We started diving earlier this week into the active transportation importance and newly completed remodeling of the intersection of Lomas and Yale tied to the $842 million expansion of UNMH. As interlude, here’s a short pictorial meditation on “Sidewalk Closed.”

Anybody with any walking/rolling experience in ABQ has faced the seemingly eternal question: Is this sidewalk really closed? and the oft-commensurate “Should I really take this detour?”

As the many with experience coming across sandwich board signs such as those above can tell ya, about seventy-nine times out of one-hundred, the sidewalk isn’t really closed ahead and that taking the detour is almost always a really bad idea.

“Sidewalk Closed” signs are put up, first thing, any time any construction job comes anywhere close to a sidewalk. “Detour” signs are often added as part of a “Temporary Traffic Control (TTC) Plan,” as brought up in our last post on Lomas/Yale. Putting up these signs is extremely low-hanging TTC fruit, because unlike the case with signs anywhere near a driving lane, walker/rollers aren’t likely to hit and obliterate the sign and, besides, it’s just a sidewalk closure and who cares about that? Nobody walks/rolls on these sidewalks/crossing that we care about anyway.

Or so very much seems to be the thinking of everyone involved in TTC Plans and road construction planning/implementation in general.

Hence, experienced walker/rollers tend to dismiss such signs and just go around the “Sidewalk Closed” and ignore the “Detour.” Unless the closure looks like this:

Getting back to the signs on Lomas/Yale last week…

The reason for the signs is the remodeling of what’s lovingly called a “pork chop” in roadway design speak, the little raised area with pedestrian curb ramp separating a “slip lane” from the primary sidewalk on the other side of the “pork chop.” Slip lanes are those driving lanes curving away from straight driving lanes at some intersections that allow drivers to not wait for the red light and zoom through the curve, usually with only a “Yield” sign before rapidly entering the other street/stroad at the intersection.

Slip lanes were popular back in the roadway engineering day. They are now considered by many/most/about all road engineers as too dangerous. New streets in ABQ aren’t supposed to get them as part of intersection design, and reconstructed intersections in town are supposed to include a policy process to see about removing existing slip lanes.

Supposed to. At least that’s what been said at various active transportation meetings by various roadway engineers and consultants. The slip lane at Lomas/Yale is the biggest reason for this little blogpost series (heck, it’s in the title!) and we’ll get back to that in our next post.

But before that and to wrap up today’s interlude on “Sidewalk Closed,” let’s end on a happy note. Riding back to Lomas/Yale this past Friday, two days after the “Sidewalk Closed/Detour” photos above, I came across the scene below:

The road crew across the way and signs at the intersection were gone, but two heavy sandbags to hold the signs up remained. Strangely, the bags weren’t there a couple of days ago, but the wind must have picked up and the crew used the bags to hold the signs.

Then they took the signs, left the scene, and left the sandbags.

Thus commenced a little work from the Better Burque Tactical Urbanism Team (BBTUT)

Ah…much better.

If you’re needing any free sandbags, I’d suggest a trip out to Lomas and Yale. Those things might be there well through the rest of this decade.

On that happy note we’ll pause for now and get back to that slip lane, yeah, the one you can still see, post-remodel, if you squint at the top of the photo above.