It’s time for brick pavers to go
Removing them should be part of any Central Avenue project
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In a city with hundreds of miles of roads, it comes as no surprise that elected and appointed officials are pretty much constantly thinking about infrastructure improvement plans.
With the City Council and city staff now contemplating a multi-year update of the Central Avenue corridor, we would like to offer one piece of advice: get rid of the brick pavers.
The brick pavers that make up crosswalks and parts of the sidewalks at some intersections probably looked great when they were put in. But they were put in decades ago. We think the first of them probably were installed during a big downtown project in the 1980s.
They have aged about as well as some of the pop music of the 1980s, which is to say not very well at all.
They appear to shift, crack and come loose on a regular basis. We're betting that employees in the Public Works and Public Areas departments would describe the pavers as a maintenance nightmare. And the damaged pavers don't look very nice, either.
When they are covered with rain water, snow and ice, the pavers don't seem to be any safer to walk on than plain old concrete. Some might argue that they are even more treacherous.
So we urge city officials to replace them with concrete. Use colored concrete if a different look is desired.
Getting rid of the pavers would relieve city workers of the task of maintaining them, improve the look of downtown and maybe even make it safer for pedestrians.
For all those reasons, we advocate for removing the pavers.