The new downtown Raleigh train station needs more parking

I agree with a recent writer who complained about the hefty parking fees at a parking garage across the street from the new Union Station in Raleigh while the couple made a train trip to Washington. My wife and I had the same experience but a shorter ride. While the city’s new train station is impressive perhaps it is too much so.

Three shortcomings to me about the Raleigh station are that Amtrak didn’t set aside 25 to 30 passenger-only parking spaces on its property for overnight travelers; a street-side appearance that doesn’t look like a station entrance; and tracks so far from the terminal that it seems a quarter of a mile walk from ticketing to boarding.

The new station is grand but a distance to maneuver. The Washington-traveling couple and others similarly affected by parking fees in Raleigh might choose to depart from nearby Cary if practical. It has a nice station, parking is free, and waiting and boarding areas a minute apart. Still, support Raleigh.

Leonard Wilson

Raleigh

Loved to death

Californians have loved their trees to death. There are lots of trees on the East Coast yet we do not have the same catastrophic fires. Due to misguided laws and regulations, California has prohibited sustainable forestry practices resulting in forests full of dead, dry trees and dense underbrush.

The healthy trees are surrounded by kindling waiting for a spark. An old forester told me years ago that “One day a bolt of lightning will hit California and the whole place will burn up. I hope they don’t have the nerve to act surprised.”

Millions of trees lost and thousands of lives lost or changed forever due to mere mismanagement. It’s not climate change, the Santa Ana Winds or God’s vengeance.

Ken Shivar

Raleigh

Shut down?

Our president claimed that “This would be a very good time to do a shut down” if he doesn’t get the $5 billion he wants for his wall. Here we are with at least 76 dead from the California fires, at least 1,300 unaccounted for, Puerto Rico still reeling from hurricane damage, as are parts of the Carolinas and Texas. How far would $5 billion go to help some of those people?

Rosemary Harrell

Mebane

Districts fraudulent

The Associated Press article in Monday’s edition (“Midterm elections reveal effects of gerrymandering,” (Nov. 19), outlined how Pennsylvania’s success in re-drawing their gerrymandered congressional maps prior to the past election — unlike our state’s failure to do so — resulted in a far more representative, and therefore, legitimate electoral outcome than that which we witnessed in our state.

It reads, “Pennsylvania flipped from a solid Republican congressional delegation to one evenly split under a map redrawn by court order, contributing to the Democratic takeover of the U.S. House. Despite an almost even split in the popular vote, North Carolina’s congressional delegation remained overwhelmingly Republican under a map drawn by the GOP.”

So in these times of deep partisan division, with the GOP using gerrymandering, curtailed voting, and voter ID as tools of voter suppression in the name of preventing the purely fictional “voter fraud” travesty they love to spout about, how many of us have stopped to consider where the actual fraud lies? If the popular vote in North Carolina is “almost even split,” and we end up with a delegation that is “overwhelmingly Republican,” how can the NC congressional delegation be anything other than fraudulent?

And if that is the case, what does this say about the legitimacy of their legislative actions? This should cause all civic-minded, democracy-loving North Carolinians to say enough is enough, and to demand that the courts follow through with correcting this outrageous assault on our state’s electoral system.

You’re fired