Once again the City's sensible pro-bicycle and pro-public-transport policies make me fiercely proud to be both a native New Yorker and a lifelong advocate for mass transit.

Never mind it was the gentrification imposed by the limousine-riding capitalist-pig aristocrats (yeah, Sen. Schumer included) that drove me to permanent exile here in Washington state – ironically the most notoriously anti-transit realm in the nation.

Mr. Naparstek is probably too young to remember, but many of the policies Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Kahn is (finally) enacting were originally proposed by Major John V. Lindsay before and during his first term, 1965-1969.

Lindsay, the last NYC mayor who governed from the premise the City is for everyone (and not merely the obscenely rich fat-cats who dominate it now), made no secret of his belief the ultimate solution to Manhattan's traffic and air pollution problems was banning automobiles from Midtown and dramatically increasing bicycle, bus and subway usage throughout the five boroughs.

Before he was elected in '65 (NYC's mayoralty elections are held in off years), Lindsay appointed a special Public Transport Advisory Committee, and as the associate editor of Taxi Weekly – a lively tabloid for cab drivers that was sometimes quoted by Jack Benny – I was frequently privy to the committee's debates. My boss Les Peterman, TW's publisher and editor-in-chief, was a voting member; my TW reporting therefore often doubled as committee research, and our combined efforts eventually earned TW a mayoral commendation.

Meanwhile Lindsay's unapologetic support for subways and mass transit in general (taxis included) provoked relentless and politically damaging hatred from Big Oil and Big Automotive – never mind most real New Yorkers (the limousine set excluded) reject automobile ownership as idiotic: tantamount to hanging a rotting albatross around one's own proverbial neck.

Though in Lindsay's day there were still (a few) meaningful differences between Democrats and Republicans, the anti-bike, anti-transit positions of Sen. Schumer and Rep. Anthony Weiner prove that on the vital socioeconomic issues of our time – in this instance our worsening enslavement by Big Oil and Big Automotive – there is literally no difference between Democrats and Republicans.

This is why I prefer to label them “DemocRats” and “GOPorkers” – the fact that despite their rhetorical deceptions, they are equal collaborators in the malicious betrayal of working Americans.

Which betrayal of course also explains the Puget Sound area's incomparably dismal public-transport history: a 43-year record in which five of seven transit proposals were Big Lied to defeat, the result the worst urban-area mass transit in the nation and probably on the entire planet – a ruinous deficit that now (given the irremediable contractions of late-stage capitalism), can never be relieved.

@loren, the Forward Thrust rapid transit election that I believe anchors your 43 year span actually had a 59% approval. Unfortunately, the majority didn't rule as 60% was required for passage. An early taste of Mississippi-on-the-Salish government that the followers of Eyeman are so intent on bringing to our region. We might have had our own BART to be proud of had a few more votes swung our way.

Mr Brewster, thanks for picking up this column. I've been reading about this brouhaha on bike blogs, it's sad to know that the local tea flavored anti-cyclist hysteria is at work over the entire country. Will attitudes change when gas spikes again, or will the crazy simply intensify? Hey drivers, every cyclist on the road is one less car in the jam, and for every cyclist charging a light, 100 drivers are rolling through a stop and 10000 are speeding. People bend rules, some more than others, we're not all looking to get run over.

OK so the we got its and politicians and other muckety mucks in New York are crying about bicycle lanes AND they are crying about not being able to use their free parking permits? Have em start paying and pay double. Please have them send money and I will commence studying how to care about their plite.

In meantime what is their percentage of the city population? How many percentile wise of city population is served by these measures and what is their satisfaction level.

Big wigs and privileged you are only the tail of the dog. Nuts to you.

Loren is probably also lamenting the Monorail fiasco as well. Had that project been a success, we would have a West Seattle Ballard rapid transit system up and we wouldn't need a deep tunnel for cars to replace the Viaduct.

I suspect come April we may see more bicyclists cross the I-90 bridge to avoid the car gridlock, and overflowing buses when 520 becomes $7/rt. Weather will be looking nice, and those of us bicyclists flying by will be quite an enticement to abandonment of the car.

I rather enjoy reading about bikes, but I DO not like driving near the irresponsible twits who think traffic laws don't apply to them & whiz around like water bugs. Or the ones at night who don't wear reflective gear & don't have lights fore & aft. So, yes, bike lanes need to be built. Bikers also need to be licensed--both as riders AND their bikes registered, as Seattle did for a short time in the 1970s. And--there's some needed revenue, legislators--the income from bicyclist licenses (or bicyclist endorsement on their driver's license or state ID card) & bike licenses. Olympia, ya listening?

