bicycle commuting – USA Gov Policy

Ballotpedia.org reports that the total indebtedness of the fifty states is approximately $1,149,926,081,000. U.S. Governmentdebt.com estimates that New York has the highest debt of any state in the nation. This is in addition to the federal government’s $21,000,000,000,000 debt.

The states, of course, do not have the right to print money, so their debt problems begin to hit crucial interests more rapidly than Washington’s. State and local pensioners could soon feel the impact. That is why spending programs both large and small need to examined. It is vital to consider whether funds committed actually fulfill a valid purpose, or are they merely a cave-in to vocal advocates and special interests.

One popular concept that has spread across the nation is the dedication of portions of roads to bike lanes, and the use of tax dollars to carve up roads to prove greater safety for cyclists. As this column has previously reported, despite the diligent lobbying of politically active and media-savvy supporters, this is a prime example of how state and local funds are wasted.

Seattle Curbed recently released a report on a study in their city, which has a weather climate, an urban geography much more conducive to cycling than many municipalities, and a population that is quite enthusiastic about the practice of bike commuting. Despite all those advantages, it found that commutes by bikes or mopeds accounted for only a “tiny fraction…0.6%” of commuters.

Despite the ardent support of politicians seeking to gain from their association with the activists, this is a very small portion of commuters to justify the expense and the inconvenience caused by bike lanes. Despite that, as noted by Crain’s New York, Mayor De Blasio’s “Department of Transportation vowed…to add 10 miles of protected bicycle lanes and allocate 50 lane miles of regular bikeways annually starting this year…The number of bike paths citywide has more than doubled in the last decade, to 1,133 miles from 513 miles in 2006. Of the existing paths, 425 miles are protected, meaning they are protected from automobile traffic by a physical barrier, not just paint. Last year, the city installed a record 15 such paths.”

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There have been reports of citizen revolt against bike lanes. The Wall Street Journal reports that in cities including Baltimore, Philadelphia, Seattle, Boulder and even the trendy-friendly borough of Brooklyn, NYC, citizens are rising up against the practice of carving up roads for bike lanes. The publication found that ““Retrofitting city streets for protected bike lanes can be pricey. A master plan prepared for Baltimore’s Transportation Department recommended adding 52.5 miles over five years at a cost of $26 million, a tab the plan said could be covered by a mix of local, state and federal funds.”

Author and futurist Syd Mead, writing in The Los Angeles Daily News provides this analysis: “While the bicycle has many virtues, it also prompts people to go overboard. It’s often lauded as the transportation of tomorrow and the savior of cities. It is not. It is called transportation. It is not… It … operates under rigid limitations: the physical condition (and therefore age) of the rider, seasons and weather conditions, and terrain…Today there is an almost messianic insistence that bicycles should be a part of the urban transit mix. …In large urban centers…using a bicycle to traverse 10, 15, or 20 miles one-way is simply not a feasible proposition…A typical busy lane gets used by dozens of automobiles per minute. A bike lane is lucky to be used by dozens of bicyclists in an hour. Imposing bicycle accommodations onto an existing vehicular culture and street alignment is prohibitively complex and preposterously expensive on a per-mile basis. Given the relatively small number of commuters who would use such lanes in comparison to car drivers, any cost/efficiency formulae that purport to justify such infrastructure enter the realm of pure fantasy.”

Unfortunately, practical and fiscally responsible analyses of bike lanes are drowned out by the enthusiasm and political sophistication of bike lane supporters.

Photo: NYC Dept. of Transportation

Quick Analysis

America’s Terrorists in Training

When students, trained and equipped by Hamas and its financial backers, occupy campuses and threaten Jews and anyone who disagrees with them, it is neither a peaceful protest nor an exercise of free speech. It is a terrorist attack. Those students are not peaceful protestors. They are terrorists in training. It has been reported that many of those arrested are not even students, but individuals with ties to terrorists or anti-American activities. Their mission is not to protest, not to persuade, but to force institutions to bend to their will. Their targets are two-fold: First, in adherence to Hamas’ anti-Semitism, an attack on not just Israelis but Jews everywhere. Second, to weaken America’s influence in the crucial Middle Eastern region. But students do make up the majority of those involved. The blatant ignorance of so many protestors did not occur spontaneously or recently. Years of preparation went into it. Radical extremists infiltrated the educational system, from kindergarten through graduate school, for decades with the purpose of destroying pride in America and imposing a leftist agenda. On-air interviews of involved students have been revealing. Beyond chanted slogans, the students appear to have little knowledge of the actual dynamics of the Middle Eastern conflict that they appear to be so passionate about. What did come clearly though was a hair trigger response to condemn America and American institutions. That is the intentional result of many years of academic indoctrination. History has been taught through the prism of anti-Americanism. The extraordinary accomplishments in human freedom, the enormous good done by the nation have been obscured, while faults, even though they were corrected, are magnified. The Federalist notes that “America’s academic leaders seem powerless only because they’ve spent decades promoting the ideologies now on such brutal and ugly display… many administrators claim to be stunned. Yet those of us who’ve been following the disastrous decline of American higher education have been warning for years about the inevitable. America’s academic leaders seem powerless only because they’ve spent decades promoting the ideologies now on such brutal and ugly display. Years ago, America’s most prestigious academics made a conscious choice to elevate indoctrination over education. Training activists became their highest goal. Radical ideologies that began in Ethnic and Gender Studies swallowed once-proud social science and humanities disciplines. Their influence surged into administration, as new DEI offices redefined diversity, equity, and inclusion to mean their opposites, then spread their toxin throughout university operations. Wildly generous foreign money — with Qatar and China in the lead — anchored this noxious brew in place. The American Enterprise Institute found that “The 1619 Project and its companion resources have spread to thousands of schools (and counting) in all 50 states, priming students to reject America’s founding principles and even literally black out the Declaration of Independence. Meanwhile, tales of politically radical K–12 instruction seem to break into the news almost daily.” The Discovery Institute notes that “ teacher unions, rather than modeling positive social behavior, instead promote indoctrination of students on partisan political viewpoints…. Today, leaders holding high government offices at the federal and state levels are quickly exploiting an underlying principle: The less educated our citizens are regarding civics, the more pliable they are to the acceptance of radical philosophies and agenda, and the more government power can grow. The end result will be a loss of the American Dream — life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. Don’t believe this? Take a look at the citizens of today’s socialist and communist countries around the world. According to Ben Shapiro, “while advocates of Marxism today disown the Stalinists and the Maoists and the Castro regime and Venezuela and North Korea, all of those nations thought they were fulfilling Marx’s dream, too.” A Manhattan Institute review reports that “Results of a representative survey of more than 1,500 Americans aged 18 to 20 suggest that Critical Race Theory (CRT) and radical gender ideology, together known as Critical Social Justice (CSJ), is widespread in American schools. Ninety-three percent of American 18- to 20-year-olds said that they had heard about at least one of eight CSJ concepts from a teacher or other adult at school, including “white privilege,” “systemic racism,” “patriarchy,” or the idea that gender is a choice unrelated to biological sex. Additionally, 90% of respondents had heard about at least one CRT concept and 74% about at least one radical gender concept. The campus protests are a window of what’s in store for the nation if the influence of anti-American educators continue.