> It is interesting that the proposition of creating the option for alternatives is often pushed back against by people in the communities; they simply don't want to pay for things they won't personally utilize, even if many people will utilize it, it'll improve the area, and over time it'll lead to densification around the routes over the coming decades. They don't want to deal with driving around bike lanes, watching out for bikers, less parking, or slower speed limits.

What's really interesting -- and I'm not faulting you for it, by the way, since it's a super common misconception -- is that this entire argument is backwards!

The real issue isn't that we're trying to spend extra money on alternatives; it's that we're trying to stop spending orders of magnitude more money massively subsidizing driving cars. In reality, those people are on the other side of the selfish spending argument because they're the ones forcing the rest of society to spend money benefiting them.

Remember, bikes don't need special lanes except to make them safe from encroachment by cars.

Driving places isn't inherently better; it only became so because we spent the last century demolishing our perfectly-good downtowns to build parking lots, spending trillions of dollars on highway projects, rewriting zoning codes to force private property owners to provide plentiful "free" parking at their expense, and otherwise bending over backwards to accommodate them.

In contrast, if property owners were free to build traditional development (i.e., if we abolished the government regulation restricting them from doing so) people would freely choose to walk and bike places instead of driving because those would be the quicker/easier/better option.