The city of San Luis Obispo would love for you to think the “Anholm Greenway” (aka “Anholm Bikeway,” aka “North Broad Bike Boulevard”) will be the most marvelous thing they’ve ever done.
Don’t swallow spin. The real story is ugly and dirty.
This is the most neighborhood-unfriendly city project in memory.
It is racist, ableist, ageist, elitist, and plain mean, nasty, and rotten to neighborhood residents, and the features that make it such are completely unnecessary. It was the city’s deliberate choice to say to residents: “You don’t count.”
The design and advancement of this atrocity rest on conflicts of interest so incestuous no well-governed city would tolerate them.
Bicyclists are alleged to be winners, but what they get is a dangerous, unsafe mishmash of textbook concepts clumsily applied where they don’t belong. Any number of kinder-to-residents alternatives would better serve bicyclists, but an arrogant know-it-all city rejected them all.
The city says this is but the first of many neighborhoods it intends to treat so shabbily. So wake up, SLO neighborhoods—yours could be next.
Richard Schmidt
San Luis Obispo
This article appears in Education Today 2021.
This is the most biased and poorly written opinion piece I have ever read. Richard seems to have his own agenda in mind – so sad for him.
Sorry about the free parking, Rich.
The writer fails to give any specific examples supporting his argument, which leaves me wondering how a bike path could be “mean, nasty and rotten” to the residents. How, exactly, is he so inconvenienced? The loss of parking?
Not in my neighborhood is all the writer has to say.
Hopefully, someone will have more to say so readers understand the problem and can decide if their neighbor
hood would be harmed by bike lanes.
I would be willing to consider the substance of the writer’s objections if he specified them, but he lost me at “racist, ageist, ableist and elitist” . Now it is just generic whining.
The SLO city council refuses to listen to city residents and persist in shoving these ‘bike highways’ into our neighborhoods, more evidence of an out-of-touch, arrogant city council.
Instead of “Bike Highways”, the city could just keep the traditional bike lanes which is how a normal city would do it.
We should all be riding bikes, but don’t tell that to the more than 100 million of us who are overweight or obese.
Walk.