It's not often that comments made by Whoopi Goldberg on a national TV show have direct relevance to something here in the city of Boulder, but in a roundabout way the dressing down that Goldberg gave New York Mayor Bill de Blasio does.
On Jan. 16, Goldberg in a now famous rant ripped de Blasio on the subject of bike lanes in the city. Among other choice comments, she told the mayor that he had "screwed the city up." His offense? Under his watch New York City had built or converted from auto traffic lanes another 83 miles of protected bike lanes. These were in addition to the 113 miles his predecessor, Michael Bloomberg, had added. Goldberg evidently was fed up with the increased traffic congestion on her commute to work, congestion that had been made significantly worse as a result of her route being "road dieted" down from six lanes to two and a half.
The attack by Goldberg about a subject near and dear to the hearts of liberals, multi-modal transportation, stunned de Blasio. The next day in a press conference de Blasio remarked that he "didn't expect, in the context of a national show ... it to get so local and so specific." But de Blasio who still envisions himself as a candidate for president surely knows that the "Vision Zero" plan that he implemented in New York, and which has spread to cities including Denver and Boulder, is controversial on a national scale.
For those who are not familiar with it, Vision Zero is an organization whose goal is to reduce the number of traffic deaths to zero. A fantastic goal for sure, but at what cost? And that is where Vision Zero differs from most other programs. They don't have much use, or some say any use, for cost-benefit analysis of the programs they want cities and states to implement. They rather take a moral approach that one death is too many and the cost to achieve that goal is not relevant.
But back to the issue at hand. De Blasio is not alone in his ignorance of the widespread skepticism and hostility towards massive expenditures of tax dollars on multimodal transportation infrastructure for bikes, trains and buses at the expense of road and highway maintenance and improvements. Another proponent of Vision Zero, Denver's Mayor Hancock, appeared last week on KOA radio talk show host Mandy Connell's show. After spending considerable time on Denver's efforts to be the first city in America to have safe injection sites for illegal intravenous drug users (another dubious first for Colorado), Connell broached the subject of light rail and bus transportation in Denver. She told Hancock, "If you look at mass transportation across the country, none of it is self-sustaining, so it's always going to be subsidized, and when you only serve 4.7 percent of the population the other 95 percent is getting surly. It's like, why are we spending all this money when we should be working more on our roadways?" She continued, "They see roads in disrepair. The see potholes and they see other things, and then they see that single train going down the track all by itself with one guy in it." Hancock responded, "Today 73 percent of the people in Denver move in single-occupied automobiles. This is not acceptable." Connell then responded that a lot of people are "resentful that government is telling them, 'You've got to change your behavior,' instead of the government being responsive to what they want."
And whether or not Connell realized it, she had hit the nail right on the head of what ticks off so many people, not only here in Boulder but evidently in places as different and as far away as Middle America and Paris, France. For just about every time politicians ignore over and over again what people are telling them they want, such as the ability to get to and from work with as little headache as possible using the cars they want to use, you eventually end up with yellow vests burning things every weekend in Paris or the guy with yellow hair that everyone in Boulder seems to hate living in the White House.
The cause and effect is hard to ignore when you see it happening over and over again.