Easing way for foot traffic - City sidewalk repair blitz begins

By John Fritze | Sun reporter

Mayor Sheila Dixon kicks off Baltimore's new sidewalk improvement campaign, called "Sidewalk Sam." The mayor stands on sidewalk poured yesterday as she uses a hand float to smooth freshly poured cement in the 1200 block of S. Clinton St. (Sun photo by Kim Hairston / July 31, 2008)

Hoping to clear a waiting list for sidewalk repairs that stretches back four years, Baltimore officials said today they will focus more attention - and an additional $2 million - on smoothing the way for foot traffic.

City transportation contractors will increase by two-thirds the number of sidewalk repairs completed in the city in this year, resurfacing nearly 650,000 square feet of cracked, washed out and uneven walkways.

"We get a lot of service calls for our sidewalks and our streets," Mayor Sheila Dixon said yesterday. "Some people think that we only drive cars in this city. But more and more people are walking."

Dixon's push on the sidewalks comes a year after the city Department of Transportation increased its budget for road improvements by about 70 percent - an effort paid for largely with bonds - and added more than 20 miles of bike lanes.

Baltimore plans to resurface 200 lane-miles of streets this year, a slight increase over last year and more than double what was paved in 2006, Dixon has said.

City Councilman James B. Kraft, who represents Southeast Baltimore, said fixing up sidewalks is a small thing the city can do to improve quality of life and make neighborhoods more attractive to pedestrians.

Dixon pointed to a recent ranking by a Seattle-based Web site called Walk Score that deemed Baltimore the 12th-most-walkable city in the country. The site noted Federal Hill, Fells Point and the Inner Harbor as particularly walkable.

"People look in neighborhoods. They see how they are, they see how they feel," Kraft said. "When they're clean and green, people want to stay there. They want to move there." In all, there are 3,600 miles of sidewalk in Baltimore, and a typical blocklong stretch can last 15 to 20 years.

Tree roots and weeds that grow up between cracks in the pavement can hasten a sidewalk's deterioration.

City Hall pays for repairs if damage is caused by tree roots, water meters or utility poles.

In the 2008 fiscal year, which ended in June, the city repaired sidewalks in 2,700 locations at a cost of $2.5 million.

For the fiscal year that will end next June, the city has set aside $4.5 million and hopes to repair 4,500 locations.

If damage is triggered by normal wear and tear, property owners must foot the bill - at $6.50 a square foot.

If the entire sidewalk in front of a house must be replaced, the job can quickly add up to hundreds of dollars.

But the more pervasive problem many neighborhood leaders have faced is getting the city to respond quickly to requests for sidewalk repairs.

City transportation officials said they hope to eliminate the backlog in five years.

"I think it's a great idea if they can get it done quicker and do quality work on the streets and the sidewalks," said Susan Thompson, president of the Hampstead Hill Association south of Patterson Park.

Dixon said city sidewalk projects, and their status, will be placed on the city transportation department's Internet site.

Kraft said the best way residents can reduce the workload for sidewalk crews - most of whom are contractors - is to uproot weeds that grow up between the cracks. "If you pull them out, it's highly unlikely we're going to have to come back and fix that sidewalk for you," he said. In addition to borrowing more money for construction projects around the city, the Dixon administration has developed a flair for promoting those efforts. The city has dubbed its new project the "Sidewalk Sam" campaign.

The promotion, which will be carried on signs at construction sites, is named after 4-month-old Samson, the baby elephant at the Maryland Zoo in Baltimore. The signs feature a picture of an elephant.

"The role and responsibility of government is to take care of really basic, fundamental needs," Dixon said.

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by B' Spokes

Like most people I live a hectic life and who has the time for much exercise? Thanks to xtracycle now I do. By using my bike for daily activities I can get things done and get an hour plus work out in 15 minutes extra of my time, not a bad deal and beats taking the extra time going to the gym. In case you are still having trouble being motivated; the National Center of Disease Control says that inactivity is the #2 killer in the United States just behind smoking. ( http://www.cdc.gov/nccdphp/bb_nutrition/ ) Get out there and start living life! I can carry home a full shopping cart of groceries, car pool two kids or just get lost in the great outdoors camping for a week. Well I got go, another outing this weekend.
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"Sidewalk Sam?" More like sidewalk scam. Get ready for the city to come rip out your sidewalks, even if there is nothing wrong, expect them to do a half-assed job replacing them, oh, and then four years later you get a bill for the shitty job.
Part of repair should be redesign. Is it so hard to design a sidewalk? In seems to be in Baltimore. Telephone poles and other infrastructure interferes with sidewalk use. A telephone pole right in the middle of a sidewalk is just one of the kinds of interference built in. I used to use sidewalks extensively for bicycling around Minneapolis. Some of the sidewalks were from 1920 and were pushed up by roots and cracked. But with more than twenty years of using Hennepin County streets and sidewalks, never was there the interference of the sidewalk by tree trunk sized poles and steel road signs like I have seen in Baltimore. When Governor O'Malley used "The Greatest City in America" as the slogan for Baltimore, he must have had one of those three martini lunches, been smoking an illegal substance, or just plain never got around much. Maybe the city BELIEVES that no one wants to use the sidewalks anyway; what kind of fool wants to travel through the city outside of a locked car? And now we run into the crime problem. This is why Baltimore is so car centric.