Driving the Amalfi Coast highway makes a Big Sur excursion seem like Highway 5 by comparison.
While the Monterey peninsula has some spectacular scenery, the views from nearly every turn on the Amalfi provide vistas that are truly awesome.
And, while the views are everything reported, you must appreciate what California has built for highways in years past.
While our lack of road repair is now catching up with us in the Golden State, we remain a bit ahead of our Italian relatives.
The idea of creating a road diet for bicycles anywhere on the Amalfi would be more than humorous. Even pedestrians, usually tourists, are a rare breed, probably for several reasons.
Which jogs my thinking about the money we have spent in Santa Clara for bicycle lanes at the expense of taxpayers.
It just seems that true taxpayers are getting the short stick when it comes to the highest and best use of our streets and roads.
Think about it. Ninety nine percent of car owners pay registration fees, driver license fees, bridge tolls, highway tolls and gas taxes all for improved highway access.
However, the small minority of bike riders pay none of these taxes yet are being given street lanes of their own to ride their bikes.
What’s next. Lanes for roller skaters?
We have been duped into the believing that road diets are necessary for the safety of bike riders and add to the greening of our planet.
Yes, and there are also people who believe in the New Green Deal and we will be taking electric buses to Europe in the next decade.
If you can buy into this fabrication of either, let me recommend a good shrink.
In the meantime, we need to return our streets to the people who pay for them.
Enough of this goody-goody mentality that adds to the very problem our politicians are pretending to solve.
We have a traffic problem that is exacerbated by narrowing our streets for bike riders. Bikers, we have no problem with you and honestly, you are riding on a street that was designed for cars. Where did we get this crazy idea that bike riders are entitled to their own space on our tax-paid-for streets?
If you are one of those people who thinks that the planet is going to be dead in twelve years, please make the remaining time a bit more enjoyable for the rest of the population and ride your bike at your own risk on my car-intended, tax-paid-for roads.
Now, the latest analysis for El Camino is a continuation of the Grand Boulevard concept with a few twists. Remember, logical thinking people loudly objected to creating dedicated bus lanes and eliminating two car lanes.
The traffic people, who haven’t fixed anything yet that works, want to eliminate parking on the El Camino.
You want to complicate or eliminate the business activity of 100 store front businesses?
Was this idea brought to us by the same people who created street diets for bikers?
