Anyone who’s lived in Guilford County for the last 20 years knows that our Board of Commissioners is —putting it mildly —- a rather unusual lot. So it’s really sayng something when the Rhino’s John Hammer takes note of the current case of mass hysteria. The individual instances are too many to note for the purposes of this post, but what ‘takes the cake’ is the lack of parking at the new $100 million county jail:
A fact that the commissioners seemed to have overlooked is that in Greensboro, North Carolina, in the 21st century, the vast majority of people drive to work, to visit people in jail, to see their clients and to just about anywhere they go. When our office was on East Market Street, we had reporters who drove two blocks to meetings at city hall and in the Old Guilford County Court House and people didn’t think it was strange.
Maybe I’m pushing it by assuming that Rhino reporters represent a cross section of society. Still, I’ve argued —-most recently here— that no matter how much gov’t pushes ‘walkability,’ people are still going to drive two blocks. I live in one of the oldest and most walkable neighborhoods in G’boro and the number of people who head for the car to travel two blocks blows me away.
The irony is Guilford County commissioners most definitely aren’t part of the Smart Growth crowd; when it comes to parking at the new jail, they’re just suffering from ‘mass hysteria.’
