[sustran] Re: Fw: Bicycles are not a form of transportation

[Walter Hook]

This is an oversimplification of a complex debate on the hill.  The stupid
comment about bike paths not withstanding, I am glad she is criticizing
earmarks, most of which are road pork.  She has been pushing for more
tolling and supportive of congestion charging, (fed support is key to our
chances for nyc congestion charges, and democratic pork politicians like
Oberstar and road lobby stalwarts like highway and transit subcommiteee
chair democrat de fazio of Oregon tried to kill it.  Oberstar is great on
money for bike lanes but also presided over massive highway pork spending.

To me the solution is a fix it first law modeled in new jersey that would
restrict federal funding for new roads and bridges till the existing ones
are all in a state of good repair.  

-----Original Message-----
From: sustran-discuss-bounces+whook=itdp.org at list.jca.apc.org
[mailto:sustran-discuss-bounces+whook=itdp.org at list.jca.apc.org] On Behalf
Of Lee Schipper
Sent: Monday, September 17, 2007 2:48 PM
To: sustran-discuss at list.jca.apc.org; lwright at vivacities.org;
carfree_cities at yahoogroups.com
Subject: [sustran] Re: Fw: Bicycles are not a form of transportation

Does this mean i can no longer cycle to meetings at DOT?

>>> "Lloyd Wright" <lwright at vivacities.org> 09/17/07 2:39 PM >>>

Interesting article on how the Bush administration does not consider the
bicycle to be a form of transporation...


http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20819827


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

  <http://images.salon.com/news/feature/2007/09/14/bike_paths/story.jpg>



Photo: AP/Wide World

Salon composite of Secretary of Transportation Mary Peters.

Sept. 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
<http://dir.salon.com/topics/taxes/> tax, 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
<http://dir.salon.com/topics/transportation/> transportation
infrastructure at all. 

In an Aug. 15
<http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/transportation/july-dec07/infrastructure
_08-15.html> appearance 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  <http://www.bikeleague.org/> League
of American Bicyclists, 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  <http://www.sfbike.org/> San Francisco Bicycle Coalition. 

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  <http://www.ebbc.org/> East Bay Bike Coalition in the San Francisco
Bay Area, who calls the Peters' comments "outrageous." Plus, he notes,
with problems like  <http://dir.salon.com/topics/global_warming/> global
warming, the  <http://dir.salon.com/topics/obesity/> 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
<http://bicycleaustin.info/> Michael Bluejay, 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
<http://www.tlcminnesota.org/Resources/Newsletters/May%202007/bwtcupdate
.html> Bike/Walk Twin Cities, administered by
<http://www.tlcminnesota.org/> Transit for Livable Communities, $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
<http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/rescissions/pl110_5/summary.htm> Federal
Highway Administration. "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  <http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/pressroom/re020306.htm> speech 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
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/24/AR20070
82401697.html> Washington Post. A key proponent of raising the gas tax
to fund bridge restorations in the wake of the Minneapolis bridge
collapse is Democratic Rep.
<http://www.mndaily.com/articles/2007/09/10/72163282> Jim Oberstar 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." 

 
Lloyd Wright
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"Viva...changing the world one street at a time."
 

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