Wednesday, April 14, 2010

Ray LaHood, suggesting that cyclists and peds should have a voice in transportation matters: What nerve!

From the Associated Press, here's a report on the backlash from LaHood's speaking up for you and me. Evidently, as the old saying goes, we have the best government money can buy.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Typical us vs them DC mentality. If you spend a dollar on bikes, that's a dollar you're stealing from car or trains?

I don't know LaTourette, but he seems to be picking a fight where one doesn't exist. He should realize that every person on a bike is one less car on the road in front of him. It's the equivalent of building an extra lane.

But in DC, everyone ones to cut off his nose to spite his face. It's a zero sum game, they think, and every win for someone else is a lose for you.

LaHood seems to be reasonable and level-headed. That in itself will get him into hot water in DC.

Anonymous said...

Stuff like this is WHY a lot of us voted for Obama! The opposition is likely nothing more than the right-wing "simply yell NO!" response to anything the Obama tries to do.

Khal said...

Why dang...

I am proud to say that Photo 1 in that AP piece shows one of our new Diamond Drive bike lanes in Los Alamos. This is one of the infrastructure improvements that our forward-thinking community brought to reality during my tenure as Los Alamos County Transportation Board Chair. We wrote a policy that provided for bicycle accommodation on our roads and that policy, adopted in 2005, drove the design of the major arterial shown in the picture, including bike lanes.

That bike lane added very little cost to the price of the road and not only provides cyclists a high quality bike lane but doubles as an emergency breakdown lane for others. Design wise, it connects (either directly or indirectly) something like over half of our residences to almost all of our major destinations. I ride it most days.

Thank you, Secretary LaHood!