I'll start off with a joke:
Two guys are sitting in a plane and one asks the other "What time is it?" and the other responds "No you can't marry my daughter." The first guy is like WTF? and the other explains that if he tells him the time they will start chatting and become friends. And with being friends he will eventually be invited to the house where he'll meet his beautiful daughter, fall in love and will ask for her hand in marriage. So to simplify things he just answered the critical part of the line of questioning.
For JF I think his decades of experience has lead him to this kind of reasoning, it may very well be that the process of answering a question eventually comes down to bike lanes (No you can't marry my daughter) but even so that does not make "No you can't marry my daughter" (bike lanes) a valid response to "What time is it?" There is a more appropriate place and response to interrupt this process then jumping to the "heart" of the matter.
With JF I remain pessimistic that he can provide an appropriate response for the discussion at hand without some giant leap in logic (positive spin) or trolling his anti-bikeway agenda (negative spin.)
And sort of bouncing of Gene's post if I had to pick one or the other I too would prefer HH over JF and the fact that next week is going to be the opposite is ... well something to think about.