2 posts tagged “trash”

So yesterday morning was our moderately unimportant city marathon. Most people within the city didn't realize it was even scheduled for yesterday morning until they decided to drive someplace. Salt Lake City is almost entirely a suburban city. There is a small compact downtown (from which I'm writing this) but the rest of the city sprawls out across the mountain valley. There is a laughable attempt at a public transit system, a system that works only for those who live within walking distance of the light rail stations. Those who do not must ride a bus. To take a bus in our city means one of two things - that you are either woefully poor (or cheap, as many Utahans are) or an environmentalist with dedication that calls into question your sanity. I would ride the public transit if it didn't mean that I had to spend 40 minutes waiting for a transfer every time. My daily commute on our buses would take 4 hours of my day. Going from home to work, from work to class, from class to work, from work back to class, and from class to home. That is my daily route. A 5 minute car drive would evolve into an experience similar to what the Donner Party must have gone through. But I digress.
Due to Salt Lake City's suburban nature, driving places is a requirement. And yet, once a year during the marathon the city decides to revive the nostalgia that is the Berlin wall. If you live inside of the Berlin wall, or in East Berlin Salt Lake City, you are trapped. Any errand you must do must take place within the perimeter, and crossing the perimeter is a long and arduous process. If you live outside the wall, that's a little better than being inside of the wall, but good luck getting inside of East Berlin Salt Lake City for any reason.
I understand city marathons. The idea is to use the 26.2 miles in such a way as to take runners on a tour of the city. But consider the residents who must live their lives within the city. A friend of mine had to commute downtown for work yesterday. A 20 minute drive from the south of the valley became an hour ordeal, which required him driving farther north to get into the city. Last year I had a similar ordeal doing an install at a hotel downtown. The hotel and my office were on opposite sides of the marathon wall. Sadly enough for me I had to commute back and forth across the line several times. It's never fun. I'm more than happy to accommodate the requirements of having some cool stuff like marathons and other festivals within the city. But please do it in a way that informs people who cannot put their lives on pause with ways to adjust and accommodate.
My other complaint about the Salt Lake City marathon is this - trash. We had a hydration point a few blocks away from our house. This meant, for the city and runners, lots of tables filled with little plastic cups of water. Apparently this is where the city's interest in hydration ended. Instead of cleaning up the cups, many of the runners and the marathon staff just threw them all over the ground. We had pretty strong winds yesterday, and this meant that our yard and the river that runs through our neighborhood was filled with dozens of little plastic cups. The least the marathon staff could have done is collected the garbage and used biodegradable or paper cups instead of littering the neighborhoods that the marathon passes through. Nothing like trashing the neighborhoods you already piss off by having running crowds coming through them at 7:30am.
And then there was this little story. The afternoon after the marathon was over, we were driving over to the home improvement store that was on the other side of the marathon line. Driving down our street, we got behind a car with a mom and a grandma riding in the front seat. They were driving with their hazard lights on and going maybe 5 miles per hour. The grandma was videotaping something from the front seat. Confused, I looked really hard for what they were following, and it appears that in front of the car was a little boy learning to ride his bicycle. It looked like he just got the training wheels off of his bike because he was really shaky and swerving around the road. This, I realized, is evidence of our declining society. A mom is far too lazy to walk with her son and teach him how to properly ride a bike. Instead she drives behind him yelling at him from the window on what to do. What happens then, mommy dearest, when little Timmy loses control and careens into the traffic on the main road we live next to? You can't run and save him because you're too damn lazy to walk with him. Great job. You win the parenting award for the year. I guess it's better than having him tied to the back of the car...