America’s Finest City?
San Diego (where I currently reside) bills itself as "America’s Finest City". With the pension debacle and the gridlock in the City Council, one would argue that the label is tenuous at best. The blog is going to seem to some as a knock on the city. It is not. What it is is an observation. To wit…
I am, first and foremost, a bicyclist. This is the sport that I love the best. I would rather ride my bike than do nearly anything else. As a cyclist, I’m out on the road a lot. From my vantage point, I see things that motorists (trapped in their steel cocoons) don’t notice. What I see around the streets of San Diego is an unbelievable amount of litter. Discarded soft drink cans; empty water bottles; abandoned plastic bags; rags of every conceivable size and shape; and fast-food wrappers. The shoulders of the roads are in pitiful shape. They are pitted and full of holes. Weeds poke through the cracks in the pavement and madacam. In some places, the paint marking the bicycle lane is virtually invisible. In other places, there is no bicycle lane at all.
I’ve written letter after letter to the various city agencies, begging them to clean up the roadways. To date, my pleas have fallen on deaf ears. I could understand it if they responded that there aren’t funds to perform clean-up duties. But that would presuppose that someone is actually reading the letters I’m writing. Telephoning the agencies is a study in frustration. One is either placed on hold, or shunted from one bureaucrat to another until you hang up in despair.
Why do people feel that it is okay to dispose of their trash on the side of the road? When did this type of behavior become acceptable? Would they, I wonder, do this in their homes? Would they simply toss trash on the floor and expect someone else to clean up after them? The roads belong to us all. We all have a shared responsibility to keep them litter-free. I want city officials to enforce the anti-litter laws that are already on the books. I don’t think that’s too much to ask. If San Diego truly wants to be "America’s Finest City" then its citizens should begin by cleaning up their city’s streets. A tourist’s first impression shouldn’t be one of dirty city streets.
