By Scott Sullivan
Editor
Let There Be a Sign
Blue Star Highway is busy with signs, crossroads and driveways darting off left and right. It buzzes during rush hours, in summers especially. Flashing lights, arrows and attractions vie for one’s attention.
BS in sum can be confusing for in- and out-of-town drivers. Fatal crashes happen. Two Cincinnati septuagenarians were killed and a back seat passenger gravely injured May 11 when their eastbound Buick ran the North Street stop sign at Blue Star and was T-boned by a dump truck.
First responders are called in to clean up and document such carnage. In this case, The Commercial Record did not ask for pictures.
For the first 14 of my 17 years here, the CR occupied an office at 3217 Blue Star, this column’s name. It was quite an outlook. When we heard metal crunch, glass shatter, perhaps an explosion or people screaming a quarter-mile south at the Old Allegan Road crossing, we would speculate, What this time?
I’d walk, more like limp as I aged, on uneven grass still in Blue Star’s 66-foot roadside easement, camera strapped with most-versatile lens, that way with trepidation. More sirens grew audible as the scene opened up, became larger, clearer.
People were hurt, maybe dead, surely traumatized. In need.
To add to, or perhaps subtract from the highway’s hurly-burly, consider the in progress in pieces Blue Star Trail, to be when completed a 20-mile north-south nonmotorized path between Saugatuck and South Haven.
The good: most of it will be paved and separated by grass and/or other greenway strip west of the faster-moving car and truck traffic asphalt. The bad: it still must negotiate the same road and driveway crossings on oft-sloping side terrain that will require filling or building bridges.
Maintaining it will take money, just as fixing and/or improving roads and sidewalks does.
A best-case scenario for such routes is on rails to trails: ex-railroad track and utility line easements on pre-cleared and graded land through, if you hit it any right day, Arcadia.
Look not far north at Laketown Township, through whose rural wooded meadows, past hop farms and homes, stretches north to trails further north through Holland to Grand Haven.
Correspondent Jim Hayden reported last week recent resident responses to a parks and recreation committee survey showed bike paths were Laketown’s most-used resource. Invasive species pest control came next.
I have walked, run or biked (sometimes all at once) similar Kent Trails near where I love, dog and leash attached. Pushed my daughter in a stroller miles too. We co-marked it, then hair-pinned at a pre-targeted turn point and rolled back.
Hold the pace, push the pace, relax … how is strength holding out? Know breath, heartbeat, body … keep recalibrating those coordinates. Keep a rhythm going through and past the end.
Creating such opportunities alongside well-traveled Blue Star — especially through denser settlements such as Saugatuck, Douglas down to M-89, Fennville east, Pier Cove west; through Ganges where friends spend ashram summers, through SH linking east on the Kal-Haven Trail — poses challenges.
None, though, quite like Douglas’s contribution from the Blue Star Bridge south to the Center Street traffic light. With the best intentions, The City of the Village in 2015 split Blue Star from three to two car lanes, lopping off the west one for non-combustion traffic only.
Douglas has so many master plans it is hard for simple people like me to keep track of them. Its circa-2015 Blue Star Corridor one was meant to “calm” traffic, i.e. slow down motorized vehicles, encourage walkers and bikers to share more safe space using a green-planted entryway; slow down, shop, inhale less carbon-combustioned air.
These were, and still are, fine intentions. But BS thus bifurcated baffled many who were or not bemused by it. Car and truck tires often struck curb-like bumpers around the new, narrow traffic islands. Cuts made in them to allow cross-traffic in and out of side-street and business entries were painted green to delineate them and resembled mini-golf greens.
What was needed was a single, simple sign that explained it all. One that could guide pilgrims safely through the labyrinth, not distract but focus them.
Why not a fluorescent yellow diamond-shaped marker, ringed by flashing LED lights, signifying:
- Motorized traffic narrows here from three to two lanes,
- The ex-west southbound lane is now separated from nonmotorized traffic by a bumpered, buffered island with cutaways,
- The once-west lane now is for bikes and pedestrians only,
- One sign that made all this clear?
To be continued