Well, I didn’t enjoy my drive down Friendly Avenue on Saturday as much as I thought I would. But it wasn’t due to the horrifyng lack of trees. The road running in front of The Shoppes at Friendly Center was fine. I’m not a fan the new shopping center, but we did get one good thing out of it: a wider road with, yes, sidewalks. That’s fine with me.

I thought that’s what was going to happen further down Friendly between Holden and Westridge. But as I kept driving, I noticed GDOT is digging a big trench in the middle of the road —– a median, for heaven’s sake.

Here’s the way it was explained to me by a resident who attended the planning meetings. About 29,000 cars travel down Friendly every day, whereas the capacity is roughly 26,000 cars. So, instead of widening the road to handle the extra capacity, GDOT decided to build a median in order to slow the traffic. In other words, they’re building a bottleneck along one of Greensboro’s major thoroughfares.

Does this make sense?