Bicycle License Plates
‘Tis the season for the automobile industry sellouts to attack bicycle infrastructure in our Canadian cities once again. Usually, they lay in wait until the coldest days of winter when ridership dips. Inevitably, there is always someone who brings up the issue of bicycle licensing. Here’s a screenshot of something that showed up in my news feed the other day.
First of all, I would like to express my appreciation for the transparency of the Edmonton Journal for covering half of my screen with an advertisement that shows me precisely who they have sold their charter right of freedom of the press to; the automobile industry. It’s not every day a conservative leaning media sellout is this blatantly transparent about their motivations for publishing a letter. This letter, written by Rick Neen, is surprisingly well penned; I suspect the editors at the Journal edited the letter to bring it up to this standard, because it’s quite rare for someone to achieve this level of penmanship while remaining uncritical in repeating automobile industry lies and propaganda. However, no amount of penmanship can cover up the cognitive dissonance of someone who starts out by stating, “I am not against promoting bike use” in the first sentence, then in the very next sentence states, “I think the city should justify their insane planned expenditure on bike lanes in these times.” Seriously, if you’re not against promoting bike use, then how would the expenditure on bike lanes be considered insane? Of course the city should justify any expenditure, as this is a cornerstone of good governance, but to consider it insane without first understanding the justification tells us straight away that Rick is not being very honest when he tells us he is not against promoting bike use, fortunately making him as transparant as the paper that published his letter.
Next, Rick comes up with an unoriginal “idea” that bicycle users should pay for the privilege of having their own “roads,” as he puts it. Rick tells us that car drivers do this by registering their vehicle and buying their license plates. It seems Rick doesn’t quite understand how much cars are subsidized in our cities, because the registeration and licensing of cars is not what pays for the roads in our Canadian cities. The building and maintenance of our road infrastructure is paid for by municipal property taxes. This means that anyone who owns or rents property in a city are paying for the road infrastructure in that city. The money Rick pays for his registration and licensing of his vehicle barely pays for the salaries of the bureaucrats and their offices and equipment for running the licensing and registration process of motor vehicles.
People like Rick need to understand the reason why vehicles are registered and licensed isn’t to pay for the roads they drive upon; that is a privilege the public generously allows to law-abiding motorists. The reason for this is because a car is a powerful machine that is easily capable of hurting and killing people in many different ways. They can also be used in various crime schemes such as smuggling and human trafficking. The police, who are also funded by property tax payers, need a way to determine ownership of motor vehicles in order to ensure accountability.
The roads are a long established public good for the benefit of all, not just car owners. The problem is that they are often taken over by car owners who tend to abuse the privilege of driving their cars on our roads. Because they take up so much space compared to, say, a bicycle, cities often experience gridlock. This means public money needs to be spent on expensive traffic control solutions like computer controlled traffic lights with sensors embedded in the road to detect traffic flow, diverting funds away from other programs such as improving public transit. More taxes need to go to funding the policing of motor vehicle use, to enforce laws that people are not following, further subsidizing the car industry. More public road infrastructure needs to go to parking, often dedicating an entire lane for this purpose, so that someone can just leave their big car somewhere so they are close enough to where they want to go without experiencing the discomfort of some exercise. Meanwhile, they put other road users at risk, namely cyclists, because they become impatient and inattentive, or sometimes they’re just a homicidal maniac who probably shouldn’t be driving a car. And so cyclists, who have a legal right to use the roads they have paid for through their property taxes either directly or indirectly through the payment of rent, are asking for a protected lane of their own just so they won’t get killed. Then the self-entitled car owner who forgets that driving their 200+ horsepower 4000+ pound passenger vehicle built for five but used only by one is a privilege think that something is being taken away from them, when in reality, something is being given back.
The automobile industry is only interested in taking more of our money. There is a lot of profit to be made in this business. They do not want people to ride a bicycle or use public transit, because that represents a loss in revenue. So they have worked very long and hard to undermine and discredit any mode of transportation that doesn’t profit the automobile industry. They have been extremely successful at this campaign, to the point that they are now a victim of their own success. Gridlock continues to be a problem in cities even in absence of bicycle lanes. In Southern Ontario, we have a highway with both collector and express lanes, twelve or more lanes of highway traffic, that slows to a crawl with congestion each and every day. The cost of automobile ownership is driving up inflation and the cost of living. To buy a car, people are signing on to loans that will take them eight years to pay off, while the cars themselves are engineered to only last that long, keeping car owners in a perpetual cycle of car payments. Meanwhile, the greater number of cars on the road comes at the expense of property tax payers, taking money and real estate away from public transit users and making other modes of transportation like bicycle inherently unsafe. If you’re wondering what’s keeping you poor, look no further than your car.
The problems don’t end there. Cars introduce a myriad of health issues both for the people who use them and for those who just happen to be around them. Often people will complain that they cannot ride a bicycle due to a disability that, more often than not, was caused by an automobile. In the best case, a car leads to a more sedentary lifestyle, which is known to contribute greatly to obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and other health conditions. The health effects of simply pumping gas into your car are so well known, many gas stations have long since switched over to a “Self serve” model in order to avoid workplace liability cases. If you wonder why cancer rates are so high today, you really don’t need to look any further than the gas pump. This doesn’t even consider the tens of thousands of crashes that happen every year in the City of Edmonton alone; out of which the numbers of injuries or deaths in each of those years are still in the thousands.
People have had enough. We see what is going on, and we can see where this path will lead us if we allow it to continue. We need to make room for safe bicycle transportation if we expect any kind of growth in our cities. Cities that do not grow fall into decay and die, and cities can only grow from the bottom up. The expectation that everyone should own a car to use a public good such as a road safely not only puts undue stress on those starting out who could contribute to the growth of a city, it also creates the congestion that makes everyone’s lives miserable. If you love your city and you love cars, you should want greater infrastructure dedicated to cyclists; the more people there are on bike, the fewer there are contributing to gridlock, and everyone gets to reap the benefits of the economic growth that provides opportunities and better quality of life to greater numbers of people. We are only trying to fix a problem caused by cars in the first place. This is your justification, Rick. To not want more bicycle infrastructure is what’s really insane.