If you build it, will they come?
While the answer was yes in the charming case of the Iowa ballfield made famous in the 1989 movie “Field of Dreams,” the outcome is decidedly uncertain for Providence Mayor Jorge O. Elorza’s 78-mile Great Streets Initiative.
Unveiled in 2019, the plan has a laudable goal of connecting the capital city’s neighborhoods through a network of urban trails designed to better protect and, importantly, grow the number of bikers and walkers in the city.
But as this week’s cover story reports, the reaction to the scattered rollout of bike lanes in business and residential neighborhoods throughout the city has been mixed.
Businesses fall on both sides of the debate, with critics especially worried about changing traffic patterns and lost parking in some areas.
Mayor Elorza, himself an avid cyclist, might have gotten more buy-in had his office done more public outreach, including downtown where some lanes have literally shown up overnight. Holding a series of poorly advertised public meetings in the middle of a pandemic then plowing ahead after limited changes is no way to get the pulse – or support – of a community.
But the term-limited mayor had no time to waste, and that ultimately may be the project’s undoing.
For a network of bike lanes to work well, they need to be connected so everyone knows the routes. What the city has now is disjointed and will remain unfinished when the mayor leaves office in a year.
Let’s hope his successor takes a more measured approach to the question of whether the project should be finished, left as is or dismantled.