Bedford city officials said this week that the city will have to remove student-created art in crosswalks at Harwood Junior High School and Bedford Junior High School thanks to Greg Abbott’s war on rainbows.
Bedford, like the city of Dallas, filed for exemptions to be allowed to keep special crosswalk designs in place. But city officials said the “two meaningful pieces of community art” in crosswalks near the junior high were deemed noncompliant, despite the fact they have no social or political messaging, according to Axios.
Bedford city officials said in a Facebook post they are disappointed to lose the crosswalk art, “which brought color, pride and student creativity to our school zones.”
In October, TxDOT Director Marc Williams gave local governments 30 days to remove all “pavement markings” that don’t serve traffic control or safety functions, after Gov. Greg Abbott tried to out-MAGA Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, claiming that non-standard crosswalk designs are a safety hazard and condemned those that promote “a political ideology.”
In fact, though, numerous studies have shown that non-standard crosswalk designs actually increase safety, and most are either, like the rainbows, a sign of a community’s identity or, like Bedford’s student art pieces, a source of civic pride.
Rainbow crosswalks in Houston and in Galveston have already been removed, while the city of San Antonio has also filed for an exemption to keep rainbows in place there. City officials in Lubbock last week announced that Abbott’s war on rainbows is forcing them to remove crosswalk art depicting the iconic glasses of rock-and-roll legend and Lubbock hometown hero Buddy Holly.
— Tammye Nash
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