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Old Posted Jun 5, 2018, 5:34 PM
DancingDuck DancingDuck is offline
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Join Date: Jan 2013
Location: Winnipeg
Posts: 353
Quote:
Originally Posted by alittle1 View Post
Just throwing this out there to see how others feel about the situation.

Does anyone believe that there should be a User's Fee payable to the City for use of these bike paths and extra bike lanes located throughout the city that the City has specially built for bicycle traffic?

Some taxpayers still do not have sidewalks in their areas for kids and seniors to walk to ammenities in the area, but there are paved bike paths all over the City. It is agreed that bikes do take some strain off the environment, but do load it up in other ways. Therefore, bicyclists should be paying part of the bill through user fee or taxation contribution.

Secondly, should it not be mandatory for bicycles to have an I.D. plate and insurance plan similar to autos and motorcycles that use the roadways of the City and the Province? If a bicyclist hit a pedestrian or auto, should they not have liability insurance to cover the claim by the injured party?
Both of these seem like ways of discouraging more people from choosing biking as their form of transportation. While I understand why some may push for it, or at least a discussion of it, there are a few problems I have...

The first, in regards to a user fee, is that it seems counter productive. If people are forced to pay to use infrastructure designed specifically for them, would it not make more sense more sense for them to continue biking on either the street or sidewalk, and simply not use the bike lanes themselves?

Another issue is how to implement it? Do you pay x-amount of dollars at the beginning of each year in order to have access to all the bike paths/lanes? Or is it charged based on the distance travelled? If it's a per year cost, and your routes barely use the designated paths, why use them at all... Alternately, if it's based on distance travelled, and you bike to/from work on designated path the entire way, it may be cheaper to alter you route to avoid those paths, thus rendering then useless in the first place

It would also be difficult what to do about paths that are built for both pedestrians and bikes (Bishop Grandin Greenway as an example): do both cyclists and pedestrians pay the user fee? Or just cyclists or just pedestrians? To play devils advocate, I guess it would only be fair to start charging a users fee to people that walk on sidewalks, seeing as that is infrastructure built specifically for them...

In regards to the discussion of registration, I'd be a bit more supportive, but even here I think it may not solve much. The biggest question is again how is it applied? Does every single bike need insurance and a license plate? I'm not sure that a child learning how to ride a bike poses the same "risk" as someone biking 20km/h. Perhaps it could be done by age, but that would still come with problems

Another issue is that it's just one more inconvenience to those who choose to bike. Someone who bikes everyday may not have a problem with it, but my grandparents who bike only a few time in the summer may decide it's not worth it, not to mention those that struggle to pay for basic costs of living and now have to suddenly pay to register a bike...One major positive of mandatory licensing would be that stolen bikes would in theory be easier to return to the owners of found, but that would pretty much be the only reason I support it.

If cyclists are going to have to start having to pay liability insurance, everyone else should as well, such as people on rollerblades, skateboards, joggers (doubly so if they're pushing a massive baby carriage) and especially the person yesterday who was jogging with earbuds in and ran in to me cause they didn't look before they cut me off...
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