Biden’s Bureaucrats Outlaw Humor on the Highway

SACRAMENTO — One of my favorite Soviet-era jokes involved a man who was admiring a shiny American car on a Moscow street. Another man approached and also admired it. The first man said: “What a beautiful Russian car. What magnificent, magnificent work we do here.” The second man called him a fool: “Don’t you know that that is an American car, not a Russian car?” The first man replied: “Yes. I know it’s an American car. But I don’t know you.”

The Soviet Union was many things — all of them awful — but it was most obviously a bureaucratic hellscape, where endless rules, forms, lines, and fear of upsetting some government informant cast a shadow over every part of life. After taking a trip there in 1982, the Cato Institute’s Edward Crane found not just “drabness and grayness” and “rudeness and surliness.” He found it remarkable that “you virtually never see people laughing, smiling or just seeming to enjoy themselves.”

A bureaucratic society is a humorless society. That’s why Soviet jokes proliferated under the radar — and why authorities punished people for uttering them. So it’s no surprise that as American society has become more rule-bound, with our citizens more dependent on dictates from various agencies, we’ve become surlier. Bureaus attract rule-followers and devotees of conformity. I suspect humor punctures the pointlessness of the whole enterprise.

The latest example is a minor one, but it’s instructive. “In December, the Federal Highway Administration [FHWA], an agency within the U.S. Department of Transportation, issued new guidance on traffic-safety messages: Signs should avoid language that uses pop-culture references or humor,” reports the Wall Street Journal. Many state road agencies, it notes, post messages on electronic signs such as “Driving basted is for turkeys” and “Get your head out of your apps.” 

Those signs are silly but harmless and funny in a corny way. The transportation bureaucrats claim the signs are distracting, but a 2020 Virginia Transportation Research Council study cited by the Journal found that “[m]essages about distracted driving, messages that include humor, and messages that use word play and rhymes rank high among multiple measures of effectiveness.” Maybe federal highway officials might focus their wrath on misspent highway funds instead, but that would take serious effort.

One light-hearted local freeway sign has been raising eyeballs since the 1980s, when the head of maintenance for Caltrans installed a sign at the beginning of Highway 50 west of Sacramento: “Ocean City, MD 3073.” It’s a reference to the end point of the same highway. It has received much attention over the years and has been stolen twice, according to the Sacramento Bee. I hope no scold at the FHWA notices, or it might be replaced by a mileage marker for Carson City. 

There’s no sense analyzing the pros and cons of humorous road signs because, well, the brouhaha isn’t really about public safety. It’s about the nature of bureaucrats and bureaucracies — their determination to exert control and conformity and quash anyone who gets a little silly. I’ve been doing a deep dive on transportation planning and urbanism lately and have found that people who fixate on these issues tend to be among the most self-serious types one will find. They’re all about ending Americans’ “car addiction” and helping “car-brained suburbanites” abandon their “murder mobiles” and replace them with bicycles, e-bikes and transit trips.

One would think that in our federalist system, state road planners would have the authority to determine the specific nature of trivialities such as sign messaging. But federal funds always come with strings attached. Just as academics and activists have been consumed by a philosophy of road-diets, climate change, and light rail, so, too, have transportation bureaucrats. I often refer to the “Congestion Lobby,” which sees heavy traffic as a way to prod us into car alternatives.

Some state agencies are pushing back. “Florida state officials have turned down an influx of $320 million of federal dollars to address infrastructure and emissions, claiming the money is politicized because it’s meant to address climate change,” reports Business Insider. The Biden administration and U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg seem far more interested in this anti-car agenda than in building the roads, bridges, and freeways that Americans depend upon.

The FHWA recently announced new regulations that force state departments of transportation and metropolitan agencies to track transportation-related greenhouse emissions. Such tracking and other carbon-reduction measures are a prerequisite for receiving their share of $27 billion in new federal transportation funding. It’s reminiscent of California’s approach, which dismisses new freeway building in favor of boondoggles such as high-speed rail.

The federal measures include programs that promote transit-oriented development, electric-vehicle charging infrastructure, bicycle lanes, and the like. If you want to have a chuckle, spend time on social media debating bicycle enthusiasts who earnestly believe Americans should rely on pedal power to get their groceries and commute to work. Because most Americans live in suburbs, these folks demand nothing less than the restructuring of our car-dependent communities.

All of this is oh-so-serious business. It’s almost too easy to find overwrought pronouncements about the evils of cars or impending doom. This quotation is from Vice President Kamala Harris at recent COP28 climate talks in Dubai:

Around the world, there are those who seek to slow or stop our progress. Leaders who deny climate science, delay climate action and spread misinformation. Corporations that greenwash their climate inaction and lobby for billions of dollars in fossil fuel subsidies.

Normal Americans might want to say, “Lighten up.” We live in one of the most prosperous nations the world has ever known, with a transportation system that promotes independence and prosperity. We can address climate change without all the hysteria and bureaucratic societal reordering — and perhaps we can even keep our sense of humor in the process.