Sidewalk Closed, Use Other Sidewalk

The sign on the north side of East Cesar Chavez says SIDEWALK CLOSED, USE OTHER SIDEWALK, and it has a black arrow pointing south. I followed the arrow. I waited through two light cycles, crossed with a man carrying a full-size ceiling fan box on his head, and arrived at the south side. There I met a second sign, same font, same faded orange, same arrow, pointing north.

The man with the ceiling fan and I looked at each other the way two strangers look at each other in a hall of mirrors.

"I've been doing this since Tuesday," he said. Then he set the box down in the bike lane and started walking in the street, which is where every pedestrian detour in this city ends up. The arrows are a formality. The street is the plan.

I have spent a good part of this month on foot between the river and Seventh, partly for my health and partly because parking east of I-35 now requires an app, a QR code and something close to a mortgage pre-approval. In that time I've become a reluctant naturalist of the temporary traffic control device. What follows is a field guide. Bring water. Wear something reflective. Nobody is going to save you.

The Mirror

That's what I call the pair I met on Cesar Chavez: two closures, one on each side, each confidently referring you to the other. They usually show up when two towers go up across the street from each other, which on this stretch is all the time. Each contractor files its own closure, and apparently nobody files a form asking whether a human being might someday want to proceed east.

The Mirror is the purest expression of how this city handles walking. Every individual decision is defensible. The sum of them has you standing in the middle of the road next to an appliance.

The Suggestion

The Suggestion is a single sign with no arrow at all. It says PEDESTRIANS, and then it stops, like it lost its train of thought. Sometimes there's a second line that says USE CAUTION, which is advice in roughly the way "good luck" is advice.

I found one on a side street near Pedernales, zip-tied to a chain-link fence wrapped in green mesh. Behind the fence was a hole deep enough that I could hear it echo. In front of the fence was eighteen inches of crumbling curb, a storm drain and a parked dump truck. The Suggestion isn't telling you where to go. It's telling you that you, a pedestrian, have been noticed, and that the noticing is complete.

The Rendering

This one is my favorite because it's beautiful.

Construction scrim used to be plain green or black, the visual equivalent of a cough. Now the fence is wrapped in a forty-foot printed illustration of the finished building, and the illustration always includes the sidewalk. A wide, pale, perfectly shaded sidewalk lined with young live oaks and people in linen walking dogs that have never barked. A woman holding an orange spritz is laughing at something just out of frame. Probably the actual sidewalk.

Walking along the Rendering, you are, at that moment, in the street, behind a water barrel, inhaling diesel, looking at a picture of yourself not being in the street. The banner says COMING 2028 and ELEVATED RIVERSIDE LIVING. It sells you the sidewalk the fence is blocking.

I've stood on that stretch for twenty-some years, and I remember what was there before the fence. A mechanic's bay with the door rolled up all day, a radio playing conjunto, a hand-painted sign for brake jobs with a phone number missing one digit to the weather. A pecan tree, an actual one and not a rendered one, that dropped nuts on the hood of anything parked under it in October. You could walk from the paletería to the river without stepping off the concrete once. Nobody printed a banner about it, because nobody needed to sell it to you. You just had it.

The Barrel Island

Sometimes the city or the contractor attempts generosity. They take a lane of traffic, line it with orange barrels, and declare the space between the barrels and the fence a pedestrian walkway.

In theory this is fine. In practice the Barrel Island is eleven inches wide at its narrowest point, interrupted every forty feet by a barrel someone has knocked into the walkway and nobody has knocked back, and it floods after rain into a single brown puddle that's deeper than it looks. I watched a woman with a stroller attempt the Barrel Island on Thursday and give up at the third barrel, which is the correct number of barrels at which to give up.

On the plus side, the island does have a view. You're close enough to the travel lanes to read the bumper stickers of the cars brushing your elbow. One of them said KEEP AUSTIN WEIRD, and it was on a Range Rover going 40. The Barrel Island taught me that.

The Phantom

The Phantom is a closure with no work behind it.

The fence is up. The sign is up. The sidewalk is ripped out and replaced with packed gravel and a single orange cone, which has fallen over and lies there like it's been shot. But there's no crew, no machinery and no sound except grackles. The project has paused for reasons the public will never be told: financing, a lender getting cold feet, a design revision, a dispute over who pays for the utility relocation. The building isn't happening. The closure is.

I know one Phantom that has been closed so long the weeds growing through the gravel have flowered. Bees visit. In its way it's the most natural landscape on the whole block, a pollinator garden installed by accident and protected by a permit.

Who Gets the Sidewalk

Here's the part that isn't a joke, or isn't only one. A sidewalk is public right-of-way. A developer who wants to close it for a year or three applies to the city, pays a fee and gets it. That's the system, and it isn't secret. The fee is calculated, invoiced and booked. The walking is the part nobody invoices.

So the trade, every time, is the same. A private project gets public concrete for as long as it needs, and the public gets a sign. If they're feeling expansive, the public gets a banner with a lady and a spritz. If the project stalls, the public gets bees.

I'd like one rule. If you close a sidewalk, you have to provide one, a real one. Plywood, railing, a roof against falling bolts, lit at night, wide enough for a wheelchair, a stroller and a man with a ceiling fan to pass each other without anyone stepping into traffic. Cities elsewhere manage this. They build those covered wooden tunnels along construction sites, and people walk through them like it's nothing, because it is nothing. It's lumber. We're surrounded by lumber. There's a crane on every block.

Until then I'll keep walking in the street, where the arrows always intended me to be.

On my way home Friday I passed the Mirror again. Someone had taken the north sign, turned it ninety degrees and leaned it against the fence so the arrow pointed straight up.

It was the most honest directions I've gotten all month.