Why Trump Hates Bike Lanes

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Transcript:

Two years ago, in a desperate and unsuccessful attempt to get people to vote against Donald Trump’s return to the White House, I went over the major problems outlined in Project 2025, which was always going to be Trump’s handbook for this administration regardless of what perennially wrong talking heads liked to claim. I hit the big ones, like outlawing abortion, neutering entitlements, making the president an omnipotent king, and so forth. Project 2025 was a hefty document and I’m not hbomberguy. I don’t have the focus or energy to sit here and talk at you for four hours.

So, I wasn’t able to get into the less worrying aspects of the plan, even though some of those aspects happen to be very important to me. But today I’d like to talk about one such issue, because it really emphasizes how stupid and petty this administration is. Today I want to talk about the Republicans’ War on Bicycles.

If you’ve been subscribed to me for a while, you already know how much I enjoy riding bicycles, to the point that I recently rode my bike from San Francisco to Los Angeles for Climate Ride. But long before I discovered the benefits of padded shorts and jerseys with the pockets in the back, for decades my bike was my primary mode of transportation. I didn’t own a car until I was in my mid-30s because I rode my bike to work, to meet friends, go on adventures, and basically just bridge any gap between public transit options.

I didn’t do this because of a particular ideology. It just made sense: I was a college student living and working in Boston, and a bike could get me anywhere I wanted without worrying about a huge car payment, or pricey repairs, or gas, or figuring out where to park. And it made me feel good, not just keeping me physically fit but mentally as well because I got to ride through beautiful parks and along the gorgeous Charles River.

But these days I see an ideological connection that escaped me back then. I had opted out of a consumerist mindset, riding a used Raleigh I got for $100 instead of taking out a big loan and dropping half a paycheck filling it up with gas. Instead of further fucking up the environment by burning fossil fuels, I was burning falafels. And by moving through Boston’s various neighborhoods at a slow enough pace, I was able to see and chat with my neighbors, get an idea about how they live, and appreciate the diversity of each enclave.

All of those benefits happen to be progressive policies, and so I’m not surprised now when I go on big group bike rides that the majority of my fellow riders are lefty weirdos like me.

And that’s also why I wasn’t surprised that Project 2025 included a passing dig at bike lanes. Alllll the way back on page 629, the document suggests that the Federal Highway Administration has gone too far by funding “ferryboat terminals, hiking trails, bicycle lanes, and local sidewalks,” thanks to “The Biden Administration…emphasizing the

priorities of progressive activists instead of pursuing practical goals.” There it is quite plainly: wanting people to have safe access to public transit and places to walk and bicycle is “progressive” activism. The conservative approach is to encourage private corporations to charge individuals “user fees” and tolls.

And that is, truly, the conservative ethos: you do not get anything good without helping some billionaire buy his next yacht. Bike lane? Sorry, no, you’ll have to buy a car…excuse me, sorry, we don’t sell those anymore so you’ll have to buy a massive SUV and drive it at 80 miles per hour on the toll road that goes over the ghetto.

You may think that with all the women’s healthcare to ban and immigrants to terrorize, the Trump Administration wouldn’t even have time to think about the bike lanes, but you’d be wrong. Within a few months of Trump taking office, the Department of Transportation issued a memo ordering employees to immediately freeze all grants issued after 2021 and identify any projects that provide “funding to advance climate, equity, and other priorities counter to the Administration’s executive orders,” specifically targeting any projects “whose primary purpose is bicycle infrastructure,” as reported by the outlet Grist which got a copy of the memo.

Grist notes that one program that was probably targeted would have allowed Durham, North Carolina to “add sidewalks, crosswalks, and bus stops to the city’s busiest transit corridor, which is used by thousands of people each day,” and which has seen numerous pedestrian fatalities. Grist goes on to note a CDC report that found “Americans were 50 percent more likely to die walking in 2022 than in 2013,” making us the worst high income country for pedestrian deaths.

