Deconstructing the Hope Street bike lane trial
by Roger Schreffler, special to RINewsToday & Nancy Thomas, publisher With the Jorge Elorza administration coming to an end on January 2, many eyes will focus on the new mayor of Providence, Brett Smiley, with surety that he will move forward and stick to his guns to bring sanity to the outgoing mayor’s Great Streets Initiative, a well-meaning but poorly conceived plan to make “every street in Providence safe, clean, healthy, inclusive and vibrant.” Key to Great Streets seems to be using bike lanes – in some cases short bike lanes that go from here to there and aren’t really connected logically to a continuing transportation link. But the use of bike lanes is about much more than – biking. Apart from the word salad of the Great Streets Initiative mission statement, it doesn’t accurately reflect the situation on many Providence streets. Hope Street is a stunning example. It is a heavily traveled thoroughfare, running north to south on the East...