There are few more direct funding mechanisms than the gas tax. It pays for pavement, pure and simple. More gas tax, more pavement. Fewer potholes. Better bridges. And yet, despite the fact that people seem to want to improve our transportation infrastructure, they don’t want to pay for it. It just boggles the mind.

You can’t get better roads without more revenue. Despite all the whinging about government “inefficiencies”, the last time I checked we weren’t building gold-plated highways. It’s not as if half of our road spending is lost to waste. Road spending is, however, lost to the fact that there isn’t enough money. If you want better roads, you have to pay for them. It’s that simple. If you don’t want to raise the gas tax, then stop complaining about the quality of our roads.

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• Currently Listening To: "Casey Jones", The Grateful Dead

I can understand arguments about diluting scarce transportation resources when it comes to our roads. Understand, though not really agree with. I can also understand, from an intellectual point of view, arguments about increasing local mandates, although those who make this argument do it against bills that do not mandate anything. What I can’t understand, though, is how some people argue against this by essentially mocking anybody who does not drive. Not only is it, frankly, intellectually immature, it just doesn’t make sense from a conservative point of view.

I bus to work just about every day, and I bike home when I am able. To me, biking is one of the most conservative modes of transportation out there: it’s cheap, it’s energy efficient, it has next to no impact on the environment, it’s a time saver (I don’t need to spend an hour at the gym if I just spent an hour biking home), it is healthy, it creates little to no traffic disruptions, it doesn’t damage our roads, and I don’t have to give money to unstable Mideast countries to fuel it. When I take the bus, I’m also using a pretty efficient mode of transportation. Given some conservative opinions of biking an busing, though, it’s as if they would prefer that I drive in a single-occupancy car, clogging up the freeway with everybody else. Is that what conservatives want? Thousands of people who currently bike or bus to join them on the freeways, making rush hour worse? That’s hardly conservative.

The only reason I can see for this kind of thinking is that biking and busing is seen as somehow “socially liberal”, done by tree-hugging hippies. Thus, from a political point of view, conservatives have to oppose it, lest they acknowledge the legitimacy of parts of a so-called “liberal” lifestyle. This opposition is misdirected in a couple of ways. First, it’s quite a generalization to assume that all bikers or mass transit users are in the same boat: I just don’t want to waste my time sitting in a car by myself in rush hour traffic, so I’d much rather bus and do something productive like read, or bike and enjoy the fresh air and exercise simultaneously. These are quite common reasons for not wanting to drive. Second, given changes in demographics and energy, we’re heading towards a future where there will probably be more biking, walking, and busing as people become older and less likely to drive, and as oil gets more expensive.

Bikers aren’t just a bunch of moonbats wearing “funny hats and Lycra pants”. From a classically conservative point of view, bikers are making very sane transportation choices. Designing our transportation system to simply take their needs and the needs of all other road users into account is just common sense.

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• Currently Listening To: "Motion Picture Soundtrack", Radiohead