Senator Tester has skin in the health care game, since as a kid he lost fingers in the machine he's leaning on. He can tell you the rest of the familiar story.

Needless to say, he's a Democrat.

Thanks to democratic underground.

SF's bike revolution is over

San Francisco Citizen

The bike movement in San Francisco may have began with Critical Mass in 1992, which got a lot of publicity after a riot in 1997 when city cops tried to stop it in downtown San Francisco.

But the next big move by city cyclists and their enablers in City Hall was rushing the 500-page Bicycle Plan through the process without any environmental review in clear violation of the most important environmental law in California. 

I'm proud to have been a party to the litigation that culminated with the court ordering the city to do an environmental review of the ambitious plan.

The bike movement in the city has now apparently skidded to a halt. According to last year's Travel Decisions Survey (page 5), trips by bicycle in the city are down to 2%, even though the Mode Share Survey 2011 (page 5) found that trips by bicycle were 3.4% of all trips made in the city.

We learned recently that commuting by bicycle was down 24% from a 2015 peak.

But those numbers haven't fazed City Hall's anti-car zeal, as it recently opened bike lanes on Masonic Avenue that have been an underwhelming success, with few cyclists using the garish green monuments to wishful thinking.

Failures like that won't stop the city's pursuit of what Paul Krugman calls zombie ideas: "beliefs about policy that have been repeatedly refuted with evidence and analysis but refuse to die."