[DVBC] Another sign of your government at work

[Drew Knox]

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/09/14/bike_paths/print.html



------------------------------
 The bicycle thief*Bike activists face an uphill climb against
Transportation Secretary Mary Peters, who claims bike paths are not
transportation and are stealing tax money from bridges and roads.*

*By Katharine Mieszkowski*

Sep. 14, 2007 | Imagine you're the federal official in the Bush
administration charged with overseeing the nation's transportation
infrastructure. A major bridge collapses on an interstate highway during
rush hour, killing 13 people and injuring an additional 100. Whom to blame?
How about the nation's bicyclists and pedestrians!

The Minneapolis bridge collapse on Aug. 1 led Secretary of Transportation
Mary Peters to publicly reflect on federal transportation spending
priorities and conclude that those greedy bicyclists and pedestrians, not to
mention museumgoers and historic preservationists, hog too much of the
billions of federal dollars raised by the gas
tax,<http://dir.salon.com/topics/taxes/>money that should go to pave
highways and bridges. Better still, Peters, a
2006 Bush appointee, apparently doesn't see biking and walking paths as part
of transportation
<http://dir.salon.com/topics/transportation/>infrastructure at all.

In an Aug. 15 appearance<http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/transportation/july-dec07/infrastructure_08-15.html>on
PBS's "NewsHour With Jim Lehrer," Peters spoke against a proposal to
raise gas taxes to shore up the nation's aging infrastructure. The real
problem, the secretary argued, is that only 60 percent of the current money
raised by gas taxes goes to highways and bridges. She conveniently neglected
to mention that about 30 percent of the money goes to public transit. She
then went on to blast congressional earmarks, which dedicate 10 percent of
the gas tax to some 6,000 other projects around the country. "There are
museums that are being built with that money, bike paths, trails, repairing
lighthouses. Those are some of the kind of things that that money is being
spent on, as opposed to our infrastructure," she said. The secretary added
that projects like bike paths and trails "are really not transportation."

Peters' comments set off an eruption of blogging, e-mailing and
letter-writing among bike riders and activists, incensed that no matter how
many times they burn calories instead of fossil fuels with the words "One
Less Car" or "We're Not Holding Up the Traffic, We Are the Traffic"
plastered on their helmets, their pedal pushing is not taken seriously as a
form of transportation by the honchos in Washington, D.C.

Bike paths are not infrastructure? "There are hundreds of thousands of
people who ride to work, and millions who walk to work every day, and the
idea [that] that isn't transportation is ludicrous," says Andy Clarke,
executive director of the League of American
Bicyclists,<http://www.bikeleague.org/>who has biked to work for
almost 20 years on a path paid for with federal
dollars. Clarke fired off an angry letter to Peters, and invited the 25,000
members of his organization around the country to do the same. "The guy in
his Humvee taking his videos back to the video store isn't any more
legitimate a trip than the guy on the Raleigh taking his videos back," says
Andy Thornley, program director for the San Francisco Bicycle
Coalition.<http://www.sfbike.org/>

In fact, only about 1.5 percent of federal transportation dollars go to fund
bike paths and walking trails. In the meantime, 10 percent of all U.S. trips
to work, school and the store occur on bike or foot, and bicyclists and
pedestrians account for about 12 percent of annual traffic fatalities,
according to the Federal Highway Administration. "We represent a
disproportionate share of the injuries, and we get a minuscule share of the
funds," says Robert Raburn, executive director of the East Bay Bike
Coalition <http://www.ebbc.org/> in the San Francisco Bay Area, who calls
the Peters' comments "outrageous." Plus, he notes, with problems like global
warming, <http://dir.salon.com/topics/global_warming/> the
obesity<http://dir.salon.com/topics/obesity/>epidemic and energy
independence, shouldn't the
U.S. secretary of transportation be praising biking, not complaining about
it?

What really drives cyclists around the bend is that while they're doing
their part to burn less fossil fuel -- cue slogan: "No Iraqis Died to Fuel
This Bike" -- they're getting grief for being expensive from a profligate
administration. "War spending, tax cuts for the rich, and gas taxes are all
big sources of funding. Bike spending is not," fumes Michael
Bluejay,<http://bicycleaustin.info/>an Austin, Texas, bike activist,
in an e-mail. "The few pennies we toss
toward bike projects is not enough to fix our nation's bridges, not by a
freaking long shot."

One of the many communities that benefit from federal dollars for bicyclists
and pedestrians is the very one where the bridge collapsed. For the St.
Paul, Minn., program Bike/Walk Twin
Cities,<http://www.tlcminnesota.org/Resources/Newsletters/May%202007/bwtcupdate.html>administered
by Transit
for Livable Communities, <http://www.tlcminnesota.org/> $21.5 million of
federal dough is being spent to create bike lanes, connect existing walking
and biking trails with one another, and install signage to alert drivers of
the presence of bicyclists and walkers. Despite the cold winters,
Minneapolis is something of a biking Mecca, with 2.4 percent of all trips to
work made by bike, significantly higher than the national average of
0.4percent, according to Joan Pasiuk, program director of Bike/Walk
Twin
Cities.

It's hard to argue that walking paths and bike trails are robbing federal
coffers when states can't even spend all the federal money they've received
to repair bridges in the first place. In 2006, state departments of
transportation sent back $1 billion in unspent bridge funds to the federal
government, according to the Federal Highway
Administration.<http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/rescissions/pl110_5/summary.htm>"The
fact that there is a billion dollars of bridge repair money sloshing
around in the system not being spent suggests that it's not the fault of
bike trails," says Clarke.

Congressional Democrats agree. "It's a red herring to point to bike paths
and even imply that if we didn't build another bike path we'd have all the
money we need to fix our highways and bridges," says Jim Berard,
communications director for the House Committee on Transportation and
Infrastructure. "You can't build very many bridges with the amount of money
that you would save if you didn't build any bike paths."

So why is Peters suddenly taking on bikes and pedestrians? Her comments are
especially odd since she sang the praises of bikes as transportation in a
speech <http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/pressroom/re020306.htm> at the National Bike
Summit in Washington, in March 2002. Has she simply forgotten the glory of
two wheels? One theory: Peters is on a campaign to quash the idea of raising
the gas tax, as she editorialized recently in the Washington
Post.<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/24/AR2007082401697.html>A
key proponent of raising the gas tax to fund bridge restorations in
the
wake of the Minneapolis bridge collapse is Democratic Rep. Jim
Oberstar<http://www.mndaily.com/articles/2007/09/10/72163282>of
Minnesota, who has advocated for bike and pedestrian paths in his
district. By putting a culture-war spin on the bridge collapse, Peters is
hoping to run his gas tax proposal off the road.

Does Peters herself buy this theory? Does she really think that bike paths
do not qualify as transportation infrastructure? Why does she say that
things like bike paths steal money from bridge repairs when states have more
than enough money to fix bridges? The secretary would not respond, but
Jennifer Hing, a spokesperson for the Department of Transportation's Office
of Public Affairs in the Office of the Secretary, would. She answered all
the specific questions with one resoundingly uninformative e-mail: "The
federal government should set high standards for and invest in the ongoing
safety, reliability and interconnection of the nation's transportation
network. State and local communities should have the flexibility to then set
local transportation priorities."

For their part, cyclists have been weaving through political land mines for
decades. In the perennial struggle to gain public support for bike paths,
they remain philosophical. Says Thornley of the San Francisco Bicycle
Coalition: "Before there were automobiles, and after there will be
automobiles, there will be bicycles moving people around for
transportation."

*-- By Katharine Mieszkowski*
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