Letters to the Editor

I applaud you for your Spring Style cover of March 26. With about 20% of this edition of The Source devoted to high fashion in the high desert, I reveled in your humor and good-natured distraction from the media saturated, depressing news about Afghanistan, the brutal drug war in Mexico, the esprit de corps of our city council, and the mind numbing cost of health care.

I wanted to say a few words about the, you guessed it, bike lanes. We have seen many, many responses to the bike lanes here in Bend and how important it is to keep them free of vehicles and junk.

This week's letter comes from J. Turley who fears a crackdown on downtown skateboarding will limit commuting options and unfairly target law-abiding skaters. Thanks for the letter and the reminder that skating is (still) not a crime. As a small token of our gratitude for your letter, drop by our skate-friendly office, 704 NW Georgia, and pick up a pound of Strictly Organic coffee on us.

Central Oregonians have shared several beautiful spring days in the last couple of weeks. It has been a chance to prepare and test out alternate transportation for the summer. Thousands of people leave their car at home and ride on another set of wheels. Enjoying a ride to work on a sunny day is one of the greatest parts of living here in the summer. But Bend is trying to put unfair and bias regulations upon commuters of the skateboarding kind.

I am a blue-collar person. I have a wife, two daughters, and all the pleasure that that brings.

Can the editorial staff please do me a favor and stop using parentheses to interject their astute observations of obvious grammatical errors within readers' opinion letters? I can't tell where the readers' semi-coherent ramblings (which often include parenthetical explanatory notes) end and the editors' assertion of their own snickery grammatical superiority begins. It's like, before taking the splinter from your brother's eye, remove the beam from your own, man.

Dear Aaron Switzer,
Trading pants sounds like fun. Seriously.

This week's letter comes from Ben Groeneveld who sends a restrained take on his recent collision with a car while bike commuting. The issue of bicycle and pedestrian safety remains a serious one in car crazy Central Oregon, and falling gas prices aren't likely to do anything to increase awareness efforts. So thanks for the letter, Ben. With warmer weather on the way, we'd all do well to keep an eye out for bikers and other non-motorized users of our roads. In the meantime, you can collect your winner's prize: an Old Mill pint glass at our office, 704 NW Georgia.
 Our vehicles collided. No citation was issued. That's the police report. I wanted to go left, and the driver wanted to turn right.  I feel so sorry for the driver that hit me. The driver didn't see me and my viewpoint is that the driver was not trained to look for bicycles.  In contrast, I am so experienced in looking for car behavior that might put me at risk. What better could we have done? One of the officers said "It could have been worse."

I'd like to comment on last week's WTF about Pit Bulls. Pit Bulls have been given an undeserved reputation due to irresponsible owners. I am the first to concede that Pit Bulls were not bred to be lap dogs. A number of other species have been bred for attack dogs and in fact are responsible for more attacks. Yet the other breeds do not have the same reputation. More people have been killed this year by cigarettes, cars, McDonald's, and booze than all dogs combined since records have been kept. In fact, far more children are killed by their parents and faulty cribs each year than all the dogs combined. Yet I don't see any anti Big Mac legislation on the horizon.

What Bend should do with our share of the Obama money: buy Mt. Bachelor and run it as a non-profit. Pay all the employees and officers a fair wage, but run it as a non-profit so that the lift ticket, equipment rental, and concession prices can come way down - lower than any other ski mountain in the U.S.