A lot of research has shown how areas can reduce these deaths, and it’s things like protected walkways and safe crossings, consistent street lighting, and speed management policies, but those things COST money as opposed to MAKING money for private business, and so the Trump Administration quickly began moving that funding away from those projects and towards the fossil fuel companies.

All of that brings me to the recent news, in which Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, formerly an award-winning lumberjack who starred in MTV's The Real World: Boston, announced that he would end funding for “DEI bike lanes.” Every word I just said is true. The dumbest timeline. DEI bike lanes.

As NPR reports, suddenly bike safety information has disappeared from the Federal Highway Administration's website. One such tool that has gone bye-bye is the Pedestrian and Bicycle Crash Analysis Tool, or PBCAT, which collected information on crashes that allowed researchers to find better ways to save people’s lives, similar to the research I discussed a few weeks back that identified the enormous size of our trucks and SUVs as being one reason for the increase in deaths. It really always comes back to destroying the science with these guys, doesn’t it? Because if you don’t have any data about deaths, you can just pretend the deaths aren’t happening.

NPR also spoke to anonymous employees, saying that “even agency staff have been left guessing about why” they’ve been asked to remove every reference to bicycles. I hope that this video gives them, and you, a better idea of why. Bicycles have been dangerous to the status quo since they were invented. When bikes arrived in the US at the end of the 19th century, riders formed the “League of American Wheelman” (now “League of American Bicyclists”) and immediately began lobbying the government to not only make sure bikes were legal in all states but also to improve the condition of the roads to make them safer.

When women started riding bikes it was revolutionary. Prior, they were expected to depend upon men to do the hard work of hitching up horses if they wanted to go anywhere, but the bicycle was relatively inexpensive, required no serious upkeep, and you could just hop on it and go wherever you wanted. The popularity of bikes forced a change in women’s fashion, doing away with layers upon layers of skirts and restrictive corsets, and eventually leading to trousers.

The suffragists were enamored, with Elizabeth Cady Stanton saying “the bicycle will inspire women with more courage, self-respect, self-reliance,” and Susan B. Anthony agreed that cycling “has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. It gives women a feeling of freedom and self-reliance. I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel…the picture of free, untrammeled womanhood.”

The bicycle was equally revolutionary to lower classes who couldn’t afford to own horses, and in a fun capitalism footnote, early bike manufacturers were the first industry to create options for each income level, something that persists today across many industries, including automobiles.

Today, bicycles remain inextricably connected to progressive values and a host of positive attributes. In a review of the literature on bike sharing programs published earlier this year, researchers found that a desire to use community bikes was linked with pro-environment and social responsibility values, and also with perceived agency, “defined as the belief in one’s ability to act with autonomy and control.” Interestingly, they note that “In contexts such as Iran and Saudi Arabia, gender-based restrictions and socio-legal norms severely limit women’s access to cycling and BSS, regardless of personal motivation.” Denying women access to a freedom machine? I think the Trump Administration has learned a lot from the country they started a war with.

Another recent review of the benefits of cycling points out that the research “increasingly conceptualizes bicycling as a complex biopsychosocial phenomenon rather than a purely recreational or physical pursuit,” showing “improvements in participant mental health, depressive symptomology, mood, and cognitive processes,” but also “opportunities for social interaction.” I think this aspect is crucial to understanding why our authoritarian government is anti-bike lane: safe paths for pedestrians, cyclists, scooters, and others connect our communities together. They make us see each other, talk to each other, share space with each other in ways that highways packed with SUVs simply do not. And that kind of community is inherently dangerous to an authoritarian government.

So yeah, of course the reality TV guy in charge of the Department of Transportation is going after bicycles. He and his boss want to force that $5/a gallon gas down your gullet. Don’t let him: support your local bike community. Agitate for better bike lanes, better roads and paths and sidewalks that are built for the 112 million Americans who ride a bike and the millions more who want to be able to travel around our communities without getting run over by a cybertruck. And go out for a bike ride! It’s fun.

Why Trump Hates Bike Lanes (YouTube)