On Thu, Oct 29, 2009 at 1:56 PM, Eric Westhagen <[email protected]> wrote:
> terms--eating off a plate or in a deep vase. My point was that motorists > would think more kindly toward bicycle infrastructure if there was a license > which not only covered office expenses of the license office as stated in > current law--but a license which in some part paid for the infrastructure > off limits to motorists. Cyclists already bend over backwards making accommodations for motorists. Wasting tax money to build bigger and fancier highways, wasting precious isthmus square footage on giant parking structures to store unused cars, sucking in exhaust smoke every day, pulling to the side of the road so we don't make someone five seconds late to an appointment, risking our lives just to travel from one side of town to the other. I myself follow a labyrinthine route to work every day just so that I don't annoy anyone in a car with my slow speed. And yet you think I should pay extra money just so those same automobile drivers will be happier about my staying out of their way? Tacking on a tax to bike riding just to make non-cyclists happy is the silliest idea I've heard in a long time. Driver's don't even understand how roads are paid for in the first place. Most of them think that gas taxes pay for city streets and complain that cyclists don't pay for street upkeep because they don't buy gas. I predict that instead of drivers suddenly being happy about having cyclists on the roads we'd just get even more of them yelling about how we should be on the "bike paths" they're paying for when they buy their kid a bike for Christmas. The only thing sillier would be if instead of adding 20 minutes to my commute by winding through lesser used residential roads and bike paths I took the direct route to Middleton down University Avenue every morning. Of course to be safe I'd need to take a lane. I'm sure rush hour traffic would be delighted to slow down to my speed for a few miles, and would spend the time thinking about the best ways to raise funds for a bike path. _______________________________________________ Bikies mailing list [email protected] http://lists.danenet.org/listinfo.cgi/bikies-danenet.org
