Do bicyclists (and pedestrians) pay their way in the U.S. transportation system?

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Sec Ray LaHood at the National Bike Summit

For instance, a recent AP story highlighted 'potholes' in the way of the new policy and the Trucking industry newsletters trotted out their usual arguments. (A small point of information--heavy trucks pay a lot of taxes, but not nearly the amount needed to offset their damage to roads.  The trucking industry is very heavily subsidized by the rest of us.  Maybe that is a very good idea and maybe it isn't, but either way it is the current situation in the U.S.  So it is somewhat amusing to hear truckers, whose road subsidy is measured in dollars per mile driven, complain about subsidies for bicycle facilities, where the subsidy is about 0.2 cents per mile ridden.)

Kevin Horrigan of the St Louis Post-Dispatch weighed in, at the end of a story about LaHood's visit to St Louis for the groundbreaking of the Mississippi River Bridge:

I could wax on about bridge names for another 360 words, but then there's be no space left to discuss the biggest problem with the bridge: No bicycle lanes.

Under the bicycle parity policy announced by Secretary LaHood, that bridge that he wants to name after Costello and Bond should have room for bicycles. But does it? No, it does not. It merely allows for four lanes of smog-belching, massive carbon footprint-leaving motor vehicle traffic.

It infringes on the rights of bicycling enthusiasts, who have been pushing for years to have bike-only lanes funded with the same enthusiasm as highways and bridges. The bike parity policy would do that.

Transportation planners with, say, $100 billion to divvy up, will have to think, "If we're going to spend $98 billion on highways that will carry 10 million motorists a day, we also have to spend $2 billion on bicycle paths for a couple of hundred people a day."

Reason: We bike guys (I owned one, before I started looking like a bear in a circus when I rode it) own the high moral ground. Never mind that we don't pay gasoline taxes to build roads. We don't pollute. We are close to nature. Our lungs are pure, our calves are firm, we look good in day-glo Spandex, and we have the same right to the roads as you.

Well, today we found out that Ohio Congressman Steve LaTourette was backpedaling like crazy about his remarks critical of Secretary LaHood's plan.

You see, it's easy to be critical of 'evil wasteful useless bike paths' in the abstract, but it turns out the Congressman LaTourette's constituents--thousands of them--and even LaTourette himself, want to have their own communities made safe and inviting for bicycling and walking.

So maybe it's time for the Post-Dispatch's Steve Horrigan to walk back his remarks as well. Here are some actual facts to counteract his random thoughts:

• MoBikeFed research summary: Bicyclists more than pay their way on Missouri's roads
  
  
• League of American Bicyclists: Fuel tax, tolls, vehicle registrations cover just over 50% of total cost of our nation's roads (meaning that the other 49% or so are subsidized from general tax revenue) 
  
  
• Streetsblog: The amount of funding from non-road users has doubled in the last 25 years and is rather precipitously increasing over the past few years
  
  
• Two million bicyclists in Missouri, and 5.8 million pedestrians
  
  
• Bridges in similar locations to the St Louis Mississippi River bridge have use of not "hundreds" in total, but rather thousands per day. A typical usage count for such a bridge is 1000-2000 bicyclists per day and an equal number of pedestrians.
  
  
• And we've not even touched the public health, environmental, and livability arguments--which are nicely summarized in the Complete Streets resolution recently introduced by Rep. Mike Sutherland of Warrenton.

Making our communities safe and inviting for bicycling and walking is the most inexpensive, most cost effective, most logical, and simplest way to tackle many of the complex problem that currently vex our society, from health and obesity to pollution to over-reliance on foreign energy supplies.

That's why we support and that is why national leaders--like Secretary LaHood, President Obama, and Missouri's own Senator Bond--support it as well.