Letters to the Editor
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Why Peters Goes after Cyclists (Reply)
An earlier caller asked why Peters went after cyclists. My first reaction is that it was a brief verbal ploy that is representative of an administration that is simply playing whack a mole with all of its problems. Faced with a hot situation, not confident in its past performance or sure about its future, this department just grabbed at any straw. But it seems unlikely this is part of a long range plan.
IF however the government has decided (ludicrously) that it is best to blame bridge collapses on cyclists, then it is because polling data has told them this is a wedge issue that will work. (Remember how they used the 'welfare queen'?)
And I have to say that riding around in E-Central Illinois, I have encountered a shocking amount of road rage against cyclists. People who are irritated about how cyclists 'get in the way of real traffic.' I have various theories as to where this rage comes from.
They often say that it's because cyclists don't follow the rules of the road, particularly with regard to stop signs. I live in a college town, have seen all kinds of ass backwards behavior, so I have no doubt that the way some people ride does scare and then anger drivers.
The larger, more basic source of the rage is somewhere deeper, I think. It's that people hate their car-bound existences--the cost, the anxiety, the rat race of highway traffic, the constant and very real possibility of a major accident. But since they have no real way of getting out of it--for a host of reasons ranging from their own physical condition to national transportation policy--they project their rage onto cyclists. I note that this is often a class issue as well, that pits working class people (i.e. construction workers in their big rigs, headed to work) against service and professional class people with more flexibility and sometimes more money, who choose to ride bikes.
This is the rage Peters would be trying to build on politically. And given the Republican Party's recent history of demonizing small fish, budgetarily speaking, it may well work.
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Political affiliation probably correlates with transport method
It would make sense that more environmentally minded people as well as younger and less affluent people would utilize bikes as transportation. These aren't the Neocon base. The old-school conservationist Republicans aren't Bushies either.
Divide and Conquer... don't take money from Bushie friends like military contractors (they're Keeping You Safe!!!) ... get your infrastructure funding from those wasteful environmental, community and social service areas.
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Bike path or bike lane
Bike paths are recreational ergo not transportation oriented. Greenways are the domain of your city not the Federal govt. Bike lanes are something different. Bike lanes are transportation oriented. But if all you're talking about is toodling around on your $4,000 Trek on a path through the woods, I fail to see why that's a critical infrastructure issue.
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Road Rage
John makes a good point. I ride my bike to the train station every day and it's my main form of transportation (haven't had a car in 10 years) and I routinely encounter road rage to the point of people trying to run me off the road simply because I'm on a bike. Yes, I obey all traffic rules, stop at stop signs, signal for turns, etc... but I still get insults yelled at me at least once a week, tailgated etc...
I've given up on having any infrastructure built around bicycles in my area, but this has me more worried for my safety than I already am.
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@schenka & Teensy
My first reaction on reading this was, "thank goodness I live in Amsterdam!" I'm less exposed to both polluted roads and polluted minds like that of Secretary Peters :) Leave it to the Bush administration to say "bike paths is not transportation." By which definition, nor or roads and bridges.
Cycling is, for me and many others, the fastest, cheapest and safest way to get around this fair city, to do your shopping, to get to work, etc. Every day I cycle 20 minutes from the city, along the Amstel river, past idyllic windmills, canals and farms...I do this in a suit, on my way to work in a bank.
In Amsterdam there are more bicycles than people and the locks probably cost more on average than the bikes. Two lock minimum :)
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Mary Peters
Just another bush whore. What cesspool does he dredge these people out of?
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bikes are bad for 'the economy'
There is a larger issue that isn't being addressed in this discussion. The economic and market system we have chosen and have very nearly succeeded in exporting/imposing on the rest of the world requires continuous and perpetual growth to sustain its self, and at least in America economic interests trump all else. From an economic growth perspective, a person driving a hummer on the highway is far preferable to a person riding a bike on a bike path. The hummer/highway combination generates more jobs, more money circulation, more tax dollars and more corporate profit than the bike/path combination. In fact, the bike/path combo generates very little (which in many ways is the point!). The bike may be the right thing for the environment, personal and community health, etc., but it is entirely the wrong thing for 'the economy' and therefore must be discouraged by the establishment.
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If there were such a position as Guardian of Trees and Bush appointed her,
she'd arrive for work her first day with a chainsaw in one hand, a flamethrower in the other, and a bag of wood-boring beetles. And the neocons would smile.
War is peace.
Defeat is victory.
Spying is freedom.
Imperialism is liberation.
And the oil will last forever!
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The most hilarious thing
Is when the bikers do their last-Friday-of-the-month free ride en masse in Cambridge, Mass. They ride so slow that they tie up Mass Ave all the way up and down. Not a one of them would EVER actually ride so slow if they were trying to get somewhere. And this to demonstrate that the bike is a viable form of urban transportation. Talk about self-defeating tactics! Never have so many acted so stupidly towards the ruination of such a good cause.
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Ride on!
Wow, is there any issue Bush Leaguers won't be on the wrong side of? If people were riding ATVs and snowmobiles on those paths, they'd probably be fine with it -- I mean, isn't this the same administration that champions those noisy gas-guzzlers crisscrossing public lands? If it runs on gasoline, they like it; otherwise, not so much.
Weather permitting, I bike an hourlong commute regularly to work, and it's quicker than public transportation, although I've found I get a lingering cough during prime commuting season that I chalk up to exposure to the car exhaust from all the lone drivers crowded in their cars and SUVs going up and down Lake Shore Drive.
Many's a time I've ridden, glanced at the dark salmon-colored smog on the horizon and imagined a quieter, cleaner, less car-centric Chicago as I cruise by all the gridlock, wondering what those folks are thinking when they're caught in the latest traffic jam or gaper's delay.
Sadly, America as we know it is impossible without cars, and that says everything about us as a country, about who's in charge, and where their heads are. I fear that we'll die as a country before accepting something so simple and sensible as a bicycle as a primary mode of transportation.
Seeing yet another Bush incompetent ideologue like Mary Peters push this attack on bikers is entirely unsurprising. We definitely know where their heads are crammed.