Why Aren't You Getting Out - the Follow-Up

As we left the ghost town of the Apostle last night, my friend Mike mused "I think part of it is they have a parking problem." Which I thought about as we walked back to our car, about 2 blocks away.

I felt fine walking with Patrick to the car. But I don't know that I would have felt the same walking alone. I don't know that I would have felt good about about asking a single female friend to come down and meet us there last night. The streets at 10pm on a Saturday were fairly busy, but in an odd way. There were groups of younger people walking together who were not threatening per se, but behaving kind of erratically, weaving in and out like you do when you're out to be out, not out going somewhere. Literally no place that we passed — the Apostle itself, the new cowboy bar in the hotel, the head shops, Cossetta's — had eyes on the street. It felt unsafe because it felt uncertain.

As we move towards fewer and fewer parking restrictions on places, I think this will become more of an issue. And if we want people to take more public transportation and bike and walk more, it will become even more so. Even with the two of us, I don't know if I would have been willing to wait in the dimly lit bus shelter, in a system that runs infrequently at night and often changes times.

I compared this to Berlin or Amsterdam, where the feeling was very different. I might not have walked in the Red Light District alone at night, but everywhere else felt different. Maybe I am just a naive tourist.

But I think it's bigger than that. In many ways it's a policing problem. In an extreme simplification of a situation probably better discussed in person than on social media, we as a citizenry have lost trust in policing services; we've lost the sense of partnership. People tell me it's because we "need more officers" but I really think it's because we don't seem to have officers that connect to the community. Does Saint Paul even have an NPO program anymore?

(As I was leaving Dunn's the other morning, there was an honest-to-goodness squeegee guy in the parking lot. And while part of me was humming "Honest living, honest living," the other part was thinking that we needed some "broken windows" kind of enforcement.)

We're in a really tangled mess, where if we pull on one thread  it ends up tangling the knot somewhere else. Cities need people to go out and spend money and create vibrancy. Cities need parking, and transit, and bike/walk alternatives. Cities need safety and community partnerships. And we need to figure out how to get there.