NickBob is correct in his assumption I use the 1968 Forward Thrust defeat as the anchor for the 43-year period I cite.

But – here responding to GaryP, I was not counting the Monorail fiasco, only the five defeats of genuinely regional systems or (as in the case of Forward Thrust) those that proposed serving an area beyond Seattle's city limits and thus could have been the cores of such systems.

Specifically what I counted are the '68 and 1970 Forward Thrust proposals (defeated by xenophobia, racism and anti-Jewish, anti-New Yorker bigotry); the regional transit system State Sen.Ted Haley proposed via the legislature in 1978 or 1979 (which was viciously jeered by all the Puget Sound area dailies -- never mind it was Washington's last opportunity ever to build a transit system with federal matching funds); the first Sound Transit proposal (1995); and the 2007 Sound Transit proposal.

Just as I didn't count the Monorail defeat, I'm also not counting the overwhelming rejection of Pierce Transit's recent request for a minuscule (three cents on a $10 purchase) sales tax increase merely to sustain its present (Toonerville) level of bus service, though technically – since its bus routes reach from Olympia to Seattle, it too is a regional system.

As was made obvious by responses to pre-election coverage in The News-Tribune, Tacoma's daily, the core issue in this election was (again) what I have sadly come to recognize as typical Pacific Northwest bigotry: a savage hatred for minorities that – though normally closeted – is at least equal to its counterpart in the South, and a breathtakingly vicious malice toward anyone so impoverished they can't afford an automobile.

I wrote a blog essay about this, "Hating Globally/Reacting Locally: Tacoma Voters Maliciously Nix Transit”: http://lorenbliss.typepad.com/loren-bliss-outside-agitators-notebook/2011/02/hating-globallyreacting-locally-tacoma-voters-maliciously-nix-transit-.html

As a result of this defeat, Pierce Transit operations will be slashed by as much as 50 percent next October, leaving Tacoma and its environs with only the most minimal public transport – so woefully inadequate the voters might as well have shut the system down completely.

Nor am I counting the defeat handed Whatcom Transit last year -- never mind Bellingham's voters later saved their system by cutting service to the anti-transit areas outside the city limits, the low income rural residents who have no other means of transport be damned.

Factor in these results and the Puget Sound area's anti-transit record is even more appalling: 8 rejections in 11 attempts or a 43-year record of 72 percent hostility to what in every other urban area in the industrial world is increasingly regarded as a civil right.

Indeed I doubt any other place on Planet Earth is so venomously opposed to public transport.

Worse, the operant antagonisms are deliberately fostered by a handful of local aristocrats who see denial of mass transit as a kind of forcible gentrification – that is, a clever way to oust or exclude lower-income people and eventually turn the entire state into a de facto country club.

And now its too late. The concentration of wealth and political power characteristic of end-stage capitalism guarantees – just as the local Ruling Class has always intended – that adequate public transport will never be built in the Puget Sound area. Not now, not a 50 years from now, not ever.

I'm not nearly as pessimistic as Loren. The bankrupty of the current distribution of wealth and crumby transportation options are no different than it was 100 years ago. The difference is that the source of the alternative mode of transportation, autos are soon to be running on empty, fossil fuel is rising in cost. The national grid is not there for all of us to be driving electric cars. There will be no driving everywhere soon enough. That will force us to be more energy efficient and rail is one of the most efficient modes. That's why Warren Buffet bought a railroad.

The other alternative, bicycling will be coming back. Portland is a leader in transportation alternatives. It allows their people to spend their money on things not related to fossil fuel.

As for taxing bicycles, maybe a sales tax would work, but until bicycle riders kill each other, licences aren't necessary.

Portland is not a big city.
Truly large cities need overhead bike-only-ways w/spiral ramps.
Cost effective & safe. Throw in bike patrols,pedi-cabs & perhaps a covering & it's a whole new ballgame.
Bike Freeways.
Retrofit into older towns or part of the core design (think industrial elevators in new buildings w/retail along steep routes)of brand spanking new (think China) ones.
How many more people would ride if it was completely safe?
Less foreign fuel/war costs,less pollution & less congestion, all for less money due to less weight bearing loads.
Just think.

GaryP, the reason for my pessimism – actually the unflinching realism characteristic of old age – is the fact our species is approaching a deadly crisis that has no precedent in human history or experience.

