white line
The City has been creating and maintaining pedestrian and bike paths, a wonderful alternative to automobile travel. Since the right of way above was secured, the path has been modified:
a) a law was passed requiring dogs be leashed Friday-Monday
b) the path was paved
c) the path was striped
The physical modification, the pavement, has rendered the park more appealing to bikers and roller-bladers. Someday we will see a wheelchair (haven't seen one yet).
The symbolic modification, the white line, has not effected the behavior of out of control children and dogs. Adults typically make way for traffic approaching from the opposite direction. Of course, people with functioning brains reacted to oncoming traffic in such a way before the advent of the stripe.
The legal modification, the leash law, is a joke. Compliance is close to non-existent.
(If I was emperor of CHO I'd modify the leash law to include children under 10 and I would try enforcing this law one percent of the time.)
Labels: dogs, government, riverine
posted by emory at 7:22 AM
2 Comments:
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Do I hear a note of irony in this comment? What is it that children under 10 do to require leashing? Do they rush at you and sniff your legs, bare their teeth with hair stiffening on their backs? Or even worse, the terrible sin of being knockable-over by jumping dogs?
Our society is enamored with children. The children the children the children.
Yas yas, children are the future but please don't require me to admire all children simply because they are young. I was a child once, it is a state we all pass through.
I admire intelligent, respectful aware children. These are qualities that parents have forgotten to reinforce in the rush to make their children the center of their lives, socially and intellectually.
Oops. Getting off topic. As it relates to Rivanna Park. Children under a certain age (ten might have been overly optimistic) are blissfully unaware of dynamics. They will step in front of a rapidly moving object because from their observation they have determined that the world revolves around them.
Dogs on a leash Friday through Monday, children on a leash Tuesday-Thursday.
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