During these first beautiful days of summer, I am so happy to see people peek their heads out of doors, trying, as should be their natural right in a civilized society, to get out and about in their public spaces.
Unfortunately, most are turned back by thundering traffic that has totally co-opted all public spaces. No room seems left for people.
After years of wrangling and well over $100,000, the relatively new “missing link” sidewalks along Alexander and Wallace roads are a great improvement, but so close to the road as to be very scary. I would never have let my children on them. Why can’t the citizens who pay for the $5 million planned municipal building improvements for our public servants (The News, June 7) have broad and inviting sidewalks, with plenty of road setback, on either side of every main road so people can enjoy walking around their town?
Perhaps if these workers were forced out for an hour’s walk each day, as we, the citizens are, on our dangerous and uninviting roadways and sidewalks, they would put more priority on our comfort.
I watched adults who tried to make their way from the train station up Washington Road, only to find the sidewalk discontinuous on one side and largely missing on the other.
I saw middle-school aged children, off for an adventure on their bicycle from Birchwood Estates, unable to find a safe path down to the library a short half-mile away. The road widened in the last few years is a great improvement, but is the town too impoverished to install sidewalks for our own children?
I saw high school-aged children trying to walk from the new apartment complex on Clarksville Road to High School South, turned back by roaring traffic on the narrow bridge over the railroad tracks. Could not a bicycle or pedestrian bridge be built so that they could get to town and those of us in town could get to the soon to be opened Jewish Community Center and Meadow Park? Lots of students were walking from High School South into the main part on town to patronize the new shops, many on the road due to the terrible Washington Road conditions up in that area.
Even the toughest of young male athletes are afraid to walk on that narrow ribbon of concrete leading east on Washington with the telephone poles periodically planted squarely in the middle of it, inches from roaring traffic.
Perhaps open space to some means grand sweeps of grass, devoid of human activity, suitable for flashing electric signs glimpsed imperfectly at dangerous intersections while encased in their car that say things like “See our website for town information!”
I suspect most of us would prefer our open space were we travel each and every day of our lives: wide road shoulders for adult bicyclists and joggers and wide and inviting sidewalks for child cyclists, mom’s pushing carriages, dad’s headed to the train, and children headed back and forth to the library, schools, playgrounds, and sports fields.
We have been blessed with a compact town, a gorgeous eastern woodland ecosystem and a wealthy, well-educated populace. Can’t we harness these blessings so that we can get safely out and about without an automobile on the numerous short trips we all take each day?
Henry B. Murphy
Hereford Drive, Princeton Junction