The elements of this crisis, which include a looming double apocalypse, are threefold:

(1)-The Ponzi scheme that is capitalism is morphing into its final form, fulfilling the tyrannical impulses in its core values of infinite greed and unlimited selfishness. Though in a sense this is precisely as predicted by Marx and Engels, neither foresaw the truly godlike omnipotence given the Ruling Class by its increasingly unbreakable monopoly on the technologies of surveillance and murder. As a consequence there is no possibility of successful rebellion by the Working Class. What future is left for our species will thus ever more closely resemble existence under the (presumably) fictional Borg: a tiny, utterly merciless aristocracy ruling a planetary plantation on which all the rest of us are slaves.

(2)-The forthcoming self-imposed apocalypse of petroleum bankruptcy aka "peak oil" will end forever our species' ability to fuel anything even remotely akin to civilization. Initially – as we are already witnessing – any revolutionary potential will be ruthlessly exterminated by the Ruling Class using its mastery of the (petroleum-dependent) technologies of oppression. Eventually petroleum bankruptcy will render those technologies unworkable. But because we have lost all the survival skills of our so-called “primitive” ancestors, most humans will die with the death of petroleum-based technologies. What human society remains will forcibly revert to a neo-manorial economy in which weaponry, land and "human capital" – slaves – are the only standards of value, patriarchal theocracy the only mode of social control and neo-feudalism the only viable form of government: a new Dark Age shackled with fundamentalist Christian or Muslim ideologies, Nazi principles of governance and just enough operational remnants of death-ray technology to keep the slave majority in submissive terror.

(3)-The forthcoming Gaian apocalypse will in all probability finish the job, driving us irremediably to extinction. This is why the environmental transformation should properly be called “terminal climate change.” Instead, the Ruling Class has chosen to hide its inconceivably grim reality by deliberately wrapping it in the Disney-like euphemism “global warning” – a label no doubt tailor-made to generate the very sorts of controversies that combine with (ever-more-brazen) capitalist despotism to make it impossible for our species to mount an adequate defense.

Meanwhile, while we are increasingly paralyzed by Moron Nation chaos, the Ruling Class is doing everything it can to ensure its own survival – the reason behind its unprecedented escalation of the class war – never mind the fact the prospects for H. Sapiens sapiens have never been worse: at the present rate of climate change, the reduction of Earth to a desert planet, with the possible survival of no more than approximately 500 human breeding pairs on an ice-free Antarctica, and the more likely outcome the extinction of all save insectoid and bacterial forms of life. (Climate-change skeptics should begin their re-education by Googling James Lovelock.)

As the aftermath of the Roman Empire's collapse demonstrates beyond argument, transport is the one truly essential ingredient of civilization. Obviously regions with extant public transport systems will therefore retain the values of civilization much longer than regions without.

Another essential element of civilization is some sort of functional social-service infrastructure. The Romans for example had a retirement system for soldiers and government employees that was probably superior to our own; the woman-centered Minoans – given that their cities had neither slums nor mansions and indeed show no recognizable evidence of poverty at all – most likely had the best most effective social-service administration in human history: note for example its organized evacuation of the island of Thera, for which Google.

But when the Ruling Class is finished looting the United States to build its neo-feudal defenses, the U.S. will have neither public transport nor safety net. The closest historical approximations to the future U.S. as it is now being forcibly reshaped will be pre-Revolutionary France or Tsarist Russia – but with no surviving possibility of the revolutionary hopefulness that eventually rescued both the French and the Russian working classes from their inconceivably brutal masters.

The fact that we in the Puget Sound region have now been eternally denied any possibility of adequate public transport – this as our social-service infrastructure is meanwhile being methodically destroyed beyond any hope of repair – are signposts on the highway to the slave-pen hell toward which we are being herded by capitalism and its Ruling Class. The question – and my knowledge of history and sociology leaves me profoundly pessimistic about the answer – is whether we will awaken from our zomboid Moron Nation stupor in time to resist our enslavement, even if our acts of rebellion are no more than final expressions of the existential freedom most of us formerly took for granted.

Loren, truly you need do something to get more light in your life. Every generation or two has what it considers a crisis of epic proportion sure to doom all walks of life as we know it. Yet humans seem to adapt and change as necessary.

I've recently been reading a biography on Theodore Roosevelt, and life here in the USA right now sure looks like it did in 1900. Robber barons, oppressed workers, poor medical care, wars on the horizon. And yet here we are a 100 years later.

