Controversy Erupts Over Transportation Secretary’s Comments on Bike Paths
Controversy Erupts Over Transportation Secretary’s Comments on Bike Paths
Although pedestrians and cyclists make 10 percent of all trips to work, school and stores nationally, and suffer 12 percent of annual traffic fatalities, Transportation Secretary Mary Peters thinks the 1.5 percent of federal transportation dollars invested in walking and biking paths takes too much gas-tax money away from highways and bridges long deteriorating under increasingly heavy auto traffic, reports Salon magazine writer Katherine Mieszkowski, quoting the secretary’s recently formed view that bike paths and trails ”are really not transportation.”