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It’s hard to be optimistic as the city moves ahead with its plan to turn the currently useful Brook Road into a potentially congested, confusing mess of mixed traffic and parked cars. Adding a bicycle lane and floating parking to Franklin Street has not been a complete success — confusion, bad weather, and blind spots led to a cyclist being hit recently — and it seems rushed, if not outright wrong, to cut yet another heavily traveled road in half.

The Brook Road plan is especially perplexing given the construction of hundreds of apartment units on the old seminary property on Brook at Westwood. How can simultaneously adding cars and taking away driving lanes be a good idea?

We appreciate the need for alternative modes of transportation, and space for them, but wedging in random lanes for a handful of cyclists at the expense of everyone else hardly seems the wise, or equitable, approach.