He’s back…

I’d posted this in the comments section in response to a comment… (It got spammed)….

Curly Suze…Thanks for all your cool advice, but I think you may have missed much of the point of I Ride to Work. We’re speaking from a perspective that the neighborhood of Dorchester is underserved by the Mayor’s Bike Program and that isn’t ANY different than just about any other city or state service coming here. If you consider that Dorchester is 20% of the city’s area and population. On it’s own it would be the third largest city in Massachusetts. It houses a hospital, university our #1 newspaper, a Presidential Library has 750 streets with nearly a third of the schools in the Boston system and there is a chronic LONG TERM shortage of services and follow through and NOW you understand my plaint. Big dig we were to get sound barriers…oops forgot. New PJP Neponset Park was to get a canoe/kayak rental…oops forgot… had 4 stations to be renovated… that started over 10 years ago and one station the T wanted to have a completion party even though they hadn’t completed the ceiling…oops forgot…so now we’re in the throws of all kind of infrastructure improvements and we get half assed solutions with NO advocacy to do it the right way…oops we forgot. So when they run out a bike share program that the original map left out ALL of Dorchester and other neighborhoods south…oops we forgot and includes Cambridge and Somerville (not part of Boston) you can see why we’re suspicious. Why? Let me rephrase that, we’re not suspicious, we’re convinced we’re getting the short end of the stick LIKE WE ALWAYS DO. Any program building job or government improvement has always been done less than what was originally promised. That on top of countless services having been cut as a result of Propsostion 2 1/2 and the racial redlining done in the 60s n 70s and we have a LONG history of getting the short end from City Hall. The latest is the bike lane that was supposed to be installed on Talbot Avenue which is a major east/west road in Dorchester. Well we got some lanes, but for the most dangerous and treacherous stretch of the road we get sharos… Anyone who is a true advocate for biking wouldn’t have compromised and gotten the city to give up one side of the street for parking and put in two lanes. With three bus stops in the said stretch two commercial properties three side streets we’re not talking about that many spaces. Instead I get yelled at (even with the sharo just today in fact) to ‘get out of the road and up on the sidewalk.’ So you can see the effectiveness of a sharo in Dot. NONE! Hence my dismay.

By the way, my driving was multi-passenger included moving an entire load of someone’s possessions, included a business stop that also had material picked up and dropped off and was in a 1991 SAAB that unless I took it for free would be in the junk yard. While on the trip we recovered three chairs, a couch and a microwave out of the trash which we only could have recovered with our car (it fit the couch perfectly). We got 25 mpg on the trip. Any major parts have been recovered from junk cars and it RARELY gets used for city trips and almost exclusively for longer distance trips where public transportation options are nil or untimely. Sorry to be a waste, but hey it is America afterall. I’ve ridden over 2000 miles so far this year isn’t that enough?

Next! We’ll sell Dorchester some more with things most folks have never considered or thought about the place we call Dot!

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