2manybikes

They used to register bikes with plates in the 1950's I have plates from two states on some old bikes. There must be some reason they stopped. I wish I knew what happened. My guess it was that no one wanted to register a bike worth only a few dollars. Anyone know for sure?

rekmeyata

We all must realize that if oil profits fall due to hybrids and all electric cars that the our government will be in a bind due to less gasoline taxes being collected. So what do you thing their going to do? THINK ABOUT IT!! They will find another source of income to make up for the loss of gasoline tax revenue. So I would not be surprised if they find a way to tax or place a fee on bicycles, nor would I be surprised if they charge higher registration fees on hybrids and electric cars.

It's a fact that our nation's power grid is stressed out to the max; at some point, when too many electric cars start being used, we are going to have to overhaul the system. Where do you think that money is going to come from? WAY higher electric bills then what we pay today, or they will install a meter on our chargers that will charge transportation tax when we plug in, and according to how much juice we use will depend on how much tax we will pay. There is no free ride. Eventually owning a electric car will be more expensive to fuel then our gasoline ones we have today. Right now their just trying to suck us into buying electric cars with the hope of cheap fuel cost, but when the percentage of electric cars within the population reach's a certain percentage...look out!

tortugaflats

when the govt took over GM they tabled the hydrogen car projects which looked to be way better than the all electric car (volt). there was even a deal with shell to put hydrogen pumps at their service stations. all flushed down the toilet for the 40 mile to a charge volt. GREAT move.

Schmadley

Think of how many bicycles (of all sorts) are sold in the US (actually, anywhere in the world) today. They all have a sales tax of some sort on them that goes to the government. That would add up to pretty penny wouldn't it? Why then, can't the govt use that money directly from bicycle sales and put it towards better cycling infrastructure? You buy a bike - you pay sales tax on said bike (sales tax on any other cycling related purchase). Simple, I know, but sometime, simplicity works!

rekmeyata

I was wonder when someone would bring that tidbit up. Hydrogen fueled cars though would have spoiled the fun of trying to find ways to tax us, they only way they could adequately do that would be to charge $25 for a gallon of gasoline, I think that would have made some people wonder as to what the hell is going on!

rekmeyata

Look, communities need all the tax money they can get for other projects, if you took away the sales tax from the communities to be used for whatever and applied it to the cycling infrastructure then you suddenly have made the communities responsible for showing where that money from bike sales is going. Personally, you could not collect enough money to even start the planning for a bike path not alone build one just on bike sales tax or accessories sales tax. And when does the government ever do something simple? They like to complicate things to the extreme so it's more difficult to trace the money.

And speaking on wasteful use of tax payers money. Bakersfield CA, where I use to live some years ago, put in a new 5 mile section of the bike path while I lived there. The cost of this section was 106,000 dollars...that's a good deal right? until you discover that the $106,000 dollars was per 1/4th of a mile! Thats $2,120,000 for a 10 foot wide path 5 miles long. You would never collect enough taxes on bike and accessory sales to pay for that. The most you could comfortably hope for without hurting biking industry is to charge a one time lifetime fee of $25 to register the bike, this would help deter theft and defer some of the cost of the biking infrastructure. Note I said defer some of the cost, because even at $25 your still behind the cost to build the infrastructure. In 2009 there were 14.9 million bicycles sold in America times $25 is $372,500,000. Not bad until you have a city that says we want to build a 30 mile bike path at a cost of 12,720,000, suddenly your faced with a only allowing 29 cities to build 30 mile bike paths. But in the long run it could work, it would just take longer the people would want it to take to build paths. Problem with the $25 thing is a lot of people buy kids bicycles for $50 and might have a problem coughing up another $25; so those people may be forced into the used market so there goes some of the sales of new bikes. Then theres the whole issue of accountability...

Few people in Indiana know that a percentage of their tax money is paying for the State of Kentucky, that's right Kentucky, horse racing! And Kentucky's horse racing gambling program loses money every year. Indiana has been paying to subsidize another states losing gambling for many many years, and no politician has ever tried to stop it. Don't laugh because all the other states do just as ridiculous crap, just in different forms.