Obama’s Transportation Secretary: Let Them Ride Bikes
Over at Shopfloor, Carter Wood notes that Obama Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood spoke at the National Bike Summit and suggested that when it comes to public planning, bicycle and other sorts of non-motorized traffic should be considered equal to motorized traffic:
Today, I want to announce a sea change. People across America who value bicycling should have a voice when it comes to transportation planning. This is the end of favoring motorized transportation at the expense of non-motorized.
Carter comments:
Reading this jaw-dropping policy announcement, we thought the Secretary had let his enthusiasm get the best of him. Alas, no, his comments were actually reinforced in what he described as a “major policy revision” posted at the Federal Highway Administration website, Policy Statement on Bicycle and Pedestrian Accommodation.”
Treating bicycles and other non-motorized transportation as equal to motorized transportation would cause an economic catastrophe. If put into effect, the policy would more than undermine any effort the Obama Administration has made toward jobs. You can’t have jobs without the efficient movement of freight.
Yeah, but wouldn’t it be nice if we could all ride bicycles to work?
These ideas are pretty typical from the liberal “planners” who love spending our tax dollars to fund their visions of how we should live in our communities. It’s tied in pretty closely with never-ending efforts to “revitalize” downtowns. Given the lack of parking that plagues downtown areas, public transportation and walking/bicycling are always at the top of their lists.
I’ve never understood why so many among the urban planning crowd (those government bureaucrats who have a vision of how your communities should be and aren’t afraid to spend your tax dollars to make it so) get so drippy about bringing everything “downtown” in a city. We see it a lot here in North Dakota. City after city spend millions in tax dollars in the form of subsidies and grants and tax breaks to bring businesses to downtown areas.
Why? Apparently because they like the idea of the quaint old down towns of old. But what I’ve never heard any of them address is why the “downtowns” died in the first place. Maybe it was because there were compelling social and economic reasons to move away from downtown? That’s certainly true. Retail went from small specialty stores to mega-big box stores because retailers and customers discovered the wonders of economies of scale. Downtown areas couldn’t accommodate the new mega-stores, so they moved elsewhere. Now most businesses find that staying away from the cramped, crowded downtown areas is in their best interest. Downtown areas generally don’t have a lot of parking and can often be time consuming to travel to traffic wise.
Regardless, for better or worse, most Americans choose to drive. And they choose, overwhelmingly, to move away from crowded urban areas to more wide open suburban and rural areas. And no amount of government “planning” is going to change that.
