Town Not Walking Friendly :(

Our little town is not walking friendly. See I live in a small town (actually a suburb of Fort Worth) and there is a main street that has quite a bit of stuff on it. And I live really close to that main street. That is where the grocery store is, the pharmacies, just about all the gas stations in the town. Plus if I want to take Alex to the park we have to cross that street and walk along it.

A few weeks back Alex and I walked to the one gas station near where we live. I pushed him in his stroller like I always do when we walk anywhere. The street that we live off of has no sidewalk (at least where I was walking) then the next street we walked has a sidewalk partway down on one side, then it ends, and the sidewalk pretty much starts on the other side of the street. So if you want to walk on the sidewalk all the way you have to cross the street halfway down the street to stay on the sidewalk.

And then you can only cross the main street from one side of this street. So instead of the shortest way being straight across the street you might have to make a U or C shape just to get to where you wanted to go because of not being able to cross from both sides of James St.

So Alex and I go to the gas station. I get a soda for me and a candy bar to split with him. We went and sat in front of this one building on their porch. We ate the candy bar and I talked to my mom for a little bit on my phone. Then we headed back.

I'm getting ready to cross the one street to head home and I have a walk signal. There is a woman in a mini van who I can tell is working on turning right. She is only looking left. I started walking cautiously (considering I did have a walk sign but I wasn't sure if she saw me or not) Sure enough she starts turning right and her passenger like points to us and I think is telling her to look out for us. Since I was watching her movements I stopped when I saw her going and we were safe. But if I hadn't taken note of where she was looking we may have been hit. She didn't try to come back and apologize or anything.

We made it safely home and I got onto our towns website and sent them an email about traffic issues. I said that the crossing signals are kind of far back from the road (try pulling a stroller 5 feet into some grass just to hit a button and pull the stroller back out of the grass to get to the crosswalk) And that there are no sidewalks along the main road. Which of course would be really helpful. They said that when they plan to enlarge the main road in 2010 they will be adding in sidewalks. Okay it is 2007 now...and we probably won't still be in this town in 2010. You'd think with a town this size, sidewalks would be a given. Considering there are like 2 main streets in this town.