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Does anyone like the newly implemented street/traffic design? I have not talked to a single person that is pleased by the recent changes. I suppose the folks that came up with this absurd plan think that it is just great and are very proud of themselves.

Driving on Second Avenue going north, trying to turn left on Cedar Street safely is very difficult because you can’t see oncoming traffic without being halfway out into the street. Diagonally parked vehicles block the view. Trying to back out of a diagonal parking spot can be a problem if you have a large vehicle next to you. You can’t see oncoming traffic until you are halfway into the street.

Pine Street is one-way for a block and two-way for four blocks. You can’t turn left onto Pine Street from Fifth. What? Who came up with that brilliant idea? We’ve been turning left onto Pine from Fifth for decades and it seemed to work pretty well. And someone thinks that this is better?

With all of the “extra” parking as a result of the diagonal spaces there seem to be fewer handicapped spaces. Would the diagonal spaces even be appropriate and usable for handicapped folks? Perhaps people with handicaps are no longer welcome downtown.

I won’t even go into the issues of changing one-way streets into two-way streets and removing stoplights to put in stop signs or yield signs and putting stoplights where there were none previously.

I would guess that the changes to the streets were meant to improve traffic flow, but it seems to me that the street changes have only produced chaos.

I was puzzled for a long time as to how such a thing could happen. Then, one day I remembered what some of the “hippie type” people would do to their friends as a joke in the ’60s (the practice of which I did not approve) and then I knew how we likely ended up with such an insane street plan: “Somebody slipped something into the Kool-Aid.”

ALLAN BOPP

Sandpoint