Opinion: Bus Lanes and Bike Paths as our Cities Crumble - Illinois Review

Opinion: Bus Lanes and Bike Paths as our Cities Crumble - Illinois Review - JOHN F. DI LEO

"Reading a campaign speech in Milwaukee this week, Joe Biden boasted of a plan to spend some $36 million on a stretch of 6th Street, just west of downtown Milwaukee. 

His speechwriter had him listing such federally funded benefits as bike lanes, newly planted trees, and bus lanes to make 6th Street a prettier place to be...
Now that the campaign cycle is fully engaged, Joe Biden is traveling throughout the country, reading speeches like this in big cities and small ones, offering the same goodies to everybody.

• There are just three problems with this approach.

1. When government plans which projects to develop, it rarely chooses as well as the private sector would. They choose things with politics in mind, no matter whether the expenditures will help or not. Encouraging bicycles in a busy downtown is dangerous...
2. Ask any resident of Milwaukee – or, heck, any resident of any American city today – and they won’t list bike lanes, bus routes, or a lack of greenery among their top twenty problems...
3. And most important for at least some of us in flyover country, none of this is any of the federal government’s business in the first place...