We’re number five! Nationwide, just 3 percent of us commute to work on foot. But according to Mark Alan Hughes (Philadelphia Daily News, May 20), there are sections of cities where over half the population walks to work: 1.9 square miles in downtown Philadelphia that’s home to 38,000 people, 1.5 square miles in Boston and Cambridge (33,000 people), 0.8 square miles in San Francisco (8,000), 0.2 square miles in midtown Manhattan (3,000), and 0.2 square miles in Chicago (1,000).
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I swear I’ll never throw a spitball again. According to a story in the Huntington Journal Gazette in northern Indiana (quoted in “Undernews,” May 15), U.S. representative Dan Burton “discussed tax cuts, prescription-drug costs and border patrols in a Town Hall meeting Monday. Burton spoke at Huntington North High School to a crowd of about 100, many of them students required to attend as punishment.”
Let bicyclists roll through stop signs, argues Jim Nugent in “Bike Traffic,” newsletter of the Chicagoland Bicycle Federation (May). Cyclists can see the intersection better, they slow down more when “rolling through,” they can’t hurt people as much as cars can, and they get too sweaty if they have to stop and start all the time. “Holding big, powerful, and deadly motor vehicles to a different standard than bicycles would be rational public policy. Cyclists shouldn’t feel guilty when they call for selective enforcement of the stop sign laws.”
