Two broad sources: general taxes and bonds. General taxes include things like property tax, income tax, and state and local sales taxes. So if you own a home, have a job or buy, well, anything, you contribute to road funding whether you have a car or not.
Bonds are repaid out of either general tax revenue or specifically-earmarked income, property, or sales taxes levied to support that particular bond. Even if the money did come from road taxes, most cyclists own cars.
We may not drive them quite as much because we use bikes for some errands, but we still pay registration fees like any car owner, and we still pay gas taxes when we fuel up. Roads were built for cars, not bikes! Roads are built for transportation, period.
Important, though, is that some of the first real road improvements in the US were created by and for… cyclists. In , roughly a decade after Karl Benz built his first automobile and long before they were widely adopted, a group of almost , cyclists in San Francisco staged a massive demonstration in support of what was called the Good Roads Movement to repave Market Street. The Good Roads Movement itself dates to , an outgrowth of the founding of the League of American Wheelmen, which still exists today as the League of American Bicyclists.
The idea was that, as in Europe, governments should pay for the construction and upkeep of roads , via taxes. In the s, the growing automobile industry and organizations like the Automobile Association of America AAA began surpassing cyclists in advocating and organizing for better roads, culminating in funding the first federal highway in The policy statement , last updated in , states it pretty clearly:.
Bikes should be registered with a tag, and cyclists should take a road test! But no license plate appropriately sized for bikes is going to be useful for law enforcement, since the letters are illegible from more than a few feet away—and you can imagine how much money would need to go toward and be condemned by drivers for creating and maintaining size-appropriate ID chip technology.
Cyclists are a bunch of scofflaws! The Lowdown: Yes, cyclists break traffic laws. The 5 most common crashes involving law-abiding bicyclists on the roadway can be avoided by the bicyclist riding farther left. These crashes are caused by motorist error, and would legally be the fault of the motorist regardless of where on the road the bicyclist was positioned. Drivers of narrow vehicles, such as motorcycles, scooters and bicycles do not occupy the lane by default.
Their vehicles only occupy a fraction of the lane width. Since bicyclists are both narrower and slower than most traffic, other drivers expect to be able to use that extra lane width when passing.
The problem is, many drivers misjudge the amount of space needed to provide a safe and legal buffer. So, when a bicyclist knows there is not enough space for motorists to pass safely within the lane, she moves into a lane control position to indicate that faster traffic must change lanes to pass.
When a car door is opened into the path of a bicyclist, the results can be deadly. Motorists are required to look before opening a door into the street. But people get distracted and forget. Motorists sometimes pass a cyclist just before making a right turn.
By riding far enough left to require a lane change, the cyclist encourages drivers to wait and turn after the cyclist has cleared the intersection. When cyclists ride on the edge, they are often screened by passing cars. This hides them from view of motorists waiting to turn left. By moving left and seeking vantage to see and be seen, cyclists can usually discourage the left turn violation, or at least have space to perform an avoidance maneuver. Motorcyclists do this, too. The edge of the road is often invisible to motorists waiting at side streets.
Buildings, shrubs, poles and other obstructions can hid a cyclist who is riding too far right. Just as motorcyclists are taught, we teach cyclists to ride where you can see the driver of a car waiting to pull out.
Keeping to the right can often hide a bicyclist from a turning motorist at the critical time and place. Most overtaking crashes involve a motorist who attempts to squeeze past illegally in a lane that is too narrow to share. Check out this animation to see all the hazards that make staying far right NOT practicable! Many of the reasons we avoid bike lanes are not visible or apparent to a person in a car.
Of course, if a bike lane provides a clean, safe place to ride, we use it. Most of the same reasons why bicyclists will drive towards the center of a lane are good reasons for leaving the bike lane. Here are just a few reasons:. Even in states with mandatory bike lane use, the law allows cyclists the same exceptions as it does to keeping right in general. Sidewalks present many more blind spots and physical hazards than roadways do.
This school of thought holds that some slight rule changes — like, say, California's three-foot law — can help make biking safer, but on the whole, bikes are vehicles that are perfectly capable of sharing roads with cars. Further, many proponents of vehicular cycling are actually against measures like protected bike lanes and separated trails. One reason, they argue, is that these lanes are more dangerous at intersections than just riding in the road — because cars turning in front of these lanes don't expect bikes to ride through.
Other vehicular cycling proponents also see these lanes as a tool for segregating cyclists and kicking them off roads. Building bike paths, they say, is a precursor to keeping bikes off regular roads altogether — much like the way pedestrians are confined to sidewalks. A protected bike lane in Vancouver. Paul Krueger. More recently, lots of bike advocates have taken a different position: that bikes are indeed different than cars, and the whole "vehicular cycling" idea is a relic of the days when biking was a fringe, hardcore activity.
Now that there are lots of bikers, these advocates of segregated cycling argue, we should focus on constructing bike-specific facilities, like protected lanes and paths , rather than retrofitting a car-centric road system to cram in a few bikes.
The goal, in essence, should be making sure that cars and bikes don't have to share the road any more often than is necessary. The logic here is that roads were designed specifically with cars in mind. As a result, putting bikes on them is inherently risky , and the number of people who will brave a busy thoroughfare and claim a lane amidst speeding cars is relatively small. Martha Roskowski of the People For Bikes organization recently came up with a nice analogy for this idea: riding in the streets, like a car, is akin to skiing a black diamond run down a mountain.
There might be a minority of bikers who'll do it and even enjoy it , but to make most people comfortable with the idea of biking in a city, we need the equivalent of green circle and blue square ski routes — protected lanes and trails.
More importantly, these need to make up a linked, cohesive system, so people can bike from home to work, for instance, without needing to brave a black diamond. An unprotected bike lane in Copenhagen. Most people in the segregated cycling camp agree that bikes should act more or less like cars when they do have to bike on streets. But a minority argue not all of the same laws should necessarily apply.
I took this position when I argued that bikes should be allowed to roll through stop signs, and ride through red lights after coming to a complete stop as is legal in Idaho. The basic reason is that stop signs and traffic lights were designed with cars in mind, and bikes are not cars.
With stop signs, that means that a biker doesn't need to come to a complete stop to give him or herself enough time to assess the safety of proceeding through an intersection, because he or she moves more slowly than cars in the first place.
Additionally, many stop lights are triggered to change colors based on sensors buried in the road that detect cars, but not bikes. As with many debates, neither side here is entirely right or wrong, and there's a lot of overlap in the actual goals sought by people in both groups. But on the whole, as the popularity of cycling has grown, most biking advocates have gradually moved out of the vehicular cycling camp.
There are a few different reasons for that. One is the success of places that invested in bike-specific infrastructure. The world's cities with the highest rates of bicycling — such as Copenhagen and Amsterdam — have the highest amounts of protected bike lanes and trails, and research shows this correlation also holds for US cities.
It's often hard to parse cause and effect, but survey data indicates that people started biking because bike lanes were built — not the reverse. A survey of bike commuters in Washington, DC, for instance, found that they were willing to travel up to 20 extra minutes if it'd mean taking a safer off-street trail, rather than riding in the street. A recent study of six American cities with newly built protected bike lanes, meanwhile, found that 25 percent of bikers decided to bike more often because of the lanes in particular.
0コメント