One of the big drawbacks about covering long public meetings as a reporter is that afterward, you have to read your own notes. Given that I’ve been declared Public Enemy Number One by the Palmer Method Handwriting School, making sense of my own scrawl has become a huge challenge. Trying to make sense of what went down at this past Wednesday’s long and heated meeting about the future direction of State Street — hosted by the State Street Advisory Committee at the Faulkner Gallery of the downtown Public Library — is even more so. I can summarize by saying this: A whole lot of eggs got broken in the three-and-a-half-hour rant session, but I don’t know that any omelettes actually got made.
To the extent they were, I wouldn’t want to eat any of them.
The other punch line? Kids on electric bikes are not the scourge of western civilization that one might have thought given the intensity of the testimony to the contrary. Yes, some of these Rad Ratz are, in fact, a problem. But not all of them. And to the extent some pose a legitimate safety challenge, it is by no means clear yet how big of one. The preliminary data indicates that since the Promenade has been installed on State Street, there are significantly fewer collisions in the area and those — as frightening and jarring as they are — are not nearly as life threatening as the collisions that took place in the pre-Promenade era in which cars were often involved.