The Middle of the Street / April 11, 2020

Having a view from my front window that looks up the center of Ashbury, until it stops up on the Twin Peaks hillside, I’m interested in the middle of the street. Also because my mother always instructed me not to be in it. 

Here, as we enter another week A.C., (I’ve not kept count), the roadway is, or was, being reclaimed from the cars. The first week, of course, was post-apocalyptic. Few people, few cars. Then people started coming out, and more and more joggers appeared, (in addition to the already ubiquitous dog-walkers and pram-pushers). As often as not, they run in the street. People cross intersections on the diagonal. Bicyclists are out with their children...and cyclists in general are riding in the middle of the road, just because they can. All have drifted there due to the absence of restraint a lack of oncoming multi-ton death machines tends to encourage.

Until cars started reappearing after the near-disappearance of public transit, skateboarders began skating formerly busy Fulton street during the day. As long as I’ve lived here, this challenge was only answered late at night or early in the morning, when traffic is minimal. 

With MUNI changing their schedule, this brazen post-corona drift has been curtailed some, but centrist behavior still persists on neighborhood streets. Some people simply walk there, and do so simply because nothing has knocked them back yet. And some people wander in the road stopping traffic with a sleeping bag over their head..