As semi-autonomous and autonomous cars become the norm, I would adore to see obtaining a drivers license ratchet up in difficulty in order to remove dangerous human drivers from the road.
Cyclists are not licensed and their bicycles are not tagged or inspected for safe operation on roads, unlike motorists.
Cyclists are rarely subjected to traffic law enforcement despite demanding all of the rights that motorists pay for and are licensed for.
Cyclists are a danger to themselves and others while operating in the same area as motorists, but are not required to carry insurance or wear safety equipment, while motorists are held to more stringent regulation.
In a nutshell, cyclists are free-riding risk takers who are arrogant to boot. When they start acting like motorists and pay taxes like motorists and are fined like motorists for violating the law, I will happily change my opinion.
You’re absolutely right, roadways are insanely expensive. That’s why it’s infuriating to see entire lanes expropriated for cyclists.
For the record, I support closing that gap, in addition to taxing the odometer on electric vehicles which don’t contribute to gas tax revenue but use roadways like other motorists.
How many cyclists can fit in a space of one car? Or, would you rather that every cyclist was in a car instead? Would that increase or decrease congestion?
> occupy road space that was created through taxes on motorists while paying nothing for these benefits
So roads get funded in full by motorists and cyclists can't possibly also own motorized vehicles and they don't pay tax that definitely doesn't contribute to the roads that they surely wear down at a rate that's not on the order of tens to hundreds of thousands lower than cars. Oh and 16 lane highways are built because of all the damn cyclists clogging up the roads.
> Cyclists are not licensed and their bicycles are not tagged or inspected for safe operation on roads, unlike motorists.
A cyclist on the road is only a danger to himself. A motorist can mow down a school trip on a pedestrian crossing on a whim.
The latter two points just repeat the above. Yes, driving a 2 ton machine at 80 mph is going to have be a little more restricted than a 20 kg bicycle at 20 mph.
But the tax is still constantly being collected even though the rate isn't going up. This is like saying electricity must be free if you haven't had a rate hike in a while.
I don't think you understood what you wrote. Non-motorists subsidize motorists.
Feel free to look up the % of funding for roads that gas tax or w/e accounts for in your country.
Also look up the fourth power law, that'll tell you how much tax a cyclist should pay compared to a driver in terms of road wear. Say a cyclist should pay $1, how much should you?
Then check how many millions it costs to build a mile of highway and internalize the fact that cyclists are not allowed there. Nor do they use car parking. Nor do they cause 40 thousand deaths per year in the USA. What's the cost of human life again?
Once you figure all that out, we'll be ready to start talking about pollution and its effects.
Paying for our highways circa 1993 [1].
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_taxes_in_the_United_Sta...
Complaining about cyclists getting bike lanes is like complaining about pedestrians getting footpaths.
Road wear is not the main issue. Roads will deteriorate whether they’re used or not. They will deteriorate faster with heavier traffic, sure. But deterioration from temperature cycling, road salt application, and weather happens whether they’re used or not. If cyclists want to use this infrastructure, they should contribute to its upkeep.
If cyclists have a car and contribute by paying these taxes and fees, then let’s build a regulatory regime that exempts these users from cyclist fees and taxes. The point here is to make those using the infrastructure pay for their share of upkeep and their contribution to congestion.
Deer are only a danger to themselves too, right? People never experience damage to their vehicle or personal injury when they hit a deer? The damage and risk is not proportional to both parties, sure. But it is false to say that drivers experience no risk of damage or bodily injury when in an accident with a cyclist who disobeys traffic laws. Cyclists should be insured at whatever rate is necessary to protect against this risk.
Your school children example is not really applicable here. We’re discussing cyclists who want to be treated like motorists but refuse to act like them and obey common traffic rules. That is about as far as you can get from from an innocent group of school children crossing the street with the flashing red stop sign on the school bus activated.
Roads deteriorate whether they’re used or not. If cyclists want to use them, they should pay to maintain them. I don’t know why you find this idea so controversial. Adjust the fees commensurate with their weight if you want, but by definition those fees should not be zero.
