Re: 鈥淒owntown birch felled for bike lane, crosswalk,鈥� Jan. 29.
Mayor Lisa Helps and company, on Monday, removed the birch tree at Humboldt, Wharf and Government streets in order to enable the city to create a pedestrian-friendly plaza and scramble crosswalk.
However, if one has a good look at the most current plans, it seems apparent she and company are mostly fixated on facilitating a two-way, non-stop, protected bike lane around the corner from Wharf onto Government and a semi-stop route through onto Humboldt.
The part of the plan that puzzles me the most is how the two-way bike lanes will run right through the middle of the pedestrian plaza and sidewalk and they鈥檝e removed the tree to accommodate this. I can just imagine how many enabled cyclists will just race through there.
A better way could be to end the bike lanes short of the intersection, place bike stop signs, enforce them and have cyclists dismount and walk across the same as everybody else. It would then not have been necessary to extend the pedestrian plaza area so far into the intersection toward the tree. To paraphrase poet Joyce Kilmer: 鈥淭here is nothing more lovely than a tree.鈥�
Dave Paul
Victoria
