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Blocking parallel imports ensures only a select number of vendors can bid, driving up prices. Usually there’s a small sop to American labor, well-publicized in the media with photo-ops of people in hard hats – e.g. the 250 jobs heralded for the Sprinter order – but the bulk of the extra money goes elsewhere. It creates makework for consultants and lobbyists.

And even if it were more effective. it would have a cost. It is not smart to burden your preferred transportation with extra costs. If you want to advocate for labor, advocate for it universally. Because if railroad operators are burdened with half-baked American liberalism while auto consumers are free to Buy Japan, Buy Korea, and very soon Buy China, you end up with the epic fail that is Amtrak.

Sadly, new generations seem determined to make the same mistakes. California’s HSR advocates wanted a requirement that their trains receive 100% of their power from renewable sources. That sounds great, but it’s really very stupid. It is hard enough to actually get HSR built without decimating its potential profitability in order to make it even greener than it naturally friggin’ is. Go ahead and sign a paper saying that all energy use must be 100% renewable, if it’s as easy as that.

Unless you want your favorite projects to fail and your favorite policies to be discredited along with them, please do not load every possible noble passion into one advocacy basket.

“It’s not really a news-flash—if you run a red light and you get caught, you’re going to get a ticket,” said Caroline Samponaro, bicycle advocacy coordinator for the non-profit group Transportation Alternatives. “We’re moving from bicycling as a fringe sub-culture, to bicycling being a transportation choice for any New Yorker. And along with that comes a serious investment in making it safe, but also an importance for people to consider their role in making the streets safer through their own behavior.”

As long as there are red lights gazing down at us above calm intersections that literally everyone and their grandmother safely “runs” across—or walks, mostly—TA’s relentless cowardly messaging on this subject sets cyclists up for failure and scorn. Speaking of silly cycling sub-cultures, there only a tiny fringe of the fringe that claims to strictly obey every traffic law, in every circumstance. Everyone else—the mainstream, if you will—is more practical when walking and cycling. Everyone else, according to TA’s framing, is a dangerous scofflaw undeserving of the meager accommodations we have. And by the way we happen to pay for these things, with taxes—the government should be out there writing thank you notes for being so damn efficient at going between our places of work, commerce, and recreation.

But instead of challenging the unbalanced absurdity of traffic laws that lump pedestrians and cyclists in with the motorists who accidentally kill them by the bushel, TA lends them credibility in the vain hope of being patted on the head by indifferent authorities. It’s worse than doing nothing. We all have the responsibility to promote government by and for the people. It is our duty to demand reasonable and fair laws. Shirking that for TA’s submissive brand of establishment-friendly “advocacy” is a disgrace.