Respect Authority

Karma, it has been said, is a bitch.

I recently wrote about how Love Park is approaching skateability again after years of city crackdowns. Well, regain one famous spot, lose another. Seattle’s Department of Transportation just got pretty creative with the well known skate spot under University Bridge, the “Wall of Death.” Creative like a fucking neanderthal throwing rocks around and calling it interpretive fucking dance.

SDOT's interpretation of "street art" perhaps?

The Stranger reports that Seattle’s Department of Transportation recently dug up a three foot wide trench at the bottom of the ramp and filled it with a big pile of rocks set in concrete after “a number of complaints and incidents of cyclists and walkers being hit made it clear it was a safety issue.” Um, skateboarding isn’t supposed to be safe — that’s the whole reason it’s fun, just like playing with fire and doing drugs, and all you bitch ass cyclists need to deal with that!

Regardless, in light of the “safety issue” at hand, it seems like the sensible approach would not be to make the spot even more dangerous by constructing a crude rock wall at the bottom. You didn’t make the spot unskateable, you only succeeded in assuring that the only skateboarders hitting cyclists and walkers now will be sporting gaping head wounds. Wall of Death, indeed.

Of course, it probably never occurred to anybody that those bikers and pedestrians were hitting skateboarders, not the other way around. It’s like fucking Frogger out there.

Nonetheless, the plank of plywood already propped up over the prehistoric skate stoppers just goes to show it’s going to take a bulldozer for the Wall of Death to stay dead. So get to it, Tony Hawk Pro Skaters, looks like somebody just turned up the difficulty level.

[The Stranger]