Originally Posted by
wphamilton
As I understand it, driving (operating a motor vehicle on public roads) is a privilege but the use of the public road for travel is a right. The motor vehicles are licensed, people are licensed to drive them. The license is not a right (more like a tax to be honest). Bicycles, horse drawn carriages and so on ARE completely different in that respect.
The roads can be regulated, but that doesn't extend as far as deciding who may or may not use them. Even if the public majority decided they wanted to vote bicycles off of the public roads, it's not so easy as that. They're dealing with fundamental rights, not simply legislative actions. That's why I'm skeptical of your prediction, that it's just around the corner or years away but inevitable.
The public has the right to travel by bicycle on the public roads, but the public has no right, as the anti-cyclist traffic laws demonstrate, to use any but a small part of the roadway for cycling, unless the cyclist can demonstrate that obeying the rules of the road for drivers of vehicles is much safer than obeying the restriction to the edge of the roadway. That is the extent of our rights, to be subservient to motorists, as long as those traffic laws exist. These are the laws that restrict cyclists to the edge of the roadway (FTR laws) or to bikeways, where present (MBL laws, and similar). Those must be repealed for cyclists to regain the rights that motordom stole from them, merely because doing so made motorists feel that it made motoring a bit more convenient.