Originally Posted by
baron von trail
I'm actually amazed that bikes, unlike boats and other recreational "vehicles", do not require registration. In some ways, bike registration could be a good thing: money for more bike paths and lanes. But, OTOH, it owuld be a wee bit too intrusive.
Also mostly if not completely unworkable and unenforceable.
A car is big enough to mount a plate on - where would you put a license plate on a bike where it wouldn't either cause massive drag and get snagged on stuff, or be so small as to be unreadable and therefore useless?
When a bike could be ridden by anyone from TdF winners to 4-year-old Katie down the road, what enforcement is there going to be. Is little Katie going to be dragged away by the police for straying briefly onto the road on a bike that wasn't correctly licensed? If not, what about 12-year-old Jim who knows he should get his bike licensed but figured he's only 12 and it doesn't matter? What about the down-and-out who uses a bike to get from where he sleeps to where he begs? What about the commuter who just doesn't feel like playing within the rules? At some point you have to draw the line, and then you have to figure out how to enforce both the law and the line (if the rule is over-16s have to have registration how do you prove that the guy you just pulled over is 17 when he says he's 15?)
Originally Posted by
Gnosis
Registration fees for bicycles is just a bad idea period!
What have U.S. citizens learned about bureaucracy? We’ve learned that it festers like cancer and continually grows, consuming evermore resources (the income of taxpayers) until its host (the taxpayers) can no longer sustain themselves! Government paid jobs, vacations, and benefits would be required (always overly costly at the taxpayer’s ever increasing expense) and the bicyclist would get countless excuses for why they’re not benefiting from their registration fees, you know, the typical “there’s no funds in the budget for those improvements” nonsense.
Just say NO to additional government involvement in our lives, as the U.S. government has become a draining parasite!
Yet another good reason to say no to it. The chances of getting a government program that took funds from one specific source and channelled them to a specific project, without wasting most of it along the way, is probably about as close to zero as you'll ever get.