Poo-pooing the choo-choo twain

This sums up current right-wing libertarian thought on transportation policy:

Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood can't be serious.

Or, at least, I hope not.

When I had the chance to meet him here at The Post recently, I was fully prepared to endure a healthy dose of rambling about how antiquated, inefficient, money-losing choo-choo trains would replace cars.

One can also be prepared to only laugh on the inside when a Cabinet member asserts, in all earnestness, that cycling our kids to school en masse (and this adult has yet to master the art of driving his kids to school) was the answer to our national congestion problems.

Why? Well, because airplanes are safe and bicycles...

Oh, I do. Why wouldn't I? There wasn't a single U.S. airline passenger death due to an accident in 2007 and 2008, years in which commercial airliners carried 1.5 billion passengers. If you are a skateboarder, skier, pedestrian or train rider, your chances of dying are far higher.

In both 2007 and 2008, around 700 bicyclists reportedly died on U.S. roads. This doesn't count the immense cost of other cyclist-related injuries and the unseemly sight of those preposterously kaleidoscopic tights the rest of us are exposed to.

...bicycles cause girly-injuries.

Daddy will take you to school in his flying car.

It's this jumbled mess of illogic--what distances do bicycles and airplanes have in common, and why would providing practical alternatives to air and road transportation be such a bad thing in places like the NE corridor and California?--that is so instructive. Conservatives, libertarians, and Republicans--Ray LaHood being one notable exception--don't get it and apparently they never have. And that's presumably why they tend to reside in far-flung corners of the country where the only practical modes of transportation include driving the car to the airport.