by Ron Beitler

At last night’s meeting we had five letters that were very clearly a school (High School?) Social Studies project or something similar.

They were all in identical format and were physically mailed to the township, which is what leads you to believe it was a project. They were also all very good. Thoughtful and thoroughly researched.

What was interesting is that four of the five dealt with walkability issues. When selecting a topic to write local government about almost all decided to write asking for more walkability. This is in line with study after study that says young adults want to live in walkable/connected communities. 

It’s not surprising at all. Living on Lower Macungie Rd. and driving Brookside frequently you see scenes like the one above every single day. Whether it’s on foot, bike or here on a skateboard we have tons of walking on our corridors by young people in very unsafe situations.

In my opinion this currently represents a safety issue. Yes, we want to encourage more walking. But the fact is we already have A LOT of walking right now. Most of our arterial and connector roads are poorly equipped and fail miserably as complete streets. We need to think less in terms of “connector” and “arterial” and more in terms of Complete Streets and Boulevards. We need to work in partnership with PennDOT to retrofit key corridor roads as multimodal complete streets.