Des Peres residents oppose bike/ped plan: "transients" will "burglarize" and reduce "livability"
A recent St Louis Post-Dispatch story covers the work by a few Des Peres residents to oppose a bicycle and pedestrian plan that is currently under review for the city.
The Post-Dispatch writes:
“Now, if they connect us to Kirkwood and Valley Park and Webster, we are going to have a massive influx of people coming through a quiet subdivision,” Sodemann said. “I live on the corner. If anyone wanted to burglarize it would be the perfect spot.”
Sodemann was one of several people who spoke against the project at a City Council meeting in August. Another was Des Peres resident Bryan Anderson.
“It’s a privacy issue,” he said. “People buy homes for the neighborhood and the community. They don’t just buy a home, they buy it within a neighborhood because they like the livability of the neighborhood, they like the privacy and they like their neighbors.
A cyclist goes north on Ballas Road on Sunday, Sept. 13, 2015, in Des Peres. More bicycle lanes are proposed for Des Peres along Manchester Road. Photo by J.B. Forbes, jforbes@post-dispatch.com
“When you have a lot of outside transients — and that’s frankly what this would be — you lose that sense of neighborhood, you lose that sense of security, you lose this sense of privacy.”
The kind of worries we are hearing in here in response to the proposed Des Peres bike/walk plan are the type that are often voiced by residents uncomfortable with anything new or changing in their neighborhoods.
But in reality, making a community safer and more inviting for bicycling and walking brings exactly the opposite of what these residents are worried about. Trails, routes, and 'greenways' are used mostly by local residents because biking and walking is by nature a local activity.
More local residents out walking and bicycling means more eyes on the streets, greater safety, and less crime.
Being able to safely walk and bicycle in your own neighborhood is one of the most important aspects of "livability"--the plan will dramatically enhance livability in Des Peres, and will certainly not reduce it.
The idea that people who walk and bicycle are "transients" is frankly the appalling. This a deep-seated attitude that for decades has prevented Missouri communities from adopting the kind of walkable, bicycleable streets that have become the norm across the U.S. and other modern countries across the world.
When we make our communities and neighborhoods safe and appealing for walking and bicycling, everybody walks and a large percentage of the population bicycles. These are normal, everyday activities and it is a sad commentary on our society that some think these most common forms of human movement are the exclusive domain of poor homeless people.
Adopting a thoroughgoing bicycle and pedestrian plan, and then working systematically to implement it, is one of the top recommendations we give for Missouri communities to become more bicycle and pedestrian friend.
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