Eric, you are so woefully misinformed about
the money. Let me help paint a clearer picture:
1.The City of Madison bicycle registration
fee costs $10/four years, or $2.50/year. My ~3000 lb car’s registration
fee is $75 annually. So, since one purpose of the registration fee is
to pay
for building and maintaining roads, and the weight of the vehicle and
the miles
traveled on the road are some of the biggest determinants of the costs
of
maintenance, then a “comparable” bicycle license fee, based on the
weight of the vehicle, would be roughly 30 lbs/3000 lbs x $75 annually,
or 75
cents/year. In other words, bikes are ALREADY required to pay more than
three
times a proportionally “comparable” license fee.
2. As I have previously posted to this
list, a study commissioned by WisDOT in the 1990s concluded that fuel
taxes and
vehicle registration fees accounted for 56% of the costs of public
roads. 44%
of the cost of roads is paid for with something other than fuel taxes
and
vehicle registration, aka user fees. In Wisconsin this means primarily
property taxes, which everyone pays directly or
indirectly. “Program funding” for motor vehicles is therefore NOT
tied to vehicle registration fees, or even registration fees plus fuel
taxes.
So why should bicycles be held to a different standard?
Because motor vehicle user fees pay for
56% of the cost of roads, I suggest we dedicate 56% of the space on
roadways to
the EXCLUSIVE use of motor vehicles – no bikes or pedestrians allowed
on
that 56% of the space. The rest of the space, 44% of the roadway,
should be
divided more or less equally between all road users (yes, including
motor
vehicles would be fair), since everyone pays for that 44% through
property
taxes.
Until the fact that public roads have to
be subsidized (at approximately the same rate as public transit), any
talk
about bicycles (or pedestrians) not paying their share of the roads is
simply
ignorance of the facts.
Chuck
From: Eric Westhagen
[mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Wednesday, October 28, 2009
12:44 PM
To: STRAWSER, Charles ; BikiesSubmissions
Subject: Re: [Bikies] Bicycle
Counts (was Question on bicycle traffic counts)
Dear Group,
For the past week this debate and list of suggestions about bike counts and direction of spending for bike infrastructure avoids the real question of payments. I have not commented before on your local Madison bike issues and advocacy groups have made Madison into one of the few "biking cities" in the country. Yet there is a constant theme that "auto drivers" don't like bicyclists? And why might that be? Certainly most rode some type of bikes as children. They are pedestrians part of their current lives--so just why? They feel it is "us or they?" Certainly that is the general opinion expressed in this listserv--"us or they"--"us or those big bad SUVs."
And all sorts of hockus-pokus can be put forth to show why bikes deserve all the spending they have gotten in the greater Madison area. Nevertheless--the bikes are a minority--an elite, if you will. So, why not have a real money raising license fee? Then bikes can put their heads up high and declare to autos that they are really on equal footing in the payments department. Why not an annual fee with fines for non compliance? There is still no gas tax money--but a comparable annual bike license fee would go along way toward making a case for bike infrastructure.
>From the Web at the close of '07 was this:---- "[In Wisconsin, state law prohibits officials from collecting more in bike registration fees than it costs to run the registration program, said Arthur Ross, pedestrian-bike coordinator for the city of Madison. The best-known pay-off of that city's mandatory registration is also enabling police to return stolen bikes, Ross said.
"Certainly, I would not want to see program funding tied to bike registration," Ross added. "We need a whole lot more money than were ever going to raise through bicycle registration."
In Madison , about 20,000 bikes have valid registrations, said John Rider, bicycle registration coordinator. The $10 registration lasts four years. The program helps transportation planners, "get a handle on how many bicycles we have in the city so we can have some more say in trying to have bicycle facilities," Rider said. "It gives us a voice."
It was pressure from cycling advocates that eventually led Minnesota lawmakers to repeal that state's registration program several years ago, said Anderson, the bicycle and pedestrian coordinator. ]" ----------. . . .--------
Eric
