Lack of concern for Tampa's pedestrians is 'embarrassing'

Your letters were all over the board this week, from Tampa's streets to Berlin to health care.

Dan Sivers writes: "Hi, Steve. Can you please write about the tragic statistic for the Tampa area and our abysmal pedestrian death ranking? It is embarrassing that we as drivers in our own community care so little about pedestrians.

"There is a ridiculous comment from an idiot that Tampa roads are built for speed and I guess we are to wrongly assume that pedestrian deaths are the accepted result. ... One reason St. Pete has improved is because they have a strictly enforced police crosswalk program."

•This year's recipient of the Edwin Porterfield Award for supporting active duty military and veterans went to Phyllis Busansky. The former Hillsborough County commissioner and supervisor of elections died in June and the award was presented to her family at the annual Veterans Day ceremony at Hillsborough County's Veterans Park on Wednesday.

•Vivian Snow writes: "Steve, your (Nov. 11) article brought back some memories. December 1967 my husband, myself and two little girls rode the troop train from Frankfurt to West Berlin.

"We also climbed a platform to look over the wall, and standing by us were Germans crying and waving to their families doing the same in the East section. It was even sadder because it was so close to Christmas.

"We crossed through Checkpoint Charlie and when the East German guards came on our bus they looked at the (military) dependents' passports but would not even make eye contact with military men in uniforms. We were also struck by the devastation in the East section.

"In 1971 I took a group of senior Girl Scouts on the same train. While the East German engine was being connected to the train, all the blinds on the windows had to be pulled down. As teenage girls go, they raised the window shade to get a look and were waving to some of the guards. I was just as curious and looking too until a guard came through and yelled at us. Down went the shades."

•Physician Byron Holley comments: "Steve, according to Sunday's (Nov. 8) Business & Money section, Americans will spend $438 BILLION this holiday season! If that is not a typo it is an amazing fact when you consider that represents almost half of the government's estimate of the cost of insuring the large majority of our fellow citizens for 10 years.

"If indeed this is accurate, it really puts it into proper perspective. I still can't believe 300 million people could spend that much on Christmas! As a physician for 35 years in Tampa I can testify to the need for health care reform. The private insurance industry can be brutal. As a Medicare card-carrying senior citizen I can tell you that government-backed health insurance is a pretty good thing to have.

"Medicare is not run by the government but by a private company under their control. As a practicing ophthalmologist I saw the fee for cataract surgery fall from $2,000 to $650 per eye, less than my son, a veterinarian, would get for removing a cataract from a dog, but we made a decent living anyway."