| Augusta Chronicle
In these attempting occasions it can be crucial that children and households in all our neighborhoods have wholesome and secure entry to parks, colleges, work, and groceries. Sound investments in bike and pedestrian infrastructure make this doable, creating extra livable neighborhoods and serving to folks really feel extra related to their neighborhood, which improves high quality of life.
Many individuals in Augusta depend on bicycles as their main technique of transportation. Constructing designated bike lanes, together with these with dividers, for individuals who bike is crucial for all of us to thrive. Likewise, we all know there are fewer crashes involving walkers when neighborhoods have sidewalks. Folks – together with mothers with strollers, folks with disabilities, kids, and older adults – want sidewalks and crosswalks to be secure.
Strolling and biking are additionally nice methods to be lively. They assist to stop coronary heart illness, diabetes, and stroke – and individuals who stay in neighborhoods with sidewalks and bike lanes are extra lively, have cleaner air, and expertise fewer automotive crashes. When kids can stroll to high school, parks, and playgrounds, they’re extra prone to be wholesome and do higher at school.
Crucially, some low-income communities and communities of colour have lacked these very crucial options for many years. In lots of circumstances, these space’s merely don’t have any transportation choices in any respect, and so they typically expertise greater charges of continual ailments like diabetes and coronary heart illness. We should make up for years of misplaced alternatives and make these neighborhoods a precedence transferring ahead. The constructive advantages of exercise, well being, and security ought to be shared by all Augustans.
That’s the place we are available. As a neighborhood, we are able to work collectively to display the necessity for continued and elevated bike and pedestrian funding in Augusta. Doing so will make sure that our neighborhood doesn’t have to decide on between being secure and the wholesome. Should you assume there must be elevated investments in bike and pedestrian infrastructure, you may act now by visiting act.yourethecure.org/D3emV97 and telling your native lawmakers to help elevated bike and pedestrian funding within the SPLOST Section eight course of.
Jay Murray is market president, Suntrust now Truist, and board chairman of the American Coronary heart Affiliation of the CSRA, and Kayla Kranenberg is government director of the American Coronary heart Affiliation of the CSRA.
