Walking and bicycling provide multiple positive political, economic, and environmental benefits. Notice how President Obama refers approvingly to the multiple benefits of promoting home insulation as part of the federal stimulus package. It leads to: immediate employment, long-term capacity building in the work force, lowered energy use, fewer greenhouse emissions, and less imported fuel, and is exactly the kind of thing we should be promoting. Cycling and walking, modest as they are, have equally powerful and radical political potential.
For a primer, watch Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-OR) discuss cycling here. In this straight-forward intro, the congressman reminds us that even though the new administration has said a lot of the right things, volunteers and activists need to continue working.
One of the challenges, especially with the economic stimulus debate, is that the appropriate levers and gears do not exist yet. Since the stimulus has been created at lightning speed, it needed to use administrative machinery that is already well established. However, with the main federal transportation authorization bill due for renewal this year (worth possibly more hundreds of billions of dollars), the opportunity exists to create new federal mechanism to promote and protect these benign, flexible, healthy, economic modes of transportation. This means radical potential for empowering cycling and walking, especially in cities and towns, for daily, utility purposes. It would mean the end of life as we know it, caught in the death spiral of the negative consequences of fossil fuel addiction. Do I need to enumerate them? Sprawl, horrendous land use choices, climate change, 40,000 plus road deaths per year, obesity, congestion, enslavement to foreign regimes ... Do I hear you say this sounds too negative? What about the jobs created by and as a result of automobiles? See above re: home insulation. It is possible to create jobs to do the right things.
Please help think through specific measures that might be needed at the federal level to recognize, institute and support cycling and walking as full-fledged transportation modes. Presently, the federal government's (operational) support for cycling and walking consists of a handful of employees buried in the Real Estate Division of the Department of Transportation (plus, certainly, a few other researchers in safety and health positions).
Rep. Jim Oberstar (D-MN)has proposed a department of non-motorized transportation. While that might be too much to wish for, it could help usher in a gentle revolution.