James Burke did a great series on technology back in the 70's called "Connections" and it wasn't just roads that give humans to the tools to understand problems and solve them but improved methods of communication. And to wit, this morning I watched the horror that is the result of a gigantic earthquake in Japan, I emailed a friend about a business deal of my own. I read a paper on how to use a technique that I'm going to apply to my own job and I'm still on the couch in my living room. No mass transit necessary.

And here I am trying to point out to someone I've never met that devolving into a feudal dark ages is not an option for me or my neighbors. Just as our grandparents in the 1930's refused to revolt and overthrow the government which had clearly failed the country. Democracy as an idea once planted doesn't die so easily. If you look at the history of the towns in the USA, the first settlers after tossing out the local natives did was elect a sheriff and a mayor. Right after building a saloon and a general store and stable.

As for the ruling class, the top 400 people may own as much as the bottom 1/2 of the country but they are only 400 votes.

Gary, I wish I did live in a world that included more "light," but the teaching of a half century in journalism is that one must always confront the darkness.

For example -- apropos "improved methods of communication" -- the computers we use are utterly dependent on petroleum derivatives.

Once the oil runs out, the modern era is over: the space age, the computer age, even the age of electricity were all made possible by products that -- without petroleum and petroleum byproducts -- will no longer exist.

Nor are there any replacement materials, undeniable proof of which is in our species' history: the fact the modern era did not -- could not -- come into being without petroleum and fossil fuels in general.

What all environmentalists know but thanks to capitalist taboos are profoundly unwilling to publicly admit is that the only truly "sustainable" society is of necessity based on a localized, collectively governed agricultural economy with a static population and severely limited levels of production and consumption, for example bicycles built to last a lifetime rather than self-destruct after two or three years and an absolute prohibition against materialistically based fads.

Assuming the continued availability of books, I for one would have no problem with such a radically simplified world, but most people alive today would find its absence of material distractions unendurable.

That said, this is indeed an interesting dialogue, for which (despite our obvious disagreements), many thanks.

Hi Loren, You just need to look for the light in life even when at it's darkest hour, there are signs of hope and light. For without a crisis there would be no need to change.

Oil will "run out" but not all on a single day, or year. The cheap oil is going away that's for sure. But the tar sands will be with us for a long time after that.

Electricity in the USA mainly is generated by cheap coal, that's got another 100 years. Messy, C02 spewing awful stuff. But wind power is coming and backed by coal plants you can run a country. In fact China has realized that they are utterly dependent on other countries oil and coal and has thus embarked on a massive wind generation building plan. And as the price of natural gas rises and coal mines are depleted Wind and solar look better and better.

Static populations: Often a code word for "too many people not like me." When in fact modern industrialized countries have negative population growth. The easiest way to reduce family size is education of women, and public health. All of which are rising, although not in a straight line.

Bicycles built to last a lifetime... I keep trying to find one. Yet the physics of stressing metal means that a bicycle light enough that I want to ride, wears out sooner than I would wish. Oh well.

Materialistic fads? Those have been with us since man killed animals and skinned them, causing mates to desire a similar skin. Not likely to leave the human condition anytime soon. Besides, isn't a fad just a way of saying that a lot of people desired the same thing at the same time? And that it looked new and different and yet as a group we strove to look the same? It's a sign that people want to belong to a group and are willing to work toward that end. Who are you and I to judge the value of that? And it's been shown that people who think they are members of the same group will help each other in times of need vs those outside their group. And lastly central planning for things that are "not a necessity" makes life drab and dull. Just look at what was Eastern Europe.

So while you wrestle with the demons of evil know that these things cycle and that what appears only to be obvious to you will become known to all and accepted as the new truth. After all people once believed that the sun rotated around the earth.

You are welcome, and enjoy the early light of Daylight "Savings" (if ever there was a misnomer....)

The recent (near) enactment of the Vulnerable Users bill shows that mainstream Republicans and Democrats are willing to vote together on popular bicycle and pedestrian projects. Surveys show that the majority of Americans want government to spend something like 25 percent of roadway funding on bike-ped projects. The only anti-voices are the extremists such as embittered motorists or angry Vehicular cyclists.

Yes, it's ironic that for the people who left old stodgy New York City to come to the clean, progressive PNW now find that back East their doing it better, bigger and righter than ever before when it comes to bicycles, transit and good governance whereas here, a hoary regime operates in a corrupt and unbridled fashion, riding over repeated plebiscites and cries of the citizens like a tank driven by Qaddafi.