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Posted by Sherman in Idaho [72.47.153.24] on Saturday, July 28, 2012 at 23:55:54 :
In Reply to: Re: All of highway 99 used to be a ghost town posted by Jerry in Idaho [69.59.83.175] on Saturday, July 28, 2012 at 23:36:53 :
I've been to Sandpoint a couple times in the past year, so I know what you mean about downtown. I suspect if you don't want to become a complete "pedestrian mall" now that the bypass is done you better go to some city council meetings and tell them what you think.
I can see both sides of it, though, with tourist towns like that. On the one hand, downtown is completely useless to any ordinary person except if you want to go out for a nice dinner. There aren't any other stores downtown that sell anything useful. On the other hand, "going tourist" seems to be the only way to keep an old downtown business district alive. We're really hurting in Wallace with more than half the storefonts vacant, despite rents being dirt cheap, so I would be glad to see more tourism.
As for the roundabouts, I think they work really well. They move more cars per hour through an intersection than a stoplight does, and they do it with fewer accidents, and with no electricity, complicated equipment, or maintenance. That assumes you're talking about roundabouts that are made to move traffic, like the one near Home Depot in Coeur d'Alene, not the "traffic circles" designed to slow traffic like they put all over the residential areas in Seattle.
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