Some thoughts:

An automobile, by their weight, causes tremendously more wear and tear on a road than a bicycle. A large truck even more. Large trucks pay much higher taxes, not only in fuel but in other ways. Bicycles do not cause and enlarge potholes, while cars do. Bicycles take up less space. You could have 10-20 bicycles in the same "air space" that a car takes, if bicyclists didn't have to ride single file or double at best.

It's not in my nature to contradict another cyclist, but the last pothole in which I landed, increased 27% in size. Took me three days to climb out of that one, with dear Dark Star dangling precariously by a bungie cord.

while automobiles are the intended users of the roadways, they are not the sole users of the road. this is the legal definition in illinois.

roads that were once intended for horses now are intended for autos. and it will evolve into something else in due time.

go to your DMV and get a rules of the road. many states clump bikers in with pedestrians. and there in lies your argument. you wouldn't plow over someone walking, but a biker is somehow different?!

Yes it is!

In urban areas, much of the cost of road maintenance comed from general funds -- state and local taxes. You may well b contributing more than he. Automobiles do far more damage to the roads than bikes do, so they should pay more.

According to NHTSA, the annual per-capita cost of automobile accidents is $819. That's about $2,400 for a household of three. If that household drives 20,000 miles a year and buys 1,000 gallons of gas to do it, that's $2.40 per gallon "accident cost" If their insurance pays 80% of this cost, that is still a cost to society of $0.48 per gallon burned.

https://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/rtecs/chapter3.html
https://www.rmiia.org/Auto/Traffic%20...of_crashes.htm

There's also a significant cost in national security due to dependancy upon imported oil.

Paul

Someone feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that POUND FOR POUND cyclists probably do more damage to the roads. We use much higher tyre pressures so at the interface between the tyres and the road we will be placing a higher per square inch normal load. Also, in my observation, cyclists accellerate much more quickly than most cars so we are also introducing a higher shear force at the surface.

Public travel is a fundamental right. All vehicle drivers have the right to use the public roadways. (The only qualification of this is that they must obey the traffic laws when doing so. Persons without motor vehicle licenses still retain the right to operate non motorized vehicles on roadways.)

Your coworker feels that bicyclists are under-taxed and do not pay their fair share. In that case he should advocate for higher taxes for bicycles or bicycle operation. We could debate what is fair all day, but the recurring reality is that the states have found that the public costs of bicycling are too low to warrant the kind of fee and tax structure overhead created to accommodate motor travel, and/or the states have decided that increasing the costs of bicycling will have negative social costs that outweigh the revenue potential.

Citizens don't lose their fundamental legal rights just because the government reduces their tax obligation. Dislike of another person's tax obligation does not justify infringing upon that person's legal rights.

Damage is typically a fourth power function of axle weight, although wheel weights make a difference on flexible pavements. bottom line, cars don't do any damage to pavement and neither do cyclists. very heavy tandems do most damage to rigid (portland cement concrete) pavement, and steering axles on very heavy single unit trucks, like dump trucks, do most of the damage on flexible pavement. Acceleration causes some small shear on pavement, and essentially has no effect. bicyclists do not accelerate more rapidly than motorized vehicles, and have so little mass that their effect is non-existent.

that's how those little cager minds think... blood for oil... consume consume consume... you have no right to be here

Possibly he was only concidering the wear on roads as an engineer would. One can't make arguments for and against particular policies, without demonstrating convincingly, why yours is best. It's good to consider how much damage each type of vehicle produces. I believe that sound science and economics could be used to show why cycling should be subsidized, rather than taxed.

Am I allowed to shoot them?

all the points above are valid (apart from Raiyns maybe). In addition I think that car drivers in any case are not paying fully for the effects of their activities on the rest of us. Just consider the pollution cars bring and the reduction in quality of life by having these noisy stinking machines hurtling dangerously all around us day and night.

Also are they going to pay me when I or one of my family gets asthma or heart disease from breathing in their fumes?. How exactly are they going to make it up to me when one of them drives over me and kills me or maybe my kids.

They should be paying me not the reverse.

Awww! What's wrong with my idea?
If the person's too dumb to notice that it's a bumper sticker on the man's car therby rendering their arguement moot they don't need to be using anymore of the world's resources now do they? Nevermind the narrowmindedness of the postion in the first place.

Been around the world and found that only stupid people are breeding
The cretins cloning and feeding

By your co-worker's own logic, he shouldn't be running on the roads either. After all, he didn't pay a registration fee for his running shoes, did he? What's next? License plates for baby strollers?

Ask how much wear and tear a bike does to the roads compared to a vehicle?

He's a moron and you should have stabbed him in the face as he was speaking.

I don't own a car.

When you consider the pollution aspect, you can make the case that bicyclists shoud be compensated for not polluting like 98% of other vehicles.

Losl.

PDF link was broken at the time I tried to access it, but IA has a copy: https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://...e_ResSheet.pdf

Let's remember, kids, that the wear on the road that a vehicle does, is not a linear function of the vehicular wieght, or even pounds per square inch on the road. Trucks and cars stress a roadway in ways that a bike could never. The great weight of a vehicle pressing down on the road, with variable pressure, from bumps, and the vibration created from this process, going at great speed will make small cracks grow. Just as a finger tapping on a brick, will never do anything, a sledgehammer, tapping on it, will quickly turn it to dust. I don't think that bikes do any damage to roads, what so ever. We don't exactly clean the air and water from our activity, but we are some of the few people who don't foul it. Damn we're good( or should I say, not bad)!

UK estimates are a total wear in the order of a couple of hundred pounds a year per car, about ten thousand a year for a big truck, and pennies for bikes.

Dedicated bike lanes don't wear out, they just get weeds growing through them!

Per my comment above, damage is roughly a fourth power function of weight. Velocity of trucks appears not to have any significant affect on pavement.

Therein may lay some of the problem. Some pavements, especially flexible pavements, have a limited life whether or not they are exposed to heavy loads. Just take a look at some footpaths which are paved with asphalt. The bike lane carries its traffic for about ten years, and then should be at least sealed, and it should be repaved after about twenty years. It costs almost as much per square foot to pave for bikes as it does for trucks, the difference being the cost of the paving material, which must be thicker. Most of the labor, grading, and paving costs are the same. Bicycles seldom use bike lanes at high density, although I am sure there are a few exceptions. Assuming one bike every two minutes during rush hours, and one every fifteen minutes outsiide of rush hours, with three rush hours, we get 90 bikes per day during rush hours, and 84 during non rush hours, for a total of 174, times five days, a total of 870, plus 96 a day during weekends, a total of 1,062, per week, times 52, 55,224 per year, times 20 years roughly 1.1 million bikes. If it costs $330,000 per mile to pave a bike lane,then it costs about 30 cents a bicycle-mile to provide bike lanes. If we double the density we halve the per bicylce mile costs, and if we halve the density, we double the cost. At the 30 cents per bicycle mile rate, we are approaching the marginal cost of operating an automobile, including pavement and societal costs.

When( and if) we, as bicyclists, advocate for improved infrastructure, geared towards our needs, we should be able to demonstrate that bike specific facilities are cost effective. The roads will be built, no matter what. I think that we have a good case to make, as far as paying for the facilities that we use. If each person paid, according to their use, motorists would pay much more, and cyclist ranks would swell, reducing our costs further. But this won't happen, because you know who rules America- the motorists. In a democracy, they could have us riding on the sidewalks, and paying a greater share of their costs on top of the indignity.