The Bridge To Nowhere - Boondoggles, Scams, And The Seedy Nature Of Local Government

Montgomery County took a perfectly good four lane feeder road linking a major urban hub with important thoroughfares to downtown Washington and Virginia, and made it two car lanes and two bike lanes. 

The County Supervisor, testifying at a public hearing said:

We feel that the reconfiguration of Little Falls Parkway will confirm the County's environmental focus.  We are committed to the progressive move to self-propelled, environmentally friendly transportation.  The skies above will be brighter, the air cleaner, and our byways made quieter, more friendly, and more accommodating for all. 

The completed project has done nothing of the kind.  No biker has chosen to ride the bike lanes for the a few hundred feet of cycle freeway only to merge with busy commuter and commercial traffic and end up on two of the region's major thoroughfares. 

It is the road to nowhere, a stunt, a politically devious and administratively wasteful project.  Not one bicycle has been seen on the new dedicated lanes, and traffic now with only one lane in either direction, is stalled during morning and evening rush hours. 

'If we build it, they will come' is the old saw used by public planners since time immemorial, and Montgomery County was no different. 'You may not see much bike traffic on our new road now, but its time has not yet fully come.  When bikers see the advantages of dedicated lanes, a scenic environment, and safe access beyond, they will flock to Little Falls Parkway'. 

Now, Montgomery County is not the first jurisdiction to build roads to nowhere, make improvements where they were not needed, disrupt a perfectly good, well-functioning system for no apparent reason.  In a nearby residential neighborhood in Northwest Washington, DC, a perfectly good service road, an important passageway for trash pickup and other heavy vehicles was ripped up and replaced.  The old road was as solid as the Hoover Dam.  It took weeks to just jackhammer and remove the old concrete which was as thick as a fortress wall, laid down to last a century. 

'It needed it', said the Councilman responsible for the works. 

In one of the wealthiest neighborhoods of Washington, perfectly good sidewalks and curbs were torn up and replaced.  Not only were the old sidewalks perfectly good, but this was a neighborhood of two -car high-end SUVs where nobody walked.  

None of this should be a surprise to anyone, given the fact that local government has  been as corrupt as Sodom and Gomorrah since the first urban settlements; and infrastructure projects a cash cow for contractors, their municipal supervisors, and politicians.  

There hasn't been a public works project in the District of Columbia that has come in on or under budget since home rule, and most are subject to significant cost overruns - not just tweaky little adjustments, but major revisions. 

Everybody profits. Labor unions are delighted that their members are put to work and could care less about the viability or reasonability of the job.  Contractors salivate when granted priority status with the municipality, for they will be the first to receive generous awards, all of which can be doubled or tripled with overruns. 

The Minnesota childcare and transport services frauds are nothing special.  The District of Columbia alone has built hundreds of millions of dollars in public service infrastructure which lies boarded up and graffitied after a few years of desultory use.  Mammoth extensions of public schools, far beyond the demand and built in 'anticipation' of a demographic boom which by any actuarial or economic analysis will never happen, are common. 

'Little black children deserve better', said the councilman for one of Washington's most impoverished and crime-ridden inner city districts; so a massive renovation and expansion project was quickly approved despite the fact that the truancy rate in that ward exceeded 70 percent, and the schools were no more than prisons with lockdowns, armed monitors, and a few color-within-the-lines classes. 

The Montgomery County Executive was a die-hard environmentalist, and he engineered the most unsafe hodgepodge of bicycle-friendly disruptions of any jurisdiction.  On the assumption that cyclists can do wrong, and that vehicular traffic must always give way, traffic rules and regulations have been abandoned for cyclists, and as a result bike paths interfere and conflict with safe, properly conservative vehicle traffic. 

The County built a dedicated bike lane which crossed the major on ramp to the area's principle interstate, and neglected to regulate bike traffic to avoid accidents.  Given the presumption of right and the absence of any stop signs, warning lights, or indications to dismount, cyclists are smashed to smithereens every year...and drivers are blamed. 

The problem is threefold - the easy cover of social righteousness (bikes are good for the environment; services for poor black people require no more justification), the easy money always available from infrastructure projects, and the direct and indirect payoffs (walkin' around money) to constituents who profit from the public sector jobs thrown their way by municipal politicians. 

During Mayor Marion Barry's tenure in Washington, he made sure that all the voters of the city's black wards voted for him and spared no expense to assure it.  The black residents of Anacostia cared little about utilitarian, cost-benefit, risk-reward analyses of infrastructure projects.  Building them means day wages, salaries, and kickbacks whatever their stated purpose. 

Most of the taxpayer money comes from Washington's wealthy, all-white Ward 3 - a ward which has consistently voted against the corrupt lineup of politicians repeatedly returned to council seats and City Hall, but these elected officials know that the rest of the city will vote for them.  They don't need Ward 3 votes, only its money, and given Washington's demographics, this scam will continue ad infinitum. 

LaShonda Evans, bright star of the black community, and longtime advocate for a Mamdani democratic Socialist style of governance, put it this way to Washington's white community:

We the people, we the black people, legatees of the wisdom of the forest and the lessons of the street, and inheritors of the primal instincts of power from our African tribal ancestors, will rule.  There can be no questioning our right to govern and your duty to support us. Slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, and systemic racism is all you need to know when you sign your name to the check. 

Walkin' around money was to be endemic and universal - indirect reparations at the municipal level. 'We will rebuild the city in our image'. 

LaShonda is not alone in her racial bombast. Many if not most large American cities have black mayors and city councils.  Chicago is perhaps the best example - a race-baiting, self-interested, political incompetent Mayor who has seen profit in every George Floyd, anti-ICE demonstration and every road to nowhere.  Chicago, the home of Bathhouse John and Hinky Dink Kenna, the most influentially corrupt politicians of early Twentieth Century history, has continued its corrupt, ward politics days.  'Vote early and often' was the meme, walkin' around money found its apotheosis there. 

Alexander Hamilton saw this coming - the will of the people was suspect and popular rule an idealist's chimera - but he would be dumbfounded at what he would see at the base of the pyramid - municipal democracy rotten to the core. 

Only demographics will change the corrupt nature of Washington politics.  The city has become known as Metrosexual Heaven and the influx of white, educated, upwardly mobile voters gentrifying the city, turning old slum neighborhoods into vibrant, modern cultural meccas; and eventually this demographic shift will have its effect.  More accountability, more conservative governance, and a modicum at least of political propriety if not honesty. 

But that, Aunt Margaret, will take time.