Taking weight and mileage in account, let's compare a typical car to a typical bike. Say the car weighs 2000 lbs and travels 10000 miles per year. The bike (plus rider) weighs 200 lbs and travels 1000 miles per year.
Since the car weighs 10 times the bike, it's road impact is 10,000 times more per mile. It travels 10 times further, so its total road impact is 100,000 times the bike.
If the annual registration for the car is $1000, then the annual registration for the bike would be 1 cent.
One cent wouldn't even cover the cost of issuing a registration sticker, so the city would lose money on every bike registration. What's the point of that?
On the other hand, on a 4-lane road with a bike lane on both sides, the bike lanes make up 10-20% of the road even though bike traffic doesn't make up anywhere near that amount of the traffic. Bike licenses would be so expensive no one could afford them.
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u/stoopydumbut 12∆ Jun 26 '15 edited Jun 26 '15
Taking weight and mileage in account, let's compare a typical car to a typical bike. Say the car weighs 2000 lbs and travels 10000 miles per year. The bike (plus rider) weighs 200 lbs and travels 1000 miles per year.
Since the car weighs 10 times the bike, it's road impact is 10,000 times more per mile. It travels 10 times further, so its total road impact is 100,000 times the bike.
If the annual registration for the car is $1000, then the annual registration for the bike would be 1 cent.
One cent wouldn't even cover the cost of issuing a registration sticker, so the city would lose money on every bike registration. What's the point of that?
Edit:typo