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I really love this post by @Caitlin_Rogger, which explains why safe streets during a crisis are not a luxury but, rather, a really critical thing that will keep us healthy: https://ggwash.org/view/76918/people-need-to-get-outside-and-move-while-stuck-at-home-opening-streets-can-help
Thinking about this extra-hard today. People are going to go outside; w/o the results of robust testing, there's no incentive to stay inside, especially when the weather is nice, especially if you lost your job. What govt can do is make space and tell people how to safely use it.
Not expanding where people can be *will* force crowds where it feels easiest to go, which is what Bowser's current approach is going to result in. Being outside isn't a cute bougie thing for newcomers. People *will* leave their houses. So you can widen sidewalks, or not.
Anecdotally, the people I have seen on bikes over the past few weeks are a tiny handful of spandex-zoomy guys and a whole bunch of people obviously commuting to essential jobs, mostly construction. Knowledge-economy workers, like me, are all wfh, so very few, you know, Surlys.
Plus, parents can't just hand smartphones over to their kids. I am, like, absolutely awful with kids, and even I know that you can't stop them from running around and bonking into things. That's *built into* public ed, which means we should build it into whatever we're doing now.
Feel free to tweet photos at me of my fellow idiot young whites crowding public spaces, but I'm going to agree with you that that's fucking stupid and that as retribution they should be placed under literal house arrest. That's not who, or what, I'm thinking about here.
This isn't an individual-action problem—it's absolutely a space where public policy should be responsive and generous to how people work, not how we *want* them to work. People are going to be outside, because inside is going to start to hurt. Let's make outside safer.
So: Let more people be in more public places, and tell them how to use that space. Test, a lot more, so asymptomatic people know what they're responsible for. And slow down drivers, who are LOVING that roads w/o traffic and parking are speedway free-for-alls now.
Plus: enforcement/surveillance. I'd rather have stringent guidelines from the mayor on how to use a wide variety of public spaces, w/minimal intervention from authorities, than cops with loudspeakers everywhere? Which seems prevalent rn? Ofc you know who's going to get stopped.
