Karosta Residents Must Train Parkour Skills to Reach Bread

Karosta once again proves it's a place where only the strongest survive. This time the problem isn't with soldiers or historic basements, but with the road to the new store, which has become a real obstacle course.

"When I wanted to buy milk, I felt like I was on the TV show 'Strongest Will Win,'" says local resident Anita. "First you have to overcome a snow rampart, then break through a rutted path, and finally jump over a bus driving down General Balodis Street."

This issue reached the City Council's Transportation Infrastructure Commission through a mobile app entry, where an outraged Karosta resident writes: "Are we really going to wait until someone gets hit?" Yes, we'll wait - that's Liepāja's traditional way of solving problems. First we wait, then we wait a little more, and only then do we start thinking.

Municipal Administration head Mārtiņš Jākobsons admits that the store owners haven't solved accessibility. Of course they haven't - why would they think about how people would reach their store? The main thing is that the store is built, but whether customers actually make it there alive is a second-tier question.

Now the Municipal Administration will evaluate traffic and pedestrian intensity. They'll probably measure how many people per day try to cross the snow ramparts and how many of them do it successfully. In Riga, of course, there's no such problem - they figured out long ago that stores need customers, not just walls.