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CONGRESS TO CYCLISTS: "GET A CAR"
For every bike commuter who proudly pedals to work under the
mantra "one less car," Congress has a
message for you: Get back on the highway where you
belong, burning fossil fuel like a real American.
That goes for you,
too, you traffic-hazard pedestrians.
Fresh out of subcommittee, a new congressional transportation appropriations
bill will entirely eliminate some $600 million worth of
annual federal funding for bike paths, walkways and other such transportation
niceties in fiscal year 2004.
Never mind the political fallout of U.S. oil dependency on the Middle East, or
the fact that the average mileage per gallon for new cars and trucks in the U.S.
is at its lowest level in 20 years. Members of the House's Appropriations
Subcommittee on Transportation, Treasury and Independent Agencies know
that what America needs now is fewer bike paths and walkways -- but more
highways.
Defenders of the bill argue that, in light of huge federal deficits, something
has to go, but for bike
activists and environmentalists who have been pushing for decades for
alternatives to driving, the cuts are
a giant step backward.
"The irony of trying to make it easier for people to drive when we're clearly
running up against major
roadblocks on providing oil for driving is just too much," says Leah Shahum,
executive director of the San
Francisco Bicycle Coalition, a nonprofit that promotes bikes for transportation.
Under the new bill, which the full Committee on Appropriations is likely to
consider this week, before
it goes to the House floor for a vote, highways would receive $34.1 billion in
fiscal year 2004, which is
$2.5 billion more than this year, while the Transportation Enhancements program
that funds bike paths and walkways would get nothing. The bill would also
significantly reduce funding for everything from Amtrak to reverse-commute
transportation programs that connect low-income urban workers to jobs in the
suburbs.
"It's saying: 'We're not really that interested in community restoration or
improvement. We just want the
money going toward highway development,'" says Susan Prolman, government
relations counsel for Defenders of Wildlife. She points out that the bill puts
$4.8 billion more into highway projects than President Bush asked for in his
2004 budget.
"Draconian," "cynical," "nonsensical," "grave" are some of the words that
congressional lobbyists for
environmental, conservation and historical preservation groups had for the
legislation, which will cut funding specifically aimed at supporting
pollution-free modes of transportation.
"They essentially gutted funding for sensible
alternatives in favor of more road building,"
says Eric Olson, who
works for the Sierra Club's Challenge to Sprawl campaign in Washington.
After 40 years of funding highways, in 1991 the Department of Transportation
started the Transportation Enhancements program to develop a more "modally
balanced transportation system by encouraging
projects that are more than asphalt, concrete and steel." Environmentalists and
historical preservationist groups viewed its creation as a watershed in federal
transportation policy -- an acknowledgement that the U.S.'s vast federal highway
system can do more than just seamlessly move cars and trucks.
"So much of the devastation to the historic fabric of our cities and communities
was due to the barreling
through of highways in our neighborhoods," says Susan West Montgomery, president
of Preservation Action, a group that's among those fighting the cuts. The
creation of the enhancements program countered that with "symbolic meaning, as
well as practical money."
From 1992 to 2002, the program invested more than $2.4 billion
in some 12,000 projects, with about half of
that money going directly to benefit cyclists and pedestrians.
It has provided funding for bike paths,
pedestrian bridges, sidewalks, as well as scenic overlooks on highways and
wildlife underpasses under roads. The program has helped pay for rehabilitating
historic train stations, removing illegal billboards and mitigating pollution
runoffs from highways.
In San Francisco, the birthplace of the global bike activist movement Critical
Mass, urban cycling has
doubled over the last decade. And like many other local governments, the city
has won federal funds to
keep up with the increase in bike transportation.
"To lose these federal transportation dollars would be a huge blow to San
Francisco's growing bicycle
infrastructure," says the San Francisco Bike Coalition's Shahum. "We've seen
tremendous change in
the last 10 years from striped bike lanes to better signage to bike access to
transit and safety promotional campaigns that wouldn't have been possible
without the funding." On July 24, San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown will unveil a
new educational campaign, underwritten by the currently threatened funds, that
aims to encourage cyclists and motorists to "coexist" better.
"What we've got now in San Francisco and many cities across the country is the
beginning of a good system," says Shahum. "But we're really kind of on a
precipice of making a sea change in the city, because what we're close to
building is a complete connected network of bike lanes and passages, a chance to
ride in dedicated space."
It's not just the pedaling urbanites in San Francisco who have benefited from
the monies under the program.
Elementary school students who ride on the Shannon Park-Ladd School Bike Path in
Fairbanks, Alaska, and bird-watchers in Texas on the Great Texas Coastal Birding
Trail, also enjoy the fruits of the program.
Among the thousands of projects the program has supported are Denver's
Bike-and-Ride Project, which
retrofitted buses with bike racks and provided bike parking at bus stations. It
also contributed $815,000
for the creation of a new pedestrian plaza as part of the revitalization of
Journal Square in Jersey City,
N.J. (To look up what the program has helped finance in your state, go here and
click on the "projects"
link.)
Micah Swafford, press secretary for Rep. Ernest J. Istook, R.-Okla., who chairs
the subcommittee that
wrote the bill, argues that, with the prospect of a $455 billion federal budget
deficit and anticipating
declining revenues in the highway taxes that fund transportation programs, the
committee had to cut
something.
"It's more important to provide the basic funding for roads, before you provide
money for enhancements
whenever you're facing a shortfall," Swafford says, citing Department of
Transportation statistics that
there are 6,476 structurally deficient bridges on the national highway system as
one of the reasons that
highways were the subcommittee's priority.
But Rep. Istook put out a press release on Friday, July 11, the day the bill
made it out of the subcommittee, bragging that "$518 million is headed to
Oklahoma!" leading one environmental lobbyist to attribute the whole issue to
"parochial Oklahoma politics."
"Actually, it's kind of sad. He's basically eviscerating these programs that are
important to a lot of other states for the sake of benefiting Oklahoma," says
Deron Lovaas, a lobbyist for the Natural Resources Defense Council, another
group fighting the cuts.
The move by the transportation appropriations subcommittee also represents a
turf war between the
congressional appropriators and authorizers. The current law governing all U.S.
Department of
Transportation funding expires Sept. 30. But the congressional authorizers, in
charge of setting the
agenda that the appropriators then enact, have yet to decide if they will extend
the previous authorization
for another year, or revamp it entirely for the next six-year term. In the
ensuing vacuum, Rep. Istook and
crew have just gone ahead and set the transportation agenda for fiscal 2004.
Groups opposed to the measure are lobbying members of the larger Appropriations
Committee, as well as other members of Congress. But they think they'll have
better luck making the case in the Senate for spending a fraction of highway
dollars on bike paths.
Kevin Richardson
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