Sometime between Wednesday night and Friday morning, a motorist ran a car onto the West Main Street sidewalk near the corner of 6th Street destroying a metal bench and damaging other street art. The angle at which the motorist must have driven onto the sidewalk to create the apparent path of destruction is quite severe, almost as if making a 90-degree turn onto the sidewalk. But hey, if you don’t have control of your vehicle, anything is possible.
Today, the city carried the damaged bench away, along with another seemingly undamaged bench and one of those fancy new way-finding signs that were recently installed. The iron tree guard bent in the accident was not removed for repair and will probably be deformed for quite some time. It features the profile of the Whitestone Building it sits in front of. After all, the limestone bench on the same block damaged last June during construction of offices on Main Street is still sitting broken (though the stone shards have been swept away).
It’s times like these that we would like to see steel bollards installed around corners, especially where pedestrian seating comes into play. One can frequently see drivers run up on the curb making turns or speeding through a red light. To make things worse, the lane stripes don’t match up evenly from one side of the intersection to the other. With a few bollards here and there, we wouldn’t worry about cars running into buildings or benches (or pedestrians…) and the like. The feeling of safety while standing behind protective steel spikes separating you from oncoming vehicles also contributes to enjoying the urban environment.
- West Main Street Bench Art Casualty (Broken Sidewalk)
