Scott Walker, Posterboy for Government Waste

A fiscally conservative person might also reasonably argue that while bikes are nice, we have to fix our crumbling roads and bridges for all modes before we can afford nice extras like bike lanes, trails and sidewalks. But remember building roads is really expensive (around $50 million per mile for freeways), and Walker’s budget includes funds to expand our freeways, rather than just rebuild them. Take a drive down I94 south towards Chicago and you can see all the bridges are about twice as wide and the freeway is 50% wider. Why would a fiscally responsible person expand the extremely expensive interstate, increasing annual maintenance and operational costs by 50% when the demand does not warrant expansion? For years the traffic volumes on our freeways have stayed about the same or even gone down. The larger future maintenance costs of an expanded freeway and highway system are a legacy of higher taxes for future generations.

The other reason a cut in bicycle spending is irresponsible in the face of expanded budgets for automobiles is that 50% of all trips made by car are less than 2 miles and 25% are less than one mile, a distance easily travelled by bicycle or on foot. Building and maintaining all those roads for such short trips seems very wasteful. We also have to provide parking spaces for all those cars making unnecessary trips. A true fiscal conservative would save the money and walk or bike.

We could save a lot of money rebuilding roads if we could cut the traffic volumes by 50% or 25%. Imagine it costs a lot less to rebuild a four lane road as a two lane road than it does to rebuild it as a four lane road again (or a six lane as Walker is doing). Maybe I’m just a cheap Milwaukee Pollack like my grandpa (I wash and reuse aluminum foil too), but I’d call cutting funding for bikes and transit while building bigger roads just plain wasteful.