TO THE EDITOR:
In response to the Oct. 1 editorial on bike racks taking up parking space, parking is a hassle on Franklin Street, but losing one parking spot is a hardly a reason to go to the papers. The article could be warranted if, for example, the city wanted to convert an entire parking garage to bicycle parking. But before you pump the brakes on building more bike infrastructure, keep in mind that there are 650 car parking spots on Franklin Street, not including metered spots on the street, and in one parallel parking spot there is room for 12 bicycles.
For a community where cycling isn’t “prevalent” enough, there are a lot of bikes around here. Carrboro is even hosting the N.C. Bike Summit this year. Bicycling is on the rise, and communities either build infrastructure to keep up with the trend or they become irrelevant.
Carrboro moved from a bronze to silver rating with the League of American Bicyclists this year. It’s the first community in the state to have done so, but it’s not going to be the last. We could be the next, but other bronze communities that could be making the jump are Greensboro, Charlotte, Davidson, Durham and Cary. Can you imagine Chapel Hill being less bike-friendly than Cary? That’s not a headline I would like to see.
Nobody is waging a war on car parking, and no reasonable motorist is going to get mad because a reasonable amount of parking has been converted for bicycles. We should continue to develop bike infrastructure and look at car parking solutions.
Austin Whitehead ’15
Environmental science
