Frank Caro will be honored with a Golden Shoe in memoriam on Wednesday night at the WalkBoston Annual Meeting. See the Eventbrite page for more info.

Frank Caro, who died suddenly in October, was a strong, dogged advocate for safe and pleasant city walking. After his retirement as a Professor of Gerontology at the University of Massachusetts, he turned his attention to making Brookline a better place for senior living; he was instrumental in making Brookline the first Age-Friendly City in New England and in co-founding the Brookline Community Aging Network (BrooklineCAN).

He believed that benches along Brookline’s major streets would assist seniors enormously in their desire to be walkers, and he convinced the Commissioner of Public Works to install a significant number of benches along Beacon St., Brookline’s major thoroughfare, as well as several other Town locations (though these attractive benches are used by people of all ages).

He was the lead advocate for and first chair of the Brookline Pedestrian Advisory Committee, an official Town Committee that studies pedestrian issues and makes recommendations to the Town Transportation Board.

He advocated for proper snow removal from sidewalks, including at corners where snow plows traditionally left piles of snow and ice for pedestrians to treacherously climb over, a campaign that has been highly successful. He led a small volunteer group to check sidewalk snow removal in commercial areas after every snowfall.

He bemoaned and reported obstructions on the sidewalks such as overgrown foliage and heaved pavement slabs, believing that pedestrians have the right to easy, safe pathways throughout the sidewalks.

His observations of several walk signal problems provided the impetus for a major Pedestrian Advisory Committee study of essentially all walk signals in Brookline. The recommendations from that study have resulted in the Town applying for a grant to cover the costs of retrofitting the walk signals to comply with the ADA.  He also began documenting problematic crosswalks, some difficult to see by the vision-impaired and others mis-located.

He identified and documented the issue of poor pedestrian street lighting. Most of the street lighting in the Town was designed to illuminate automobile traffic lanes, not the sidewalks, with the high light placement casting street tree shadows on the sidewalks.  He convinced the Town to create a committee to study the problem and make recommendations.

Finally, he was the President of Friends of Hall’s Pond, an organization that cares for and enhances this small, wilderness sanctuary in the heart of Brookline, a magical natural place for pedestrians to linger and savor.

All of these issues require dogged attention to detail upon detail upon detail, which Frank undertook wholeheartedly, in his love of real city life, the life of the walker.

Anita Johnson, WalkBoston Board Member