Nice Racks

Today was the official unveiling of the bike racks on Milwaukee County buses. County Board Supervisors Chris Larson and Patricia Jursik gave them a ceremonial tryout to introduce them this morning.

Sykes had a little stroke about them. He wailed about how the racks were paid for with "free money" and mocked the two supervisors for their excitement on this. Sykes then complained that this was a big boondoggle and claimed that no one would use them and they weren't good for this climate.

Sykes was, of course, lying through his teeth again. First of all, cities with much worse climates than ours have found great success with them, and where ever the bike racks have been tried, there has been a great increase in ridership.

Secondly, the federal tax dollars came from a program under the Bush administration and had nothing to do with the stimulus funding that the right try to dismiss as being "free money." The local match came from a bicycling group.

If Sykes wanted to complain about a real waste of taxpayer money, he should have talked about how Scott Walker sold the grounds and used some of the proceeds to rent the land he just sold. Or on how Walker wanted to use the rest of the proceeds, as well as the County's share of the "free $91 million" transit grant from the feds to give the beneficiaries of this land deal their own private rapid transit bus and bus route.

But the really amazing thing is that Sykes, given his past history of behaviors and attitudes, was unable to appreciate these really nice racks.