To the editor:

For 30 years, the smartest decision Lawrence ever made was to resist turning Massachusetts Street into a pedestrian mall. I grew up walking Minnesota Avenue in Kansas City, Kan. When that street turned into a pedestrian mall, the downtown businesses died. Before that, I went to school in Atchison, also a college town. When Atchison’s commercial street was turned into a pedestrian mall, that town died.

Turning the main street into a pedestrian mall must have sounded like a good idea. But it wasn’t.

Anyone who walks Massachusetts Street as much as I do for as long as I have knows that, whatever may be causing the loss of substantive retail businesses, it is not lack of pedestrian traffic.