Transportation Secretary: bikes aren’t transportation
Posted on August 20, 2007
Filed Under bikes, politics
It is little wonder that the United States lags behind Europe and east Asia in the development of real cycling networks and bike-specific infrastructure. Bicycles are vehicles, yet the national Transportation Secretary can go on thinking (and saying) the bikes are not transportation.
In a PBS NewsHour interview last week, Transportation Secretary Mary Peters lamented that transportation funds are being spent on such frivolous earmarks as bike paths.
GWEN IFILL: Explain what you mean when you say earmarks.
MARY PETERS: Well, an earmark is a project that’s designated by a member of Congress specifically to a project generally in his or her district or state. And the level of earmarking has increased substantially over the last couple of decades in terms of the highway bill. The last highway bill that was passed, in the summer of 2005, contained over 6,000 of those marks, those specially designated projects. And the cost of those projects just in that bill alone was $24 billion, almost a tenth of the bill.
GWEN IFILL: Aren’t many of those projects, even though they’re special interest projects, aren’t they roads and bridges, often?
MARY PETERS: Gwen, some of them are, but many of them are not. 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.
…
GWEN IFILL: Who is spending the money inappropriately?
MARY PETERS: Well, there’s about probably some 10 percent to 20 percent of the current spending that is going to projects that really are not transportation, directly transportation-related. Some of that money is being spent on things, as I said earlier, like bike paths or trails. Some is being spent on museums, on restoring lighthouses, as I indicated.
I guess after the bridge collapse in Minneapolis someone has to shoulder the blame for our aging highway infrastructure. Why not blame those weirdos who ride bicycles to work?
By the way — the American Tobacco Trail, a transportation corridor for bicycle commuters in Durham, was built with federal transportation earmarks.
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