Northwest of the D.C. Swamp’s center is Montgomery County (“MoCo”), Maryland. Rock Creek Park, where Woodrow Wilson walked alone and practiced his speeches aloud, connects D.C. to MoCo. One road, Beach Drive, parallels Rock Creek.
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In the 20th century, men regularly mowed most of the park with large, farm-quality tractors, leaving numerous sites for picnics and field sports. Now, many areas of once-wide-open meadows are overgrown, facilitating the increase in deer, rabbits, foxes, hidden vagrant encampments, and so forth.
Deer and other wildlife allow ticks and tick-borne diseases to multiply. Vagrants, more accurately identified as the untreated mentally ill and/or products of age-based rather than knowledge-attainment-based promotion in schools, result in litter, trespass, and other actions that reduce civil society’s civility—or what is now most accurately diagnosed as toxic compassion.
Elsewhere in MoCo, you will come upon expensively built, six-lane divided highways that are now, at greater expense—both the redo expense and the opportunity-cost expense—being turned into four lanes, with the other two marked with plastic pylons and paint for bikes only.
Thanks to these new lines, every intersection is a jumble of who turns when, where, and how, requiring greater situational awareness from bicyclists and motorists and putting rookie drivers at even greater risk. Motorists are many, and bicyclists are few, so we have yet another classic misallocation of scarce resources with alternative uses.
Only where the newer form of Democrats rules with massive and puzzling majorities do you see billions of dollars’ worth of previously purposeful infrastructure transformed into infrastructure confusion, complete with a non-utilitarian agenda. In days gone by, the purposes were easy to understand: parks were for recreation, and roads were for facilitating daily life.
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Now, the parks are mostly thickets, and the roads are more dangerous for all, though legally modified for greater “safety” to accommodate the bicycle-commuting choices of a very few fit and intrepid bicycle commuters. The price tag is greatly increased inconvenience, reduced mileage, and longer travel times for motorists, for whom the roads were originally built.
I mean, what bicyclist would say, “Let’s go out for a pleasure spin on a six-lane road transformed into four lanes for us so we can breathe fumes and dust and maybe get run over”? MoCo could mandate EVs to address the fumes, but dust and the threat of collision, rather than a day in the park, are what biking in a highway’s mandated bike lane offers.
Effectively, the road is no longer for actual commuting, but is now intended only for theoretical commuting, even as the world wrestles with remote workers. Despite trillions spent on climate change, what tiny percentage of people bike to work in the rain?
If you live in a red state, come to MoCo to see your future should the Democrats win or steal the elections in 2026 and 2028. You will also see many, many other examples of the careless expenditure of finite taxpayer monies, no matter which roads you choose.
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Image created using AI.
John L. Smith is a pseudonym.