Comment by chrismorgan

Cycles that are not upright bicycles (e.g. recumbent bicycles, upright tricycles, recumbent tricycles, quadricycles) are (completely naturally and understandably) discriminated against in legislation because they’re not so common. Although the law classifies them as bicycles, many laws and rules that affect them are made clearly not considering their different characteristics—their size, their stability, their handling, things like that—and end up mandating things that make sense for upright bicycles but are for these other cycles counterproductive to the clear or likely (depending on the case) intent of the law.

Your example is patently unreasonable and a completely different thing.

Legislation defines various classes of vehicle, and changes the definitions and categories over time to match need. But it’s not good for the legislation to explicitly say “Category A encompasses Items B and C” and then to write a law for Item B but apply it instead to Category A. In this specific case, it’s probably mostly happened by sheer accident because they named Category A “Item B”, and so you can never tell whether the intention was to cover Item B or Category A.

This is why I like what New Zealand has done: by giving the category the name cycles and not bicycles, they’ve kept the opportunity to apply laws to bicycles specifically and not other forms of cycles, in cases where that makes sense.