Reply to It's time for bicycles to have tags and registration fees, and pay the equivalent of fuel taxes.

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Reply to "It's time for bicycles to have tags and registration fees, and pay the equivalent of fuel taxes. "

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[quote=Anonymous]OMG this dumb idea again?

Both Federally and locally the various taxes around driving (gas taxes, car taxes, registration fees etc) don't even come close to covering the cost of maintaining our car infrastructure in this country.

I believe in the highest state something like 50% of the cost is covered by these fees but in a lot of places it is more like 20-25%.

Which is to say that non-drivers are paying a large share of the cost of maintaining roads.  Which is fine because non-drivers still need goods delivered though most of our road infra is not needed for deliveries but instead exists to get suburbanites to their jobs.

But in any case it is a stupid argument.  Even in DC which has the most bike lanes in the DMV the city has like 20 total miles of bike lanes in a city with IIRC about 1500 miles of road.

But even the 20 miles of bike lanes in not a single case take up the entirety of the road - in most cases the bike lanes are 1/3, 1/4, 1/5 etc of the road.  So even in DC something like .03 percent of the total roadway is dedicated for bikes.

And bike cause almost zero wear and tear on the roads and minimal congestion so the bikes not in bike lanes are imposing close to zero cost on the system.

How about this since you are concerned about equity - everyone pays for what they use?

All roads are tolled.

Oversized and overweight trucks and SUVs payer higher tolls since they use more space and cause more wear and tear.

Large cars pay more to park since they take up more space.

How about charging for externalities too - maybe a carbon tax for all the global warming your SUV causes?  An asthma tax for the local air quality issues caused by your truck?

If you really want to go down this road (pun intended) it would greatly benefit non drivers at the expense of highly subsidized drivers.[/quote]

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