if they provide a secondary benefit to the project,
You mean like lowering demand on the rest of the lanes, improving commute times for motor vehicles, lowering pollution, decreasing collisions, improving citizen health? Those kinds of secondary benefits?
Sidenote: It’s almost more depressing that so many of the guys who ran and won on a platform of regressive social policy are also too stupid to see it through.
So many of the shitty laws that get passed like this have blatant loopholes, though I dont think that’s really the appropriate term. It’s because in order for these shitbags to not say the quiet part out loud, they have to write it in such a general way that it can be easily defeated.
Just look at any of the states with “chemtrail” laws. The laws ban the intentional release of substances that modify the climate via changes to solar radiation absorption or the weather. They are intended to prevent anyone from undertaking any efforts to combat climate change, though it’s clear to anyone with a brain that the law clearly applies to the burning of fossil fuels.
Unfortunately, too many of our elected officials (and appointees, civil servants, etc.) are gutless, and will not follow the letter of these laws.
A good politician would do exactly what you said: build bike lanes, and say they secondary benefits are x, y, z. If anyone has trouble with that, let them argue it in court.
Not that it really changes anything, but Idaho has only one city and its small 200k people. Every thing is a town in that state