Bicycles don’t belong in city traffic
A biker rides beside cars down a protected bike lane on Sept. 2022 in the Loop.
Pat Nabong/Sun-Times
Am I the only one who has noticed that building bike lanes to make cycling in city traffic safe is a lot like putting filter tips on cigarettes to make smoking tobacco safe? A cosmetic change isn’t going to change the fact that for traffic, the bicycle is a fatally flawed product from the start.
My car has hard metal floorboards to protect my legs; hard metal doors to protect me in a side collision; seat belts and air bags to protect my face and ribs in case of a front collision; upholstered seat backs to protect my spine; a roof to protect me when the weather turns bad; and four wide tires arranged in a rectangle on two axles for maximum stability.
The bicycle has none of these features and only two narrow wheels arranged front to back for maximum instability. Bicycles simply don’t belong in city traffic.
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Instead of spending the taxpayers’ money to force more bike lanes down the public’s throats, perhaps the politicians could learn to ask us first if this is what we want, rather than just giving an overly powerful lobby everything they want.
C.R. Green, Uptown
From ‘lock her up’ to ‘lock him up’
Before becoming president, Donald Trump led a comfortable life and his name was valuable.
Now, with endless civil lawsuits, criminal cases with possible jail time and being branded a loser, Trump now wishes Hillary Clinton would have won the 2016 presidential election instead.
Tom DeDore, Garfield Ridge
Lincoln Park High School needs attention
As the most diverse high school in the city — and perhaps the state — Lincoln Park High School should be celebrated. With its student body split roughly equally between Black, Hispanic and white students along with 10% Asian, it most closely mimics our city’s demographics.
But unlike our segregated city, the school is integrated well, meaning all the diversity can actually be found within one place — namely, inside the walls of the school. A real melting pot, the school draws kids from all 50 wards with both the richest and poorest kids in the city attending, and everything in between.
In short, it is what we want, or should want, in our schools. Diversity in action. Yet its facilities are, objectively, among the worst and most decrepit in the city. Makes sense when the facilities are 125 years old, with few improvements and only occasional band-aids when desperate.
If the school was located anywhere else in the city, people would be rightfully protesting, some even calling it racist. Yet because it sits in Lincoln Park, nobody seems to care or take action.
William Choslovsky, former Lincoln Park High School Local School Council member
A realist on gun violence
Regarding the headline on S.E. Cupp’s latest column, “Will Nashville school shooting be just another gun massacre we accept? — the answer is “yes.”
Not a cynic or pessimist, just a realist.
Mike Calcina, Dunning
Height of hypocrisy
Members of Congress extending their thoughts and prayers to the families of the Nashville shooting victims, while accepting the dollars and cents extended to them by the gun lobby, is the epitome of hypocrisy.
Gerald Weisberg, M.D., Lake View
Coming to grips with police misconduct
The Mar. 30 edition of the Chicago Sun-Times reported that David White has been freed after spending 30 years falsely imprisoned due to police misconduct.
Mr. White is but the latest freed for this reason. He has one thing in common with all the others: All have been Black, defying the laws of probability. It appears that to Chicago cops, jailing any Black man they can get will do to clear the case and move on. It begs the question: When did readers last see a white prisoner exonerated on such grounds? And will Chicago’s next mayor come to grips with this troubling, long-standing situation while reducing actual criminality? It wasn’t just Jon Burge breaking the law by violating Black suspects’, and only Black suspects’, civil rights.
And how many millions of taxpayer dollars might it now take to settle Mr. White’s lawsuit, which is sure to be filed?
Ted Z. Manuel, Hyde Park
Change of subject
Trump’s been indicted! Now Republicans don’t have to talk about gun violence.
Bob Barth, Edgewater