Editor,
Kill a pigeon or a crab; go to jail. Eat a hamburger; you’re a heartless savage. Kill a cyclist and drive a mile with a caved in windshield before stopping; meh.
Another day another fatality. Laguna Beach has garnered the “notorious distinction as the worst among 107 small cities” for pedestrian and cyclist fatalities. No surprise to me.
To a certain extent, I agree with what Michael Hoag (who has pushed for adoption of traffic calming devices in Laguna) said: “The reason people are being killed is we don’t value them” yet we provide money to protect marine mammals and the like. But it’s not just Laguna who demonstrated this twisted system of values.
Consider the move some expletive made when they scraped old Laguna Canyon road and made it impossible to safely ride from Irvine to Laguna Beach. Six miles of perfectly usable road was removed by some bureaucratic cartel to make room for “habitat restoration”. Meanwhile, if you want to ride a bike to Irvine, you have to pray a distracted driver going 80 mph doesn’t obliterate you and your spandex shorts.
It shows the value placed on cyclist safety is trumped by sea urchins and refuse-rummaging pigeons.
Michael Rybah, Laguna Beach
I certainly hope that the artists at the No Square theatre are readers of this paper, because Mr. Rybah’s letters to the editor should a be a rich source of satire for next years Lagunatics show.