serve to alert road users of a pedestrian crossing point across roadways not controlled by highway traffic signals or STOP signs."  Though Elliot Street is signed at 25-mph both ways, the street seems designed for quicker traffic flow and has additional width with a bicycle lane.  It seems reasonable to believe that a traffic study would indicate speed violations and a fair volume of traffic, as can be seen in the video.  

The city may argue that having too many crosswalks put in questionable locations might operate against public safety.  The MUTCD confirms this should be a concern but additionally says:  "Crosswalk lines should not be used indiscriminately. An engineering study should be performed before they are installed at locations away from traffic control signals or STOP signs."  

Had the City of Charlottesville actually conducted a traffic control study and found that a crosswalk was not advisable, wouldn't they provide this as a defense against their ridiculous attempt at criminalizing Kevin Cox crusading for public safety?  They didn't, they just painted over chalk, avoided any explanation of their actions, and confirmed how stupid they were.  When they resort to such measures, they prove how detached city leaders are from the people they supposedly serve.