Bicycle Infrastructure

This was a big week for bike advocates: They had a pow-wow with Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, launched a new coalition, and refined their strategy for the 112th Congress.

A bummer of a jobs report came out today, showing that although unemployment dropped to its lowest point in 19 months, it's still way higher than economists had hoped.

We couldn’t put a bow on 2010 until we’d thanked those who contributed to the cause of sustainable transportation and smart growth last year and shaken our fist at those who’d done their darnedest for sprawl and highways. Check out our first two installments of national, state and local Streetsie winners. Here are our parting thoughts and your final votes. Then we can really move into 2011.

In July of last year, when AAA launched their roadside bicycle repair service, cyclists got a warm fuzzy feeling for a minute and thought AAA was about as bike-friendly as an automobile organization could be. That bubble burst in July when AAA Mid-Atlantic President and CEO Don Gagnon editorialized that highway trust fund money should be reserved just for highways [PDF].

The country’s crisis of crumbling infrastructure could be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to expand bicycle access.

In the Netherlands, 30 percent of trips under five miles are by bike.

We're keeping the news coming on the governor’s races we're following most closely. Check out our previous coverage of Wisconsin, Ohio, California, Texas, Maryland, Colorado, and Tennessee. This one could be the most important yet.

Via the League of American Bicyclists, new information is out about how much the feds are spending on bike-ped  projects. While federal funding for bicycle and pedestrian projects is down a bit from last year's all-time high, it still comes in at more than a billion dollars. A third of the money is from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), which begs the question of what will happen to bike-ped funding once the stimulus funds dry up. We got some somber foreshadowing last week of what could happen to bike-ped funding if Republicans cut the transportation bill to the "core program."

Knoxville Mayor Bill Haslam is a biking mayor. He shows up almost every year to Bike to Work Day. The small-government Republican has allocated $20,000 for bike improvements.