Should bicyclists have to pay for registration, insurance and road tax for their bicycles?

What's your take on those, vja4Him?

Registration fees to make such a program self-supporting, along with general inconvenience and lack of benefit to the bike owner, are too high for many (most?) bicycle owners to participate voluntarily, and enforcement isn't practical. That's been the case with nearly all places that have tried such programs. San Jose is a recent example that stopped bike registration.

Home owner's insurance, and I think some renter's policies, cover liability for bicycle collisions. Damage due to bike crashes tends to be low, often below any insurance threshold. I don't see big societal problems of damage caused by bikes, as there are with uninsured motorists.

Should bicyclists have to pay for registration, insurance and road tax for their bicycles?

You do know that there's no such thing as a road tax, right?

If cyclists have to pay a road tax, then I think all road users should have to pay a road tax. Otherwise it's a punitive measure, taxing cyclists when no other road user pays a tax for the roads.

Oh-- maybe you were thinking that the gas tax pays for all the streets we get to ride on, and since we don't buy gas, we aren't paying for the streets?

Check out today's Monday Round-up for an illuminating article on the Streetsblog network about how the gas tax doesn't come anywhere near to paying for roads.

Besides all that-- I'm a cyclist, and I also own and drive a car. So I already pay the gas tax, thanks.

I also have insurance (house and car) and a driver's license. So I think I'm covered, thanks again.

In general, I think that everyone should have to take the written test again when they renew their license, with an extra section specifically on laws pertaining to bicycling and walking. That would educate a large swath of the population. Heck, make it open book even, like the notary public test.

Do Roads Pay For Themselves? Setting the Record Straight on Transportation Funding

2011-01-04
Executive Summary

Highways do not – and, except for brief periods in our nation’s history, never have – paid for themselves through the taxes that highway advocates label “user fees.” Yet highway advocates continue to suggest they do in an attempt to secure preferential access to scarce public resources and to shape how those resources are spent.
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... highway “user fees” pay only about half the cost of building and maintaining the nation’s network of highways, roads and streets.
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To make the right choices for America’s transportation future, the nation should take a smart approach to transportation investments, one that weighs the full costs and benefits of those investments and then allocates the costs of those investments fairly across society.

I am sceptical of those numbers. Oregon vehicle registration is among the lowest nationally and its fuel taxes are just a bit above average, so how do those figures end up so much higher than the national average?

Capital Improvement Program(CIP) is a smaller document starting on page 91 of the larger PDF. Page 107 of the large PDF (p. 16 of the CIP doc) has pie chart for CIP funding. General Transportation Revenue (GTR; gas tax, vehicle registration, parking and fines) makes up 38% of the pie, second largest after Grants & Contracts.
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"that study talks only about federal subsidies, measured in terms of the expenditure allocations of fuel taxes. it does not directly address where every dollar that is spent on each mode of transportation ultimately comes from. even where it says 40 percent of the federal highway trust fund is spent on things other than road, it lists a bunch of stuff that relates fairly directly to road infrastructure maintenance, development, and planning."

"Using Federal Highway Administration data, Subsidyscope calculated that in 2007, user fees accounted for 51 percent of all road funding—a 10 percent decline over the previous decade and the lowest level since the creation of the Federal Highway Trust Fund in 1957."

The pie-chart you reference below deals with funding of State and Federal highways. City and county roads typically get far below the quoted 35% of their funding from the gas tax. One study in Seattle showed that .44% of 2009 Seattle street funding came from gas taxes. (http://www.publicola.net/2010/08/31/...for-the-roads/)

Registration fees to make such a program self-supporting, along with general inconvenience and lack of benefit to the bike owner, are too high for many (most?) bicycle owners to participate voluntarily, and enforcement isn't practical. That's been the case with nearly all places that have tried such programs. San Jose is a recent example that stopped bike registration.

Home owner's insurance, and I think some renter's policies, cover liability for bicycle collisions. Damage due to bike crashes tends to be low, often below any insurance threshold. I don't see big societal problems of damage caused by bikes, as there are with uninsured motorists.

Yet another op-ed rant about those scofflaw, dead-beat bicyclists (y'know they're all alike, doncha?), all the same stuff that has been debunked time after time. Sheesh, why does The Columbian even publish such junk? They don't publish racist or sexist rants; isn't it time they moved past people with a grudge against bike riders?

I like the reply from Irish Nativeson on that Columbian letter. "Jim must have bumped his head drinking the Kool-Aide out of the toilet."

You may notice some comments from facebook user Bob Larimer on the bottom of that letter. I also read another bicycle related letter for fun that The Columbian published. http://www.columbian.com/news/2011/j...und-vancouver/ Good ol' Bob had some more intelligence to share with us all.