Letter: resident angry over Stanley St. proposal; road diet could fail

Get ‘Wired In’, support your favorite local nonprofit

To the Editor-

After writing my first open letter regarding the Stanley St. re-striping debacle, I was contacted my multiple other concerned resident about this issue.

There is quickly becoming a growing number of residents becoming angry with the city council because our opposition falls on deaf ears. A handful of us have done a little research into other instances similar to ours and have found interesting results.

What we have found are many failed instances of “road diets” and angry residents; congested traffic which resulted in increased traffic on streets not designed for heavy traffic;, increased injuries; negative impact on business; and slower response time for emergency vehicles. Many of these failures took place in communities larger than ours, but we’re still dealing all the same problems.

What our council fails to mention about Stanley St., while they call the present road design “archaic and outdated,” is that Stanley St. is a main travel corridor from smaller communities east of Point, not to mention the quickest route to the interstate for emergency vehicles. And we all know in an emergency seconds matter!

While I can’t mention all of these stories I will give a quick few examples:

• Story published 8-10-17 in dailybreeze.com. Vista del Mar the residents sued the city twice in two months after the road diet was put in place for all the reasons I mentioned prior.
• Story published 9-30-16 Oregonlive.com. The city of Portland is accused of “social engineering” after a teens death as a direct result of a failed “road diet”.
• Story published 1-9-15 Citylab.com. Gainesville reversed the road diet after backlash from angry residents, and even the mayor called the road diet project a misguided “road diet ideology,” citing low counts of bikes using the bike lanes in the road compared with those still riding the sidewalk (we’ve all seen that in Point already).

The list is quite long and I can’t write them all in this letter, but the point is that this personal agenda that is being pushed in our city has happened on many other cities and failed.

The two most common things that stood out while reading all of those stories was the cities went ahead installing these “diets” against residents wishes and the subsequent lawsuits that followed.

Jeremy Niemczyk
Stanley St. resident

Where do you stand on possible changes to Stanley St.? Send your letter to: [email protected].