“The thing that troubles us about the industrial economy,” writes Wendell Berry, “is that it tends to destroy what it does not comprehend, and that it is dependent upon much that it does not comprehend.”
Salon writer Katherine Mieszkowski offers up a nice retrospective on the recent controversy surrounding Secretary of Transportation Mary Peters’ remarks made in her August 15th appearance on PBS’s “NewsHour With Jim Lehrer”. The discussion was a follow up to the tragic Minneapolis bridge collapse on August 1st.
The Secretary inflamed cyclists and pedestrians across the country when she spoke about the “real problem” in shoring up the nation’s aging infrastructure was that not enough of the current money raised by gas taxes goes to highways and bridges.
“There are museums that are being built with that money, bike paths, trails, repairing lighthouses. Those are some of the kind of things that that money is being spent on, as opposed to our infrastructure,” she said. The Secretary added that projects like bike paths and trails “are really not transportation.”
Really not transportation? And was she really laying the blame – even indirectly — for the bridge collapse on cyclists? Well in any event, them’s are certainly fighting words. And Mieszkowski chronicles a bit of the fiery response to the Secretary’s remarks and offers up a few political reasons why Secretary Peters would say such a thing.
But here’s the thing. There is an ongoing struggle to embed in the American imagination a vision of what we can call a ‘bicycle commons’: a mash up of community funded safe travel ways, support services, and social networks built on a respect for the ecological value, physical wellbeing and psychological balance cycling brings to our collective life. As David Bollier observes, “Learning to see and understand the dozens of commons in our very midst is one of the preeminent challenges of our times.”
Remarks like those of the Secretary reveal once again that our leadership still doesn’t get it, doesn’t see it and doesn’t understand the public need for it.
