So why are Milwaukee County Supervisors Patricia Jursik and Christopher Larson (pictured above last June) smiling? 

     The answer is simple.  They had just succeeded in doing what the Milwaukee County Board does best.  Waste hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars.

     Since the infamous Milwaukee County pension scandal in the early part of this decade, the Milwaukee County Board has careened from one politically correct bad idea to another in a desperate attempt to regain credibility.  Thankfully, County Executive Scott Walker and a small group of Supervisors have been around to stand up for the taxpayers and rein in some of the worst excesses.  Still, bad ideas from the Board continue to plague the taxpayers.

     Late last year, the County Board overrode a Walker veto and approved spending $650,000 to install bike racks on Milwaukee County buses.  According to Supervisor Larson, the fact that most of the money came from federal tax dollars made the decision a "no brainer".  Larson is correct that the decision demonstrated "no brains" - but not for the reason he suggested.    

     During the debate, proponents argued that 200,000 riders would use the bike racks annually.  That's not a typo.  200,000 riders! In Milwaukee, Wisconsin!  With our weather!

     As many of us argued at the time, anybody thinking that the bike racks would draw anything close to  200,000 users was either delusional or hitting the crack pipe, or both.  However, preliminary numbers suggest that usage is even lower than the sharpest critic thought.

     The bike racks went on the buses in June (at a cost of around $450,000).  Transit officials started counting users in August.  The tally for August was 709 bikes.  The tally for September was 1181. 

     Given that not too many people are going to be riding bikes (much less putting bikes on bus racks) from November through mid-April, it's tough to imagine usage topping 10,000 through July of 2010.  This, of course, assumes that the count of users is accurate and not subject to the vodoo math that has infected so many government estimates lately (like the number of jobs created by stimulus dollars).    

     As far as overall ridership, the actual numbers are probably much worse.  Keep in mind that the Transit System numbers purport to count the numbers of bikes on the racks as opposed to the number of distinct riders.  For example, if one person used the bike rack every weekday (taking their bike to and from work), they would be counted as 10 bikes every week.  As a result, my guess is that the true number of distinct users is a fraction of the pathetic number of bikes on racks.

     The Marketing Director for the Transit System tells the local newspaper that they're "quite pleased with the people using [the bike racks] right away".  "Quite pleased"?  No wonder the bus company is in trouble.  Being "quite pleased" with numbers like these is like having your house burn down and being happy that the frozen pizzas in your refrigerator survived.

     If this were a town like Austin, Texas - with a huge college population and weather conducive to year-round bike riding - bike racks might have made sense.  Needless to say though, Milwaukee, Wisconsin is not Austin, Texas.  Too bad our County Board didn't have the common sense to realize this.

     And by the way, despite what Supervisor Larson might think, tax dollars are tax dollars - whether filtered through the Federal government or not!

     No matter how you cut it, bike racks on County buses has become yet another colossal - and completely predictable - waste of taxpayer dollars by the Milwaukee County Board.

     How many more flights of fancy will Milwaukee County taxpayers have to put up with before we say "enough is enough"? Now that the photo op has passed, how many times over the next five months do you think that Supervisors Jursik and Larson will hoist their bikes onto a bike rack and take public transportation down to the Courthouse?   

     So, other than the pleasure they got from wasting hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars, tell me again why these people are smiling?