Running in the Street

 No pictures today, because I'm talking about something that people do in my neighborhood a lot and since it involves actual people doing actual things in person I don't want to show anyone's faces.

But an awful lot of people in my neighborhood jog or run for (as far as I can tell) exercise most mornings. 

And they do it right in the street.

I have...concerns.

1. Vehicle-Pedestrian Interactions

It might not surprise you given some of what I've posted on this blog, but I do not live in a legal low-traffic zone or, even further from it, a pedestrianized area. In fact, there's an emergency room with a highly active ambulance bay a block or so away, and major bus routes (for the QCA, which is to say hourly but multiple routes). There are schools as well, which given the lack of non-car options for student dropoff and pickup means a lot of cars. 

In other words, jogging in the street here is basically automatically creating vehicle-pedestrian interactions in the middle of the street, which is famously not a particularly good thing for the pedestrians. Or the cars, but as Douglas Adams much more memorably indicated in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, that tends to be worse for one side of the equation.

2. Terrible Infrastructure

Look, I get that our sidewalks suck: they're not particularly flat, they're not as straight as you'd think something paralleling a straight road would be, and they aren't wide enough for two to comfortably run abreast. 

But other than the last thing, the same is true of our roads, and they have the notable disadvantage of having cars on them.

They're littered with potholes, which are just as likely to turn an ankle as to pop a tire on a bike or a car, the available paths are a lot less straight than you'd assume--made much worse by the fact that the options are zig-zag around parked cars or jog literally in the middle of a street with cars driving on it--and unlike the sidewalks they're actually tilted towards the edges for water drainage. 

I am not quite sure why this makes them attractive for jogging.

3. Lack of Alternatives

Of course, the real secret here (not that secret) is that the jogging in the street is most likely because of a lack of reasonable alternatives.

There is a multiuse path up by Duck Creek, but that's 1-2 miles away from this part of the neighborhood so unless you're driving to jog or going on a run over 4 miles you aren't going to get any real use out of it. And otherwise there's basically the roads and the sidewalks: none of our parks are large enough for that kind of running, unless you're willing to do some very narrow laps or go, again, at least a mile out of your way (which is little in a car but a lot on foot). 

So I do understand the logic--except that I still really don't.

Anyone else have any idea of why this is so popular?