Sidewalks, Dead-ends & Roadkill - Oh my!

With my long runs becoming longer and longer, I have taken to plotting them on Google Maps. This is a wondrous web service; right up there with email and Fandango if you ask me. Google is about 90% accurate (in my opinion) and I can finally have a way of more accurately measuring the distance of my runs, before I run them. Oh but there is one hitch. I live in Tigard, Oregon, population of approximately 46,000+. Do you think that perhaps the city could hire one damn civil engineer and implement their suggestions?!

My frustration stems from the fact that like many areas of the Northwest, not every street is labeled with a sign, sidewalks are limited if they exist at all, and little if any street lights. Add to that some streets are not through streets (with no signage). Perfect example: there is a street about 2 blocks from my house. Now from Google maps, using the satellite view it appears to be a through street, so much so that Google recommends this route. As I proceed on my run down this street it becomes immediately apparent that this is not a through street because someone never finished paving the damn street. Oh look, some kindly neighbor has decided to extend his fence across the street as well. Great! Now I have to either jump a fence to trespass on this guys made up boundary line or worse run back up the street and find an alternate route. I choose the later. Tigard police don’t give warnings. They give citations - big fat citations with matching fines.

I figure that this dead-end is a once in a blue moon kind of deal and continue on my run. But wait; there is more – as I continue to run following the remainder of my route, I again come to an unmarked dead-end, but this time there is no fence. This time there is a very deep and stinky creek that I have to traverse. WTF! I am on mile 13 of my run. My legs are shaking and now I have to do some kind of American Gladiator move to cross this damn creek! I find an aqueduct and use that to cross the creek. After completing this run and all the additional mileage as a result of my re-routing, I decide to see if the local Parks and Rec website can give me a map of available trails to use in my future runs. Well, there are some small parks and some of them are honestly very nice. Thank God! But none of the parks are linked in any way to each other. Oh there are proposals to one day, maybe link some of these trail together, but that is years and many dollars away. So to complete my blithe rant, I will continue to run in Tigard; dodging road kill & traffic, exploring dead-ends, and getting lost in my own neighborhood - over and over again.