SR 4 modification makes it less safe

To The Eagle:

I attended school at George Washington Elementary in White Plains, New York from 1940 through 1944. The school was only about five blocks from my house, but it was on the other side of the Mamaroneck Parkway, a four lane divided highway, sort of a mini-freeway. These were the years of one-car families, and also war rationing, so everyone walked everywhere. To get to school, I walked half a block to where my street ended at the parkway, hung a left for about a block, then went over a pedestrian walkway bridge, a beautiful iron structure with broad walkways and high protective guard rails and fences. In the early part of the school year, some of the mothers took the walk with the kids, and there was always, morning and afternoon, a tall, stately motorcycle cop by the parkway’s edge watching over us – a Norman Rockwell picture of Americana.

Even in our current state of societal decline, we could probably muster up the engineering skills to build such a bridge over SR4, but we most certainly lack the political will to do so. If we did manage locally to launch such a project, it would take a couple of decades to accumulate the necessary pile of permits, by which time it would have turned into a high speed rail project and died for lack of funding.

The only accomplishment of the recent SR 4 (paint job) modification was to make it slightly less safe by eliminating the protective buffer lane for people turning east onto SR4 from Main Street. Further administrative patchwork like speed restrictions and crosswalks will score as detriment, not improvement.

Howard Brawn

Puget Island