At a special public meeting held Saturday, April 1, the City of Phoenix announced its plan to convert a busy portion of Central Avenue in downtown Phoenix into a bikes-only corridor.

The plan will permanently convert all existing traffic lanes along Central Ave. into bike lanes. The announcement is the newest phase in Phoenix’s B-2100 plan to convert all existing roads into bike paths by the year 2100. Phoenix Diablo has learned that initial plans were drawn up during a secret private meeting at the Grid station at Civic Space Park back in January.

Construction on the new lanes should be completed by tomorrow.

“This is part of a concentrated effort to make Phoenix the least walkable city in America,” said Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton. “We really think the biking community will be excited about this.”
Downtown Phoenix has an active biking community that has continued to grow alongside the city. Misha Larks of Phoenix Handlebars People said she’s excited about the announcement.

“Central Avenue has become a very busy road in recent years,” Larks said. “We hope this plan will convince the thousands of Valley commuters who work downtown to start biking to work instead.”
But not everyone is riding along with the new plan.

Some members of the public who attended the announcement meeting expressed concern regarding how this new plan would affect parking downtown. To counter this point, the city announced its intent to make all parking lots downtown bike-exclusive by 2019.

“There is plenty of free, convenient parking available downtown,” said PHX BikeLab founder John Romero. “I’m glad the city of Phoenix spoke out about this very real issue.”

Bike enthusiast Peter Perspiration said he loves the idea of phasing out a major thoroughfare in favor of bike lanes.

“It’s the most efficient form of transportation,” Perspiration said. “It gives people more transportation options, this is one of the major achievements of Phoenix.”

Breitbart co-founder Steve Bannon spoke to students and faculty about journalism ethics at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism’s Must See Monday event earlier this week.

The highly-regarded executive also announced that Breitbart just hired a new executive editor. Bannon would not reveal a photo of the editor but said the man went by the pen name of Ronald Lump.

“Ethics are a big deal. You don’t want to be fake news like PBS. You don’t want to be wrong,” Bannon said, emphasizing the word “wrong.”

Bannon told students it was important to be fair and accurate in reporting, at least when others are paying attention.

“During this election season, other papers did not adhere to journalism ethics like we did,” Bannon said. “It’s always important to report with an unbiased perspective and to make sure you get all the facts for both sides of the story.”

Many students left the Must See Monday with a new perspective on journalism ethics. Senior Eileen Wright said she now agrees with everything Bannon said about verifying information before reporting it detailed in the Breitbart Code of Ethics.

“Once I tried to Google ‘Breitbart ethics’ and got an error 401 page,” Wright said, “So the reason I came to the Must See Monday was to get the answers I’ve been looking for.”

Incoming freshman India Pendent said she agrees. “Breitbart has really interesting ethics,” she said. “I never knew fact-checking was an optional concept.”

Also attending Must See Monday was surprise guest and new White House Press Correspondent Sean Spicy. Students asked Spicy various ethics-related questions during the Q&A portion of the presentation, but Spicy refused to comment.

Still, Spicy was optimistic. “It’s going to be great,” he said. “I can’t wait for students to win a Pulitzer by following the Breitbart Code of Ethics.”

At the end of the night, Bannon announced he would be taking a position as an ethics professor at the Cronkite School.