I’m writing as manager of the North Asheville Mattress Warehouse, adversely affected by the removal of two traffic lanes from Merrimon Avenue last autumn. My store is situated in the thick of the traffic bottleneck, created to appease a relatively minuscule number of cyclists and misguided ecologists. The brunt of this decision has been clear all summer as those with second homes here have joined in with everyone else.
The result has been beleaguered customers and woeful year-to-year store sales numbers now that motorists avoid the area if at all possible. Worse, observers would be hard-pressed to say more cyclists even use their new lanes. Why would they want to inhale exhaust fumes created by vehicles idling in half-mile-long traffic anyway? Can we put this harebrained experiment to bed already?
— Garrett Phillips
Asheville
