It's not D.E.I.

The Trump administration has discovered a new enemy of the American way of life: the bicycle. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy is warning senators about 'D.E.I. bike lanes.' His own department told NPR that supporting bike infrastructure means believing 'everyone should ride a bike to their shoebox-sized apartment to eat crickets to achieve a phony climate agenda.' A cycling advocate summed up the actual strategy: Mockery, not policy – playing on 'that dork on a bike.' Four years ago, after Joe Biden took a spill getting off his bike, Trump made his now-famous pledge to the American people: 'I will never, ever ride a bicycle.' It would be funny, coming from a man with a well-known preference for golf carts and limousines, if it weren't so destructive. In Durango, we are a bike town, the way half or more of Colorado is a bike state. We ride to stay fit, to get the kids to school, to get ourselves to work, to blow off steam after a long week, and increasingly, because getting in the car is no longer the easy default. We turn out to cheer our home-grown pros on the biggest stages in the world. This year marked the 55th running of the Iron Horse Bicycle Classic. We are hosting the 2030 Mountain Bike World Championships and two national events leading up to it in 2028 and 2029. None of that is a niche hobby for people who eat crickets. It is just how we live. And here's what the administration's own numbers can't get around: 76% of Americans support bike lanes where they live. Two-thirds of Republicans do too. It's popular, it's practical, and in a town like ours, it's bipartisan in the most literal sense: we know people who voted for Donald Trump and ride bikes every single day. The idea that a bike lane is a marker of some coastal ideology doesn't survive contact with Durango's roads and residents. And the administration's record in court isn't good. A federal judge blocked its attempt to tear out a bike lane near the National Mall in Washington, D.C., ruling in April that the decision showed an 'absence of reasoned decision-making.' In Nashville, a judge ordered a frozen $9.3 million bike grant to proceed after finding no evidence the administration had reviewed the project, though the ruling is now on appeal. And in a separate case, a court blocked the administration from conditioning federal grants on abandoning diversity, equity and inclusion goals. Just ask anyone who's tried to ride a bike, run, or walk a dog on the Animas River Trail on a summer afternoon. The trail is so busy the city considered a 10 mph speed limit for cyclists (P.S. few cyclists have a speedometer on board) and e-bikes near pedestrians. The fix for a trail this overused is more capacity, not less. New striping helps, and so does the trail's recent completion from the Demon Bridge to 29th Street. None of this is academic for Durango. As our roads grow more crowded and the city works to diversify (words like this trigger the administration) how people get around, because we have to, we're depending on federal partnership to help pay for it, as we long have. The Camino Crossing underpass, the connection our community has been working toward for decades, was a finalist in this year's federal BUILD grant review. 'We were named a Project of Merit, but we weren't funded in this cycle,' said Sarah Hill, Durango's transportation director, who's eyeing a resubmission next year. Without continued federal support, she said, the city is unlikely to find other funding for a project this size. Whether the underpass is built in time for the 2030 Mountain Bike World Championships may depend less on merit than on what happens in Washington after the midterms. Rep. Jeff Hurd, this is your district. It is a district where people bike to work, bike for fun, and are trying to build the infrastructure to do both more safely as our population grows. That the Trump administration is mocking that as some coastal indulgence isn't just wrong on the politics. It's a direct threat to a project our community has spent years working toward.