Roads are obviously expensive, hence why it is repulsive that cyclists pay nothing to build or maintain them, but actively increase the danger on them and degrade the efficiency of using them.
Pollution? In what world do cyclists not require fuel to operate? Cyclists use the most expensive fuel possible to operate: consumable calories. We burn fuel to operate machinery to produce food, then transport it to stores and then transport it home, cook it, and then use only a portion of the available calories to operate a bicycle because the human body isn’t 100% efficient.
You’re delusional if you somehow think cycling is good for the environment.
By your logic, this is fine because the kids aren’t pooping in the park which degrades it less.
Never mind that the park was created for dog owners, and their enjoyment of it is impaired by these new restrictions placed on them by people who shouldn’t even be there.
To be like that, almost everyone would need to own a dog, and everyone including the non-dog-owners would have things delivered by dog, the dog park would have to actively block access to most places, and the fees for the dog owners pay for the dog park would have to be insufficient for the dog park and the park instead subsidised by general taxation even from the people who only get stuff delivered by dog… which would be quite fair and reasonable because almost all the damage to the dog park that the maintenance fees would need to cover, would be due to specifically the delivery dogs.
The actual point of the dog park fees in this scenario would be to reduce the usage of the dog park, due to everyone riding their dogs everywhere. Which is a heck of a mental image.
Roads aren't for pleasure, they're economic infrastructure that some people happen to enjoy.
You are using a state service whenever you use the road. It is a subsidy that people who are the largest offenders consistently choose to entrench.
Allowing cyclists to run red lights significantly reduces mortality. Waiting at an intersection is provably one of the most dangerous moments for cyclists.
Your “obvious” example is something that’s unknowable to you as an individual. You have no knowledge of the effective throughput of the road ahead of you.
The disdain you have for cyclists seems bizarre and misplaced. The idea that it’s a double standard is wrong — the standards are set to minimize harm and maximize effective throughput. Having separate rules is entirely consistent here. If we subsidized the lifestyle of cyclists as much as motorists, this would be a non problem.
Thank you for sharing that. I hope you feel better now.
> Allowing cyclists to run red lights significantly reduces mortality. Waiting at an intersection is provably one of the most dangerous moments for cyclists.
The second sentence of the abstract of this study would imply you're ignorant, but I won't stoop to name calling:
"Red light running violation of bicyclists is the major contributory factor to the crash involvement of bicyclists worldwide."
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S22143...
> Your "obvious" example is something that's unknowable to you as an individual. You have no knowledge of the effective throughput of the road ahead of you.
If I'm following a cyclist who is going 20mph in a 30mph zone, they're contributing to congestion. This is obvious to every human, even those who have never even seen modern infrastructure or the vehicles that operate on it. It happens when walking in hallways or on stairways. When someone is slow and people can't get around them, you get congestion.
> The disdain you have for cyclists seems bizarre and misplaced
I don't have any disdain for cyclists, only those dumb enough to try and coexist with motorists and arrogant enough to try and change traffic laws and infrastructure to fit their needs at the expense of everyone else.
I ride my bicycle at the park with my kids, and partly why I feel so passionately about this is because I don't want my kids riding in situations where they are very likely to get themselves injured or killed.
You're absolutely right, waiting at an intersection is one of the most dangerous moments for cyclists. This is because riding on roads with motorists is the most dangerous moment for cyclists.
There is no way to make it safe for cyclists to coexist with motorists. Mixing the two results in more people getting injured and dying. This should be reason enough to ban them from roads with motor vehicles, putting aside every other issue I've raised.
Allowing them to run red lights is a recipe for disaster. Use your brain: motorists reasonably and rightfully expect to have the right of way when the light is green. Literally every other moving object yields to them at intersections with a signal. Making an exception for cyclists will result in more people running red lights, and more corresponding injuries and deaths.
