Letters: Bike lane | National RCV | Ignoring Trump | Failed strategy

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Bike lane on bridge
isn’t paying off

The Richmond-San Rafael Bridge is a vital freight and employment link between Marin County and the East Bay. On most weekdays the westbound toll approach is backed up with commuters, service providers and freight. The adjacent bike lane is empty, save for the occasional cyclist.

Hundreds of tons of emissions and thousands of manhours are spent in this queue every week. There is no resilience to a blockage and emergency services cannot reach the incident when both lanes are blocked. The proposed solution of moving the barriers at peak times or adding a moveable barrier eastbound would not actually free up a drivable lane, but would only provide a partial lane for traffic to squeeze around a disabled vehicle.

The bike lane only benefits recreational cyclists whose numbers do not justify the true cost of the lane. Those stuck in traffic bear the brunt of the cost of this $20 million cyclist amenity.

Randahl Hagen
Danville

National RCV would
undermine confidence

Re: “Ranked choice voting needed for our presidential elections” (Page A6, May 28).

Rob Richie, a co-founder of FairVote, pushes for the adoption of ranked-choice voting (RCV) in presidential elections.

Voters rank candidates from first to last in order of preference. That keeps going until someone gets majority support.

Richie asks why only two states, Alaska and Maine, have chosen this system in presidential elections and the other 48 haven’t. Here are some reasons:

RCV undermines public confidence in the results of elections. Since it produces a “majority” by progressively narrowing out a winner step-by-step, it may produce a candidate who never could have achieved a full majority under our current system. That winner may not be perceived as legitimate.

Equally important: By cutting off a run-off election, RCV also sacrifices voters’ ability to observe the top two candidates clearly challenge each other’s positions and leadership ability.

RCV is a true blow to sound and healthy elections.

Gary Sirbu
Oakland

Nation can’t afford
to ignore Trump

Re: “Media is giving Trump too much coverage” (Page A12, May 26).

Like Zafar Yousufzai lamented in his letter, I would love to see less Donald Trump coverage.

But given that wide swaths of our electorate remain apathetic, uninformed, misinformed or transfixed by him, it is of vital importance that newspapers be fulsome in their reporting of this terrible person.

If the press collectively decided to ignore Trump now, I fear we will be reading even more about him during the next four years.

Sam Benson
Richmond

Column suggests failed
strategy for Israel

Re: “Biden’s chance to do right thing in Gaza” (Page A7, May 30):

The writer, Nicholas Kristof, suggests that President Biden accept the position of the International Court of Justice that Israel “immediately halt its military offensive” in Rafah, remarking that “prolonging this war is in Netanyahu’s interest, but is not in the interest of Israelis.”

Writing from his place of relative security, the writer presumes to tell a country and its people who have been constantly defending themselves from vicious foes for the past seven decades how they should be conducting themselves in a war for their very survival.

Israel ceded Gaza over to the Palestinians in 2005. Hamas then took control of Gaza in 2007, and began reining missiles down on Israel. Then came Oct. 7, 2023, and Hamas used Palestinians as human shields when Israel responded. The writer now thinks a repeatedly tried and failed “two-state solution” is the answer?

Daniel Mauthe
Livermore