Roads aren't just for vehicles—they are for people. pic.twitter.com/LuG0q2obIK
— Secretary Pete Buttigieg (@SecretaryPete) February 8, 2021
Sure, in New York City, parts of Chicago, LA, San Francisco, Boston, Philly, Minneapolis, Portland, Seattle, maybe a few other cities.
If you are like me and have a 20-mile commute on a federal interstate or interstate spur, or live outside a human sardine can of a city where you can reasonably walk to work between short jaunts on public transportation, you can go fuck yourself with $5 per gallon gasoline.
Joe Biden is clearly not the President of the United States, but the President of the 146 Most Densely Populated Counties in America, and everyone else can eat a dick and enjoy shitty roads because Buttigieg would rather put in bike lanes.
Where’s his mask?
I believe it is Portland but it could be Seattle where they have done of the worse rush hour traffic in the US.
Seems that they haven’t really increased capacity because “cars are bad for the environment” so they have lots of cars running for long periods of time because they are stuck in traffic.
So to “fix” the problem they took some of the capacity and turned them into bike lanes. Increasing the traffic issue but look, bike lanes.
I worked in a location where did 800 people worked. Of that 200 lived within 5 miles of mostly flat riding with good shoulders.
One person rode a bike, me. In 5 years there I did not see another bicyclist commuting. Lots of on weekends, none during the week.
Only reason I commuted by bike was only one car and wife needed it just in case young children had an emergency.
People are lazy and would rather listen to music and sit on their butts in a temperature controlled dry car then ride a bike.
There are exceptions, but they prove the rule.
I tried to commute by bike when I was stationed in Oklahoma. I lived all of three miles off base, another 2.5 to the squadron. Did it for a week, then I was ‘recommended’ to stop because ‘shower facilities are only for use regular use by those who work out in the gym’. This was in the middle of the whole ‘Fit to Fight’ push by big blue. Needless to say, I was less than impressed. Ended up going back to driving after that
Seattle is the worst because the lakes create several choke points. Portland has more bridges so the major pain point is the I-5 bridge from Vancouver, although some major interchanges get bad. I lived in the suburbs so I avoided most of the horror.
pete butplug’s only experience that would make him transportation sec. Is hanging out in men’s room on interstate rest sreas
I am so going to apply for a federal DOT contract to improve the conditions of our interstate highway rest stop gloryholes. Nice and smooth with an antimicrobial lining. Every one drilled by hand by members of the local Peepholists Union, using American made tools. A gloryhole a patriot would be proud to stick his manhood through.
The guy does not have kids.
He never climbed up or down narrow slippery stairs from the 4th floor with a stroller, a bag, and a baby and then sloshed half a mile through snow on the dirty crowded sidewalk under slit rain to get to the open bus stop and then tried to get into the packed bus (which came 20 min late) with a stroller, a bag and a baby to get to her day care.
I said in other comments that AOC has a similar problem; she doesn’t have kids (and is barely not a child herself).
They have neither the experience raising small humans nor the experience navigating life with them.
For them, “Just ride your bike to work” is easy, and if it’s not they have the resources to change jobs or change residences. It’s not so easy with two kids under 5, whose daycare is on the other end of town, near where the parent works at the best job he/she can find.
For them, “Just take public transportation” is easy; they work an 8-5 downtown or work from home. It’s not so easy when the buses start at 7 am and go to 8 pm (like in my town) and you work graveyard or swing shifts, or work days but have a mandatory meeting at 7:30 am and the first bus can’t get you there until 8:20. (Seriously, a friend of mine was told by the city’s “Park and Ride” advocate — the person whose ONE JOB is to get people to take the bus — that because of her schedule she probably should just drive.)
What’s interesting to me is the hubris of the Left. As others point out here, they have social and professional mobility that We Common Folk don’t have. Meanwhile, they limit our professional mobility by imposing regulations that kill job-producing businesses and make us compete with each other over fewer opportunities, and at the same time they limit our literal mobility options by doing away with our cars and roads on which to drive them.
Keep us locally confined, and keep us trapped in dead-end jobs that don’t earn enough to go to the Nice Places or enough to leave for greener pastures. No reason to build a wall when limiting our social and professional options keeps us imprisoned just as effectively.
Here in my smallish city in Idaho, traffic seems about the same as before the China Virus. Accommodate pedestrians, wheelchairs and scooters, doesn’t Indianapolis have sidewalks? As for bikes, make riders pass a driving test before being allowed on public roads, give them tickets for riding in the middle of the lane, running red lights, blitzing through pedestrians on side walks, etc.
Bike paths are part of the un agenda- pick-a-year, it used to be agenda 21….they want to MAKE you have to use public trans or ride a bike. Real good idea as today my “commute “ to work was 118 miles ONE way…tomorrow who knows. We got 4 to 10 years of this lunacy
They hate the idea of the masses having freedom of movement. If you can move around, you can leave places with insane policies. It also “intrudes” on their class markers — they don’t like seeing the “common folk” traveling to places that used to be restricted to the elite.
Indeed. In his novel “The Venus Belt” Neil Smith has one of his characters say:
“[the private automobile] takes you from exactly where you are to precisely where you want to go, whenever you want, in comfort, relative safety, and total privacy — at a hell of a lot less money per passenger mile than any BART or Metro system. Look it up: I’m right.”
He doesn’t add (not in that place, anyway) that “from where you are to where you want to go” is what totalitarians of all parties object to. There’s a reason why communist countries have fairly-functional public transit systems and no private automobiles, and why Europe likes trains and likes traffic jams.
In defense of Europe, their cities weren’t laid out for cars. Even the roads in the countryside were laid out by drunken old men driving ox carts.
“Urban Leftist Caters to Desires of Elite Urban Denizens — Forgets That ‘Flyover States’ Are Real Places Filled with Real People”
And in other breaking news, Stanford scientists in a recently-published study discover that water is wet.