Speaking of Wasting Money

Look who woke up and smelled the coffee:

• Despite spending millions of dollars on hundreds of miles of bikeways, American cities are seeing a big drop in the number of people who pedal their way to work. That's according to the latest American Community Survey (a smaller, more detailed version of the U.S. Census), which found declining bike ridership across most American cities last year.

  The drop was most pronounced in bike-friendly Seattle, home of the $12-million-a-mile bike lane. In 2015, 4 percent of Seattleites (16,300 people) biked to work. That rate fell to 3.5 percent (14,600 people) in 2016 and 2.8 percent (12,000 people) last year.

  This decrease comes as the city of Seattle is throwing a lot of money at building out its biking network. In 2015, Emerald City voters approved the Move Seattle levy, which raised some $94 million to add 110 miles of bike lanes, greenways, and associated infrastructure. Costs have since increased to a point where Seattle residents may get only about half the miles they were promised.

And that's just Seattle.

Here in Chicago, the bike lanes cost approximately $1 million per mile and you can only use them reliably about seven months of the year. Not only that, they cost commuters a full lane of traffic, drastically increasing automobile travel times (contributing to pollution increases), end up destroying delivery routes/times (contributing to economic costs), increased police/fire/ambulance response times and lord only knows how many parking spots.

But paving and concrete people got their connected contracts, and they paid off politicians along the way. And the city unions (Streets, Laborers, etc) went along with it all because, at some point in the not-to-distant future, they'll be paid to take it all out. Job security!

Keep paying those rising property taxes.