Jim Walden’s False Choices
“…we are spending a lot of money building lanes that few people use when we are making really tough choices about cutting education and social-benefit programs that give access to food, health care, and job training.” – Gibson Dunn Attorney Jim Walden.
I thought I’d update this post with a quote from this recently published article by Ben Adler at The Nation:
It’s certainly true that many of the bikers pedaling around the hipper city precincts appear to be of the bourgeois-bohemian persuasion. But take a look across the country and bicyclists are a diverse lot, including immigrants who lack the documentation to get a driver’s license and people who are too poor to own a car. These are disproportionately minorities. According to a 2006 report by the Brookings Institution and the University of California, Berkeley, 19 percent of blacks live in households without a car, compared with 13.7 percent of Hispanics and 4.6 percent of whites.
Adler writes that “Bike lanes are not inherently liberal or conservative; they are just good, pragmatic governance.”
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Brooklyn Spoke 
Jimbo, you’re late to this party. Steve Cuozzo is the master of false choices!
“Kids caught in crossfires like it was the 1980s, the NYPD dangerously whittled down to save money, and what’s City Hall doing? Trying to fill desolate bicycle lanes by flooding the town with 10,000 more bikes.”
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/downward_cycle_gOiR3FSMnlb34nnTKklkSL
Ben Adler does not even need to look across the country to disprove his “bourgeois-bohemian” stereotype (which American journalists are contractually obliged to invoke in the first ‘graph of any story about bicycles). Pick your hippest city precinct—I won’t do it, I don’t have a clue—and actually notice for once the number of non-native, non-wealthy (but maybe literally Bohemian) cyclists riding around. There’s a lot. Often, there’s more of them than “us”, especially when the weather turns unpleasant.
Bike lines are saving lives of poor people, many of whom are using them to perform their jobs. I understand that Schumer’s contemporaries have little contact with such people, seeing them through the back window of their black cars perhaps, but their steadfast advocacy for policies that result in the poor being run over by motorcars has got to be crossing some kind of line.
Shhhhh! Don’t tell Louise that some of the food she orders to her apartment might arrive via delivery guys who RIDE ON THE BIKE LANE TO GET TO HER APARTMENT SAFELY. Her confirmation bias only allows her to see spandex clad “recreational cyclists” not using the bike lane when it’s covered in snow.
Oh the horror!!!!!