I’m a big fan of bike lanes, as Bacon’s Rebellion readers know — but there are limits to how much money we should spend on them. Apparently, the Chesapeake City Council agrees. Yesterday the council voted to reverse a previous decision to build a two-mile, $16 million bike path paralleling a road that currently has only five bikers per day. (See today’s article in the Virginian-Pilot.)
As Virginian-Pilot columnist Kerry Dougherty railed last week:
Despite the price, all but one council member at the meeting merrily voted “yes.” And why not? The cash wasn’t coming out of Chesapeake’s coffers. This would be mostly federal and state transportation dollars.
Defending his affirmative vote, Vice Mayor Dwight Parker explained that Chesapeake couldn’t use the $16 million for anything but the bike path. “If we don’t use it,” he told me. “We lose it.” Sheesh.
That’s the quality of decision making you get when the federal government doles out money with all sorts of strings attached. The feds ought to get out of the local transportation funding business and stick to projects of national significance. It’s not clear what the state’s role was in this narrowly averted fiasco, but whatever it was, it suggests that someone is not doing a very good job of prioritizing the investment of scarce state tax dollars. Let’s hope that the NoVa and Hampton Roads regional transportation authorities are more careful. (See the previous blog entry.)
