The article asks: "... could be replacing car trips and saving fuel. Why won’t federal officials promote them?" Here is my very strongly held opinion. 1) part

The article asks: "... could be replacing car trips and saving fuel. Why won’t federal officials promote them?" Here is my very strongly held opinion. 1) partially it's actually incompetence. Policies are formed and negotiated by politicians, but they don't really always know. There is too much "common sense" that people take for granted that is incorrect. For instance Mitt Romney recently came out with a statement that bike lanes increase congestion because they take away car space. This type of supreme confidence is what gets politicians elected, but they still have no clue what they're talking about. But it's a very salt of the earth type common sense approach that has some traces of logic in it. However, we know from data this is not true, and once you realize cars are an extremely inefficient use of space, then the views on what is logical start to change. But you need to come to this realization first. 2) we can't completely eliminate malice. There's a lot of money in transport/transit and incumbents are not keen on letting go of that cash cow. For instance, one of the ruling parties in Germany, FDP, is obviously in bed with the car makers which is causing them to promote policies at best contradictory (letting the market sort it out, but also guaranteed stable fuel prices and tax breaks so the high income earners don't get crushed on their commute prices) and at worst ludicrous (subsidies for e-fuels that are not really produced yet). The way I see it, we should reframe the discussion based on sharing the pie fairly. Again Germany as an example, there was a discussion pre-election about subsidies on cargo bikes. Of course the conservatives dismissed it as a vegan hipster solution, but the actual question is: who cares? If tax money is used for thousands of euros in subsidies for electric cars, why shouldn't a fraction of that money be used on bikes? So there should not be a 10k subsidy or whatever for electric cars and s 1k subsidy on bikes. Instead there should be a fixed per person budget for everyone to do whatever they personally want, and if that's a bike then that's their choice.