Letter: Route 30 bike path plan is unsafe

The bike path along Route 30 is unnecessary, unsafe, damaging to the environment and the rural character of Weston. It is unnecessary. Adult bicycle riders prefer low traffic, open, rural roads to busier routes. That’s why you don’t see them riding on Routes 20 or 30, or the old railroad tracks path, but on lower traffic town roads. It is unsafe. 

I live at Route 30 and Wellesley Street. I see the traffic, speed, and crashes firsthand; cars have ended up on my sidewalk and even hit my fence. Adding a bike path beside a heavily traveled state road and calling it “safe” does not make the underlying danger disappear. Asking families to place bicycles and children beside this traffic is deeply concerning. Children deserve safe places to walk and ride but invoking them cannot substitute for answering whether this location and design are safe. In fact, pushing kids to swerve through intersections, driveways and other path users is outright dangerous. The path is damaging to the environment. Any claimed reduction in traffic or pollution is not such. Removing thousands of mature trees, landscaping and converting a rural corridor into pavement and concrete does not help the environment. 

A bike path that will be used only a few months a year is not an environmental victory when it destroys the environment that makes Weston distinctive. Uninformed, good feeling slogans like “a bike path is a good thing” are not enough. 

Those of us living along Route 30 face having to give up our private property to build the path, losing thousands of trees and landscaping, plus endure new path created easements and liabilities which create potential litigation in perpetuity against us. We should reject this project as unnecessary, unsafe, damaging to the environment and the rural character of the town of Weston. 

Fernanda Bourlot, Wellesley Street