> The idea that it's a double standard is wrong — the standards are set to minimize harm and maximize effective throughput.
Go look up what the phrase double standard means. It is by definition a double standard. You can defend the double standard, but that doesn't change the fact that it is one.
> If we subsidized the lifestyle of cyclists as much as motorists, this would be a non-problem.
If by this you mean we should reduce the amount of subsidization to zero for both, I agree completely. Infrastructure should be paid for with use fees. If cyclists want to use it they should pay for it. If motorists want to use it, they should pay for it. Currently motorists contribute, while cyclists do not.
Dog owners are the motorists. Dedicated infrastructure was built specifically for them to use.
Parents with kids are the cyclists. They want to restrict how that infrastructure is used so that they can enjoy it in the way that is most convenient for them, at the expense of the dog owners.
Initially, dog owners used the park freely without any interference from parents with kids. But at some point, parents with kids felt they were entitled to use the dog park in ways it was never intended to be used, and changed regulations to restrict dog owners enjoyment of the park.
I intentionally left out any discussion of how these things are paid for to highlight the unfairness of this situation. It doesn't matter how it's paid for, since the infrastructure already exists for a specific purpose and is being used for that purpose.
To include the finance side of things in this analogy, it would be like funding the dog park with a special sales tax on dog food, which increases the unfairness of the whole situation when it's taken over by the parents with kids, who paid nothing to maintain or build it.
In case you don't understand how analogies work, they highlight critical similarities between two situations that are otherwise dissimilar to help understand the underlying concept. They aren't parallel in all respects, nor can they be.
If your best argument against my analogy is to introduce irrelevant dissimilarities to distract from the obvious point of the analogy, I'll take that as an endorsement it was effective.
https://www.nytimes.com/1869/03/08/archives/velocipedes-thei... | https://archive.is/UDhZf
Bike cops in NYC in the late 1800s were likely more common than cars.
https://flatironnomad.nyc/history/brief-history-of-bicycling... | https://web.archive.org/web/20250713044710/https://flatironn...
> In 1896, then New York City Police Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt launched the first-ever group of bicycle-riding officers. This team evolved into a 100-member organization with its own station stated Evan Friss, co-curator of the Museum of the City of New York’s 2019 exhibit Cycling in the City: A 200-Year History[0].
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20250319112028/https://www.mcny....
By the time this film was created in 1911, cars existed, but they had to share the road with pedestrians, cable cars, and horse carriages.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rx5sUa_2SD8
> This documentary travelogue of New York City in 1911 was made by a team of cameramen with the Swedish company Svenska Biografteatern, who were sent around the world to make pictures of well-known places.
> Opening and closing with shots of the Statue of Liberty, the film also includes New York Harbor; Battery Park and the John Ericsson statue; the elevated railways at Bowery and Worth Streets; Broadway sights like Grace Church and Mark Cross; the Flatiron Building on Fifth Avenue; and Madison Avenue. Produced only three years before the outbreak of World War I, the everyday life of the city recorded here—street traffic, people going about their business—has a casual, almost pastoral quality that differs from the modernist perspective of later city-symphony films like Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler’s "Manhatta" (1921). Take note of the surprising and remarkably timeless expression of boredom exhibited by a young girl filmed as she was chauffeured along Broadway in the front seat of a convertible limousine.
Jaywalking wasn't even really a concept until ~1915. It's legal again in NYC as of last year. Jaywalking laws against pedestrians and other non-drivers could be viewed as a taking from or enclosure of the commons; in this case, roads as public thoroughfares for one and all. In this light, the behavior of drivers towards cyclists is a continuation of their hostility towards horse carriage users and pedestrians.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaywalking
https://www.cnn.com/travel/jaywalking-legalized-new-york-cit... | https://archive.is/Y2MCk
Folks have been cycling in NYC long before cars were common. Before that, folks were using the roads for all manner of pursuits. Roads are tools for living, and they're for everyone who needs them if a better option more suited for your mode of transportation isn't available.