Driving on sidewalks.

[glatt]

There's a building (JGB Building) I walk by on my way to and from the the Metro each day. It's pretty new. About a year old and still mostly vacant. I think the reason it's vacant is that it's in a horrible location for traffic. It's hard to get to it or leave it because cars are backed up at the nearby traffic light, blocking the exit. There are also concrete median strips that block turns in certain directions.

My problem is that as I walk along the sidewalk in front of this building, I routinely see cars driving down a short segment of the sidewalk in order to get to a neighboring property (the Holiday Inn) that has a traffic light to exit their parking lot.

I understand why the cars do this. If they can get to the neighboring parking lot, they save a couple minutes and don't get funneled off into oblivion in the rush hour traffic.

The picture below shows the situation, although it was not taken at rush hour and doesn't show the heavy traffic. The red line is the path that cars take, and the yellow dotted line is the line pedestrians are supposed to take. You can see all the red brickwork on the sidewalk that shows where pedestrians are supposed to walk. The path that these cars travel takes them up a very wide wheelchair ramp that cuts the curb going both directions. It's very easy for them.

Mostly the cars wait for pedestrians to get off the sidewalk before they try to drive down it, but once or twice I've had cars block my path as I've been walking on it.

It needs to be redesigned somehow with a narrower wheelchair ramp or maybe better signs making it clear you can't do that. Ideally, they should make a driveway next to the sidewalk to connect the two parking lots, but I bet the Holiday Inn doesn't want the pass-through traffic.

I haven't spoken up about this to anyone. Should I contact the police? Should I contact the property management company for JBG? Should I contact the neighboring Holiday Inn? Should I just kick the sides of cars as they drive down the side walk? So far I've just given dirty looks to the drivers and put my arms up in the air like "WTF are you doing?" Mostly I see them doing it when I'm half a block away. Which means that I'm not usually a victim, but I'm annoyed on principle that cars would drive down the sidewalk just for a little convenience. Maybe I should do nothing and just let these drivers get home to their families the fastest way they can?

So what would you do? / What should I do?