Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood issued new rules for bike- and walkways and announced at the National Bike Summit that “This Is the End of Favoring Motorized Transportation at the Expense of Non-Motorized.” This led to more critical remarks from the BoydGroup, an aviation consulting firm that previously criticized LaHood for “advising” airlines not to oppose high-speed rail.
LaHood’s dichotomy between motorized and non-motorized transportation is politically astute but historically inaccurate. For most of the last century — roughly 1920 through 1990 — our institutions favored forms of transportation that paid for themselves as opposed to those that required huge subsidies. Those were primarily highways, aviation, and rail freight.
