Letters to the Editor (July 12)

Need for bike lanes?

Besides my personal driving, I do quite a bit of driving in Wichita for a local nonprofit. Last week I encountered a bicyclist riding in the bicycle lane on First Street. I only mention it because it was the first rider that I had seen in any bicycle lane in about two months. People that live in the inner city ride bikes a great deal, but they seem to be riding on sidewalks and any street that is between points A and B. It seems to me that it’s time for our traffic engineers to realize that this bike lane concept on Wichita’s one-way streets is a flop, if not a fiasco. Why should motorists be forced to travel on a single lane when the space that was once the second lane is now used up by a narrow bike lane that isn’t getting used? I think that much of this project is the result of “If we build it, they will come” mentality. Since that worked in a movie, it most likely will work in real life, right? Wrong.

I have long suspected that this bike lane idea being shoved down our throats is possibly nothing more than somebody in traffic engineering, or higher up in city government, being a bicycle enthusiast themselves or having a significant other that is. In my conversations with other motorists, I’ve encountered nobody yet that felt differently about this issue. I’m not advocating that motorists march on City Hall with torches and pitchforks about this, but these one-way streets need to be returned to multiple lanes for cars.

Sports concussions

I am writing to express the need for continued focus and education around the need for immediate care of concussions during sporting games. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, from 2001 to 2009, the number of sports- and recreation-related emergency room visits for traumatic brain injuries for the age group increased 62 percent. The overall rate of traumatic brain injury visits increased 57 percent. Thanks to the Kansas Sports Concussion Clinic that was created in 2012, any athlete that displays signs of a head injury is to be immediately removed from the game and not allowed back until cleared by a physician. There are a limited amount of resources educating parents on what to do if this happens to their child or where to go to get assessed immediately by the most well-trained clinicians in this area.

As a nurse and mother of two competitive soccer players, I see that there is an immediate need for education and focus on resources available as we enter into the school year and the start of school sporting events.

This story was originally published July 12, 2017 at 5:02 AM with the headline "Letters to the Editor (July 12)."