I am living a paradox and require some assistance in ascertaining an answer. I drive to work each morning. I leave my home in the early morning hours. There is no sun to light my way, or anyone else's way.
I travel north on A1A and find people who are supposedly committed to their excellent health, jogging and bicycling in the road. There exists a lovely, wide, and very accomodating sidewalk, yet these health conciscious individual are dressed in dark clothing, jogging, biking, walking and running in the shadows.
Perhaps, I had a caring mother and these people did not. She always insisted I use the sidewalks whenever possible. She also gave me a flashlight with good batteries, just in case I had to walk without the assistance of the sun.
Hence healthy friends, the question is this: "if you are so health conscious why do you insist on tempting fate?"
Valarie Butler
Key West
For the past decade, FDOT has maintained that a four-lane highway is needed between Key Largo and Florida City (the 18-mile stretch) primarily based on their arguments that the extra lanes are necessary for hurricane evacuation and because the road needs to be safer.
Governor Bush is among those who have doubts about the hurricane evacuation justification and has called for an independent firm to determine if the evacuation needs of Monroe County can be met using the existing two-lane roads (US 1 and Card Sound Road).
If the result of that study established that the extra lanes are NOT needed on US 1 in order to safely evacuate the Keys, then construction of the four-lane project is very unlikely. The four-lane highway constitutes FDOT's only safety-enhancement proposal for this corridor and funding has been withdrawn from their recently-published Five Year Plan because construction of the project is in doubt. If this roadway needs to be safer, why wasn't the withdrawal of the four-lane project replaced by a safer two-lane proposal?
We have pleaded with FDOT to increase the safety on this two-lane roadway. It has been done elsewhere, and the Cape Cod example has been quoted often. Residents around Route 6 on lower Cape Cod were faced with the prospect of a four-lane highway but insisted that they needed more safety not more asphalt. Accidents dropped by over 25 percent and there has been only one fatality in the eight years since implementation. In a similar period prior to implementing these safety enhancements, this highway had over 20 fatalities.
There are other safe two-lane roads, one of which is in California. Route 37 north of the San Francisco Bay remained a two lane road due to environmental and budgetary limitations. AFter California Transportation Department implemented safety enhancements, accidents and fatalities decreased substantially. We are investigating similar safe two-lane roadways in Pennsylvania and Maryland.
FDOT has a huge staff of very talented engineers who are capable of using their impressive resources to design and implement a model facility which significantly increases the safety of our two-lane road and they have not done so. If it had not been for one active and insistent citizen FDOT would not even have fixed the dangerous ruts in US 1 north of Key Largo. FDOT had no plans to improve this roadway unless and until it was four-laned and would not have resurfaced it without the persistence of this safety-conscious citizen.
There are many things that could be done to make this road safer and I am deeply disappointed that FDOT does not have concurrent plans to make this road safer— regardless of the eventual width.
This road needs to be safer and it needs to be safer TODAY.
John G. Hammerstrom
Tavernier
Weekley Didn't Want To Vote On Rentals
I am not among the cynics who aver that the transient rental debacle at Tuesday night's City Commission meeting was an orchestrated scheme to let Jimmy Weekley pay off campaign donors in the gated communities and, at the same time,provide them no relief whatsoever.
Nor do I contend that Jimmy's "recusing" himself from voting on the issue because he's "an owner of Fausto's" which sells groceries to some other company that, in turn, sells same and stocks refrigerators at Truman Annex, was a cheap way to enable Jimmy to avoid voting on the record on the issue.
I do admit, however, that it surprised me that the proposed amendment to allow such rentals in gated communities was supposedly sponsored by the Mayor "and Commissioners" and then unanimously tabled indefinitely by all Commissioners before any discussion at all on its merits.
George M. Maurer Jr.
Key West