If Minneapolis City Council President Lisa Bender didn’t exist, Portlandia would have had to invent her.

After a degree from UC Berkeley, Bender worked for a New York City bike lobby, then did a stint in San Francisco, before she went back to Minneapolis to work for Minnesota’s DOT on bike lanes while running the Minneapolis Bicycle Coalition whose burning passion was putting bike lanes everywhere.

Militant bike activists are the dumbest and most loathed figures in urban civics. No group of people is as entitled, obnoxious, or clueless as a bunch of white hipsters in lycra shorts out to convince city officials that giving them more bike lanes will end wars, eliminate racism, and save the planet. There was only one possible career pathway for Bender in Minneapolis. Urban planning through politics as a DFLer.

Once in office, Bender began transforming entire streets into bike lanes. The plan was to have 60% of the residents of Minneapolis using bikes, walking, or taking the bus by 2030. Nobody bothered drawing up a budget for how much this plan would cost because that would have just rained on the parade.

Or rather snowed on it because Minneapolis gets an average of 100 days of snow.

Last year, Minneapolis bike advocates were whining because the police had been ordering them to stay out of the snow. One complained that he was angry that the cops might have terrified “my fellow cyclists and pedestrians who are less privileged than myself… who may have been much more frightened in these sort of interactions than my cismale, white, straight-presenting self.”

The cismale rider was typical of Lisa Bender’s base of upscale hipsters renting condos in the ‘Wedge’.

Meanwhile Lisa Bender was being ticketed for not shoveling snow off her own sidewalk while telling everyone else to do it. In predictable fashion, she blamed the resulting scandal on sexism.

Despite Bender’s ambitions, the bike lanes were largely going unused. And, on top of that, the Minneapolis Bicycle Coalition, which had changed its name to Our Streets, opposed traffic enforcement because it was racist. And how do you keep cars out of bike lanes without traffic regulations?