[DVBC] Another sign of your government at work
eric zwicky
zwicky2 at comcast.net
Fri Sep 14 08:10:40 EDT 2007
1) mrs peters' kind of reasoning really strikes a chord with people who
find their ease of car travel impeded occasionally by cyclists. we can
help this in a small way by not hogging lanes two abreast, and by
staying to the right as much as is safe and possible. i'm not
advocating total submission, just common courtesy.
2) anybody who thinks that bike lanes are a boondoggle should spend some
time in the DC area. there are many bike trails and they are all used
heavily by commuters. i have spent every week since june in DC and
northern VA and drive out lee highway from georgetown to fairfax every
morning, and i see tons of bikes, most of them commuters with lights and
briefcase bags. many more commuters than recreational types.
there's the washington and old dominion rail trail from leesburg to
arlington, the mount vernon trail from alexandria to memorial bridge,
the capital crescent trail from bethesda to georgetown, beach drive from
kensington to georgetown, and the C&O canal towpath from potomac to
georgetown. macarthur blvd from carderock to the DC line also has a
separate bike lane. all of them are fully used by cyclists commuting
to work in DC, or out to the suburbs. also by people walking to work
or to the metro. mrs peters must not spend much time outside her limo
or she would not fail to observe that.
-eric
Drew Knox wrote:
> 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 0.4 percent,
> 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*
>
> <http://oas.salon.com/rmads/RealMedia/ads/click_lx.ads/www.salonmagazine.com/news/content/large.html/933020015/Bottom1/default/empty.gif/38386236303264653435346237643230>
> <http://oas.salon.com/rmads/RealMedia/ads/click_lx.ads/www.salonmagazine.com/news/content/large.html/1985630411/Bottom2/default/empty.gif/38386236303264653435346237643230>
>
>
>
>
> Copyright ©2007 Salon Media Group, Inc. Reproduction of material from
> any Salon pages without written permission is strictly prohibited.
> SALON® is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office as a
> trademark of Salon Media Group Inc.
>
>
> <http://oas.salon.com/rmads/RealMedia/ads/click_lx.ads/www.salonmagazine.com/news/content/large.html/933020015/Bottom1/default/empty.gif/38386236303264653435346237643230>
> <http://oas.salon.com/rmads/RealMedia/ads/click_lx.ads/www.salonmagazine.com/news/content/large.html/1985630411/Bottom2/default/empty.gif/38386236303264653435346237643230>
>
>
> <http://a.tribalfusion.com/h.click/aKmyY91EQy3ajj4ErRnqBAYbjfUHFTmmrBmVQpoWnJ3T3h3Wmr3AjZdnFULXGbTXcFX1GjxnEvT5U32VbMZcWAYWQTbXQsQMPdZbr1WfsWPMw4sU0YrrZcUPPn5AZb7PPnG3tFqXHnDmW2JlWF6vu/http://a.tribalfusion.com>
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> _______________________________________________
> DVBC mailing list
> DVBC at list.dvbc.org
> http://list.dvbc.org/mailman/listinfo/dvbc-list
More information about the DVBC
mailing list