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Comment by newZWhoDis | Hacker News Reader

If you actually cared about safety you’d require airbags, crumple zones, licensing, insurance, and crash testing for cyclists. You’d also ban them on roadways with speed limits far above what a human can reasonably propel a bike to, since dV is a major driver of accidents and lethality.

Expecting a 15MPH ~250lb bike with none of those features to interface safely with 55MPH 5,000+lb traffic is moronic. You’re better off building parallel infrastructure and taxing cyclists to pay for it via licensing.

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> If you actually cared about safety you’d require airbags, crumple zones, licensing, insurance, and crash testing for cyclists.

I've crashed on a bicycle, more than once. I've crashed even on a motorcycle (on a racetrack). The damage that is caused to myself, to my machine, and the surrounds, is tiny compared to the damage that is caused by an automobile with (at least) an order of magnitude more mass: a friend of mine had a car go through the front of his house, and the physical carnage was impressive (no person was injured thankfully).

And every time licensing has been looked at for cyclists, it has found to be a dumb idea:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uj47qJ-UUno

> You’re better off building parallel infrastructure and taxing cyclists to pay for it via licensing.

Cars cause much more damage to roads than bicyclists, and they should pay proportionally:

* https://www.investopedia.com/gas-taxes-and-what-you-need-to-...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law

And bicyclists already pay for local roads through local property taxes:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wjv8WQu92c0

The problem is that roads are now practically monopolized for private vehicle use to the exclusion of everyone else, and the costs are not fully paid for by drivers. Higher density areas subsidize lower density ones, and road infrastructure is a big part of that:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI

> You’re better off building parallel infrastructure and taxing cyclists to pay for it via licensing.

I think it's worth talking about taxation here. Roads are generally in the top 3 costs for most municipalities along with police and firefighting.

Even when you add together tolls, gas tax, vehicle excise taxes, it doesn't cover the costs of road maintenance, and needs to be supplemented by sales tax, building property tax, etc.

If bike infrastructure reduces the number of cars, SUVs, and pickups that are on the road just to carry one person around, the reduction on road wear means it's a total cost savings.

(For what it's worth, I think the same argument applies also to buses.)

My smallish town budgets less than $14M/year for streets and $300M/year for K-12 education. I would not be surprised to find that ratio generally repeated anywhere in the US.

250lb bike? Wtf are you talking about. The heaviest e-bikes are like 50lb. Bikes are so safe that they require none of these extra steps that cars require, because cars are much more dangerous. It’s simple physics. There have been dozens of pedestrians and cyclists killed by cars in my city this year, and none by bicycles ever, to my knowledge. More evidence that cars require more strict licensing and safety measures.

Not safely interfacing on existing roads — that’s 100% true. And cyclists would love parallel infrastructure. Problem is, in the US, it’s seen as anti-car (and therefore anti-american), and so is much less common than it should be. But in the Netherlands, this is how they make biking one of the primary transport modes.

> You’d also ban them [bikes] on roadways with speed limits far above what a human can reasonably propel a bike to ... You’re better off building parallel infrastructure

They are and we do? You know those signs when you get on a highway that say things like pedestrians/bicycles/horses/etc prohibited? That's what those are for.

If you're proposing that the rest of the roads' speed limits be lowered to what's achievable by the average cyclist, then why not just advocate for that directly? Personally I don't appreciate the oversigning trend, generally preferring to drive at a decent clip as conditions permit most of the time, but also being content to follow the rare bicycle at that vehicle's speed until an opportunity to pass with a wide berth and clear oncoming visibility.

The real problem here is drivers who expect to be able to continue driving at whatever speed they want regardless of who else is using the road. Apart from when I was cycling myself, I used to experience this pretty harshly while shoveling snow. Half the drivers would treat me as a human being and slow and go mostly into the other lane. The other half would continue their speed right at me, ostensibly thinking it was acceptable to create close call danger for fun and spray me with shit from their tires (ie not just assault but outright battery). Similar situation with a dinky ride on lawnmower. It's funny how the ratio changed when I started doing the snow/grass along the road with a compact farm tractor - apparently the prospect of assholes' cars being significantly damaged effects their ability to see!

As far as taxes, municipal real estate taxes more than pay for the meager wear bicycles cause to the road. And as a general proponent of freedom I certainly wouldn't want to implement multiple new draconian papers please mandates just to assign taxes a few percent more accurately.

> "You’re better off building parallel infrastructure and taxing cyclists to pay for it via licensing."

yes, a parallel infrastructure would be welcomed by current cyclists and by many of those who now abstain from cycling because of persecution and threat of death on the roads.

If everyone can agree that a parallel infrastructure is needed, the funding question is trivial. The overall costs could even be negative due to the reduced need to subsidize car usage (also health benefits of cycling, etc.). If it makes you happy, we can let little kids slap a sticker on their bike to take of the "licensing".

Why is there 55mph 5,000+lb traffic?

Because the solution to a housing shortage caused by overly restrictive zoning is urban sprawl. To support urban sprawl we have cars and long commutes. Cars create problems for other cars so we need bigger cars for crash worthiness. In response to traffic jams caused by too many cars we double down on cars. This effectively turns valuable urban land into de facto highways: 45 MPH 6-8 lane wide stroads that heavily deprioritize alternative traffic modes and safety. Don't worry citizen, we'll widen the road even if we have to bulldoze some homes that are in the way of our SUVs getting downtown 1 min faster. For a few months before more people drive.

Bikes were here first.

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