The recent death of Matthew Scarpati, struck down while repairing his bicycle on the Wantagh State Parkway, has spurred the state to announce new safety measures. The plan includes reducing the number of lanes on the parkway and adding guard rails at some points.
Those guard rails are definitely needed.
The bike path has become very popular with bicyclists, skaters and walkers. Joan Kern and other local activists fought hard to get it, and it was sorely missed during construction. It is one of the greatest joys of living in this area. But it needs to be safe.
When vehicles are traveling at such great speed, just the slightest mistake can cause them to veer into the bike path. Speed bumps may not do it. Guard rails do not have to be unsightly, and they can prevent future tragedies.
Save Saturday mail
The problems the U.S. Post Office is having are based on a huge loss of mail volume. More people are paying their bills online and e-mailing each other. More advertisers have switched from mailings to e-mails, too.
The post office is limited to inflation factors, and probably helps cause them too, each time it raises postage. Recently, it has been hard to keep up with all the price changes!
Still, our postal workers/public servants have been more efficient than in other countries, where postage costs more. Next on the table is the proposal to drop Saturday mail deliveries, or perhaps one mid-week day.
Like many other businesses and news organizations, your community newspaper would have a big problem with that. For one thing, our news deadline is Monday, in order to prepare each edition in time for the weekend. We often don’t see the mail until late afternoon. For another, we would be behind a day in processing your subscriptions and advertising payments.
The original purpose of establishing the postal service was to make sure the people governing their own country, those in big cities and those out in the prairies, all had access to the information they needed to make decisions. This communication system also helped the economy to grow. Now, the postal service is expected to operate on a profit or at least not cost the government money. Meanwhile, it is bound by a commitment to serve both profitable and unprofitable routes. The post office is caught between a rock and a hard place.
Here at the newspaper we are slowly adapting, just as our readers and advertisers are, to a new way of doing things. We receive more news by e-mail, fax and phone. We get some payment by credit card, too. We put some of the news up on our website. But most of our readers still want to receive their newspaper in print, and that is our bottom line.
In order to give you the news while it is still news, we need mail sooner than later.