The B-Square Bulletin reports on a mayoral primary forum that took place Monday at the Monroe County Library.
“At Monday’s forum, advocates for facilities dedicated to bicycle safety, and to calming motorized traffic, probably didn’t hear a lot from any of the three candidates that gave them much reason to be encouraged,” Dave Askin writes in “Feisty final mayoral forum for Bloomington Dems.”
A question from the moderator referred to emergency vehicles being hindered by traffic calming. “There are reasons for traffic calming devices to be put in place,” Don Griffin said. He said that reviews could be done on a case-by-case basis, but it was unlikely that progress will be undone. Kerry Thomson said she’d work to get more people, in this case emergency services, to the table.
“Sandberg took the question as a chance to express her opposition to the idea of prioritizing bicyclists and pedestrians, saying that streets should be complete for all users,” Askin writes.
“These are the things that might look good on paper when you are trying to make things safer for certain users of those streets and then there are the unintended consequences that we’re seeing now and experiencing. To a one, when I go to constituent meetings and go door-to-door and I bring up the 7-line, I get boos. People don’t like that. They don’t like the experience of it. Even people who ride bicycles are saying they don’t feel safe there.” (At 51:59 on the CATS-TV video)
“We can’t overly engineer these projects that are just meant to help one particular user of the streets that causes issues for another,” Sandberg said.
“So complete streets are the way to go. Let’s make the streets safe for everybody, not just the bicycles, and the new bicycle infrastructure seems that seems to be kind of the heart of the biggest complaints now,” she said. “When we make mistakes, let’s admit to it. This didn’t turn out the way we wanted it to. It’s time to correct that.”