Transportation, Transit, and Recreation. Where are the priorities? Answer: They’re all screwed up.

Transportation versus Transit. Although both words are synonymous, one usually thinks of transportation as referring to what you do in your car, and transit as using a bus, train, or plane. What do you think of when you hear the term recreational transportation? Bicycles, roller blades, and pogo sticks come to mind. (OK, maybe not pogo sticks.)

When you think of all of these different modes of moving your body from one place to another which do you think is the most common? If you said automobiles you’d be correct. Now based on that last conclusion, which of these forms of transport do you think is most essential to daily life? If you said automobiles, you’re right again!

Now bare with me here, I don’t want to lose you yet. I know some people are getting ready to huff and puff at me and say something like, “Well shouldn’t we be trying to use bicycles more so we can quit using those carbon dioxide producing, ozone depleting, disgusting man made metal machines!” Right, but let’s step back from that emotional argument (however valid or invalid it may be) and remember we’re talking about reality here, not some dream world.

Every day in America most people get in their car, and they go to work. They get in their car and go to the grocery store. They get in their car and pick up their kids from school. That’s just how it works. Based on this reality, wouldn’t you think that funding the roads, highways, and bridges that we drive on every day should be one of the most important priorities of government? Well apparently we have some pretty dumb folks in government.

We have politicians on both the state level and on the federal level who are more concerned with funding trains, buses, and bike trails than they are in taking care of an essential like the roads we drive our cars on! It sounds impossible, but it’s true.

Minnesotans can be proud of U.S. Representative Jim Oberstar, a Democrat representing the 8th district. He wrote the law that has sent federal money, intended for transportation, to recreation instead. He took money that could’ve been used to pay for fixing up bridges and put it towards gobs of bike trails throughout our state and country.

Oberstar wrote the legislation in 1991 that first allowed Highway Trust Funds to flow to states for bike trails. Until then, the 50 states combined for the past 20 years had spent only $40 million on bike trails.

The 1991 law required each state to have a bicycle coordinator, funded from the Highway Trust Fund, to have a state bicycling plan, and would be given the authority to use abandoned railway grade beds as bicycle, pedestrian and in-line skating trails.

In the next six years, $1.3 billion was invested in bicycling facilities nationwide, Oberstar, an avid biker, said.

Attributed to the Bemidji Pioneer, for the full article click here.

Not to mention, Mr. Oberstar was the first to call for a federal gas tax last week, and because of that insane request has been named “Porker of the Month” by Citizens Against Government Waste.

Does this upset you? It should. It doesn’t stop with Oberstar though. Minneapolis Mayor Rybak wants to slow down the process of rebuilding the 35W bridge because he wants to ensure it has light trail tracks going across it. Wait just a minute… I thought we didn’t have enough money to handle our bridges, let alone a new train! That’s why a gas tax has been proposed right? What the heck is wrong with our politicians? The spotlight is burning bright, and every day it is revealing a spending priority crisis going on in government!

MINNEAPOLIS - The mayor and a key state lawmaker on Monday cautioned that the Minnesota transportation officials’ swift timetable to replace the collapsed interstate bridge could overlook safety and the unique elements necessary to make it a memorial.

“I believe a large number of people want this bridge to symbolize the rebuilding of a community in some way,” Mayor R.T. Rybak told The Associated Press. “That does not seem to be a significant part of MNDOT’s goal at this point.”

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Rybak and Murphy both disagree with Lt. Gov. Carol Molnau, who also serves as the DOT commissioner, over whether the new bridge should be equipped with tracks for a light rail train.

A single north-south light rail line currently runs from downtown to the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. The state is planning to expand the system by adding an east-west line to connect the downtowns of the Twin Cities, and some have suggested laying it across the new bridge would be cost-efficient.

For the full text of this article click here.

Look, I was in Minneapolis tonight and I saw for the first time the remains of the bridge collapse in person. It is a horrifying sight. It looks like a Hollywood disaster movie set. The twisted metal, the broken concrete, it was a very strange sight indeed. Coincidentally, the other thing I saw while in Minneapolis was a light rail train, three, maybe four cars in length. The train was completely empty. I think I saw one person on board. One person! That’s our tax dollars at work! The contrasting pictures of the fallen bridge, and that empty light rail train only hammered home the point that we have a real problem on our hands.

A gas tax won’t fix it, spending money on public transit won’t fix it, only a fundamental change in the way our government spends money on highways, roads, and bridges will. How hard is it to expect government to take care of the important things and then butt out? That message has to get through to our politicians. I encourage everyone to keep up the good fight, and light up their phone lines in St. Paul and in Washington. It’s the only way we’ll make a change folks.