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Posted Oct 24, 2013, 7:44 PM
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Join Date: Aug 2002
Location: Toronto
Posts: 52,200
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No, a Bike License Fee Doesn’t Make Any Sense
Read More: http://chi.streetsblog.org/2013/10/2...ake-any-sense/
Quote:
Alderman Patricia Dowell (3rd, Bronzeville, South Loop) floated the idea yesterday that Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s budget proposal to raise the cable television tax could be eliminated by charging a licensing fee to ride a bicycle instead. She pegged the fee at about $25 a year and said one would have to complete one hour of classroom education to receive the license to ride a bicycle.
- After returning from a trip to cities in Denmark — sponsored by Bikes Belong — she started a program with CDOT to teach young people bicycling safety. But Dowell’s bike license proposal doesn’t make any sense. There are a few reasons almost all major cities don’t license bikes: It would discourage people from using a healthy, affordable mode of transport, and it would cost more to administer and enforce than it would generate in fees.
- A bike license fee that’s actually enforced would strangle Chicago’s budding bike culture and be completely at odds with the city’s policy goals. The City Council adopted the Bike 2015 Plan seven years ago stating two overarching goals, to reduce the number of injuries by 50 percent from 2006 levels and to “increase bicycle use, so that 5 percent of all trips less than five miles are by bicycle.” Licensing would run counter to both. Anyone with a bike would have to visit a website, city clerk’s office, or police station to pay the fee and obtain a license. Enforcing the license requirement — stopping and fining people riding without one — would create another barrier to bicycling.
- Dowell also views her proposal in terms of fairness. “If we have to register our cars, bikes ought to be registered as well,” she said. But driver’s licenses and license plates are necessary because driving is complex and, all too often, deadly. Someone operating a multi-ton vehicle capable of high speeds needs a lot of training in how to use the machine, and given the scale of damage inflicted by cars and drivers, an elaborate system of licensing and insurance makes sense. Since a bicycle doesn’t kill people and in fact prolongs the rider’s life, a license is counterproductive.
- That’s not to say some form of education can’t help. Most residents in the Netherlands and Germany, where some cities have bike mode-share over 30 percent, receive bicycle training in elementary school. Those and other European countries also have much stricter driver and car roadworthiness testing than the United States, including detailed instruction on how to drive safely near people walking and bicycling, making them global leaders in road safety.
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Garcetti, Bonin, O’Connor, Zev, Knabe: It’s Time for Regional Bike Share
Read More: http://la.streetsblog.org/2013/10/15...al-bike-share/
Quote:
In April of 2012, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa stood toe to toe with city staff and executives with Bike Nation and announced a city wide bike share system would be coming to Los Angeles within the next year. The system would rival New York’s now wildly-succesfull CitiBike system. Many cheered, many fretted and a few even steamed that announcing a deal with Bike Nation exploded the nascent discussions underway about a region-wide bike share system.
A year and a half later, Bike Nation is on the ropes and even Villaraigosa allies concede the agreement was a well-intentioned mistake. Los Angeles watched while its peer cities New York, Chicago and San Francisco/Bay Area launched their own bike share systems while Bike Nation was uprooting its partial pilot system in Anaheim. Perhaps the final indignity was when Santa Monica announced it was readying its own bike share “request for proposal” its Council Members sounded somewhat overjoyed to be moving faster than the behemoth to the east. But this time, Team Garcetti didn’t wait for the zombie to wreck the best-laid plans of his predecessor, this time he took action.
On Thursday, the Metro Executive Management and Audit Committee will hear a motion for staff to study best practices and recommend a plan of action for a regional bike share system. While Garcetti’s office authored the motion, they secured the support of Board Members who have worked on bike share issues in the recent past: Los Angeles City Council Transportation Committee Chair Mike Bonin, Santa Monica Mayor Pam O’Connor, and County Supervisors Zev Yaroslavsky and Don Knabe.
“Mayor Garcetti believes we need a regional approach to transportation.,” writes Vicki Curry, a spokesperson for the Mayor’s Office. “Pursuing a countywide bicycle share program through MTA is the best way to create a seamless system that crosses city boundaries so residents can easily travel from Venice to Santa Monica or Eagle Rock to Glendale.” The motion calls for Metro staff to report back at the January 2014 meeting, in just three months, with report to the Board at the with the results of a review of the bike share industry, including a business case analysis, and recommendations on proceeding with a Request for Proposals to implement a regional bicycle share program.
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Green Lane Project opens applications for 6 cities eager to improve biking
Read More: http://www.peopleforbikes.org/blog/e...improve-biking
Quote:
After generations of being neglected in the United States, protected bike lanes have spread rapidly around the country in the last three years – to Atlanta, to Long Beach, to Lincoln, Neb.
But 43 percent of the growth since early 2012 has come from just six cities: Austin, Chicago, Memphis, Portland, San Francisco and Washington, the ones selected two years ago as focus cities for the first round of the PeopleForBikes Green Lane Project. Starting Friday, the Green Lane Project, a nonprofit program that helps cities design and build better bike lanes, is welcoming applications to join its second two-year round of focus cities.
For the six cities selected, the program is free. The selected cities will receive a swarm of professional and technical support from national and international experts, intended to catalyze and enable major improvements to a city's bike network. "It's really, in some ways, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to work with people who are on the cutting edge of an innovation," said Randy Neufeld of the SRAM Cycling Fund, one of the project's creators.
The project generally does not fund infrastructure projects directly – the idea is to make the work replicable in cities everywhere. But the Green Lane Project does award cities small grants of $20,000 to $25,000 that can be used for flexible purposes such as research or communications.
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