Hoods Up – Street Smart Cyclist
The Freakonomics blog asks this question:
Do bicyclists contribute their fair share to the transportation network? An Oregon lawmaker thinks not, and has proposed a law requiring cyclists to pay a $54 registration fee every two years. A Portland bike blog interviewed the lawmaker in question, who explained the proposal this way: “[B]ikes have used the roads in this state forever and have never contributed a penny. The only people that pay into the system are those people who buy motor vehicle licenses and registration fees.” Considering the enormous benefits of investments in bicycle infrastructure, can even a tax-hating bicyclist concede his point, at a registration cost of just over 7 cents a day?
This idea is so full of fail that I don’t even know where to start. For one, there’s the massive public subsidization of driving, to the tune of billions of dollars, in a multitude of ways. There’s the city layouts designed with cars in mind. There’s the attitude toward parking (it’s a right) and ever-wider lanes (a necessity).
Moving beyond that, you could easily point out the HUGE externalities that come with driving (in terms of pollution, global warming, traffic accidents, oil dependency, etc.) and note that riding a bike incurs none of those. With this in mind, you might further suggest that governments generally ought to tax behavior they don’t approve of in order to subsidize positive behavior.
This helps to counter the only “reasonable” argument for bike registration: that it helps to keep tabs on accidents, thefts, and so on. But since bike riding is pretty valuable, why not offer a rebate of $10 bucks for registering your bike?
As if all that wasn’t enough, one might also be inclined to remember that riding a bike does no damage to roads – while crawling over them in a metal box that weighs several tons tears them to shreds.
In short, this is a stupid stupid idea that only sounds vaguely plausible because of a society steeped in the valorization of the automobile as the symbol of freedom and all that is good in the world. In an era when we ought to start cutting back on the perverse incentives in favor of car travel, proposals like this suggest we still have a long way to go.