3 February—FLASH. Yesterday’s disquisition, “A tale of two cities,” elicited a response. Not from Torrington Mayor Elinor Carbone, heaven forbid, but from El Liberalissimo. It was good to hear from El again—especially on a topic of great moment. This is what El said, this is what El Liberalissimo said:

“In fact, bicycling is big in Torrington and along the whole Naugatuck River corridor. People are using bicycles as transportation. Prospect street is a wide, lightly traveled street, but as a bicycle rider, part of ‘street clutter,’ it’s nice to have the path set apart where the street clearly allows it.

“I suspect it is part of the Naugatuck River bike trail system that will, I hope, one day allow bikers to pass to and along the entire Naugatuck River corridor while intersecting with as little automobile traffic as possible. Much of it is already complete.”

Aha. Bikes as transportation? Who’d a thunk. Even though I’ve encountered a positive paucity of cyclists on my regular trips to Torrington, I’ll take El’s presumably expert word that bicycling is big there and along the whole Naugatuck River corridor, which I’d call the Naugatuck Valley. El usually knows what he’s writing about and I’m blissfully ignorant about bicycle culture.

As for Prospect Street being wide, lacking a definition or specification, El and I evidently have different criteria. In all events, the street’s somewhat wider part is actually the short section between Water Street and Church Street with the YMCA and churches and parking lots and mortuary and vacant phone company building and vacant bank building and other monuments to death on either side—i.e., the part without the bicycle lanes.

The bicycle lanes don’t in fact materialize until the least wide part of the street, good for perhaps three tight lanes for motor vehicles. That’s doubtless why parking isn’t allowed. The presumed third lane is equivalent in width to the pair of newly demarcated bicycle lanes, which motor vehicles—especially trucks—can’t avoid encroaching at obvious times. Is it even unlawful to do so?

And only when it crosses over the river south of Water Street does Prospect Street come anywhere near the Naugatuck.

So, as I see it, we still don’t know why Prospect Street has been burdened with bicycle lanes. Maybe El Liberalissimo will have better luck than I getting any response at all from Elinor Carbone.

Editor’s obiter dictum: Congressional Republicans have dumped the contemptible virago Ilhan Omar from the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Fantastic! Congressional Democrats are having a predictable hissy fit, whining that the action was politically motivated. Ya think? We know they’d never do anything like that . . .