Comment by mattlondon
2 days ago
The roads are paid for in a large part by road taxes and fuel taxes. Cyclists pay zero towards it in direct taxation, apart from general taxation that everyone pays anyway. Why should cyclists be able to free load off of infrastructure paid for by tax-paying vehicles, and dictate that they are built to favour cyclists when they are not contributing a single penny?
Also your point about being "near" is kinda ridiculous. The police would take an interest if someone cut your skin deliberately, but would equally not take any interest if you just walked near a car. You're comparing apples to oranges.
I agree on your point about waiting to cross as a pedestrian though. It is often quite unreasonable for multiple people to be standing there - often in rain or other inclement weather - waiting for a single person in their nice dry car to drive past.
Life is too short to care about these trifling matters really though isn't it? Sure, die on this hill if you want but for most people it is easier to just buy an electric car, pay the taxes, and move on with the important things in life. Life isn't fair - if you want to dedicate your ire to something unjust then there are IMO better causes to champion than the first world problem of not having nice cycle lanes in an otherwise safe and secure developed first world democratic country with low infant mortality, high quality water, universal free healthcare, and high adult literacy levels. You have already won the life lottery, but many tens/hundreds of millions around the world are not so lucky. Or you can just moan about the white lines on your cycle lane being a bit crappy. Up to you.
> The roads are paid for in a large part by road taxes and fuel taxes. Cyclists pay zero towards it in direct taxation, apart from general taxation that everyone pays anyway. Why should cyclists be able to free load off of infrastructure paid for by tax-paying vehicles, and dictate that they are built to favour cyclists when they are not contributing a single penny?
The bulk of road funding is from general taxation in most places (including the UK, I think?). To put a bit of a spin on your argument, most tax is paid by urban areas, with rural areas generally being a funds sink. So, should rural areas really get roads at all?
See how silly that is?
I always find this argument really funny because I wholeheartedly agree that taxes should be relative to the usage/damage of roads. But when you actually look at the numbers pretty much anywhere in the world it's always the cars and trucks being subsidised by the rest of the population.
YES, PLEASE let me pay for only bicycle infrastructure, I hate having to pay for your car.
Wouldn't know about 'pretty much anywhere', but assuming you're from the Netherlands you might want to reconsider: https://www.kimnet.nl/binaries/kimnet/documenten/rapporten/2...
Here in the UK, roads are paid for by general taxation. The fuel duty has been frozen for a long time (15 years?) so the general public are in fact subsidising motorists. "Road Tax" was abolished in 1937 due to the ridiculous attitude that some motorists get about "owning" the roads - this seems to be exactly your kind of attitude.
I wonder if you've thought about the logical conclusion of your "ideas" when applied to electric vehicles? They don't pay VED (emmissions tax, which is often referred to as "road tax" by idiots) and they don't pay fuel tax, so what are they doing on "your" public roads?
In my locale, in the US, local roads are paid for by property taxes. The higher traffic state and Federal roads are paid for through a combination of fuel and income taxes. Cyclists tend to avoid those roads due to safety and distance. Cycles are prohibited on our equivalent of the motorways.
Most cyclists in the US also have cars, and are paying for license, registration, and insurance. Higher insurance rates are necessary because cars get in more crashes.
Meanwhile, bikes take up less space and do negligible damage to roads, and to other things like vehicles and stationary objects.
A more useful model is that we all pay to subsidize heavy trucking.
But also, each person paying for goodies that they don't use but someone else does, is kind of how a modern society works. It would be vastly more expensive to administer a society in which each person is charged a fee in precise proportion to the facilities and services that they use. Maybe in the future with AI.
I am a (UK) cyclist, and I pay both road taxes and fuel taxes.
(For the car that I also own, to be clear)
Just to reply to myself instead of each post calling me dumb individually:
I said we all pay via general taxation, so yes you me everyone pays for roads if we use them or not. Vehicle users also pay in addition to general taxes the direct taxes for their usage in terms of road tax and fuel duties (N.b. that road usage fees per mile are on the cards for EVs). Cyclists pay none of these (unless they also own a car)
If there is a huge government subsidy for something, you'd be a fool to ignore it
I couldn't agree more, we should make sure cyclists and motorists pay their fair share.
1. The damage caused to a road surface is governed by the fourth power law [1]:
"This means that after 160,000 crossings, the bicycle causes as much damage as the car does when driving on the road only once. From this it can be deduced that a large part of the damage in the streets is caused by heavy motor vehicles compared to the damage caused by lighter vehicles."
2. Dedicated cycling infrastructure has the lowest cost of all vehicle infrastructure [2]:
"The annual infrastructure costs per traveller kilometre are 0.03 euros for bicycles, 0.10 euros for cars, 0.14 euros for buses, and 0.18 euros for trains."
3. The implication that whatever extra taxes motorists pay cover all externalities of driving, like death and injuries (40 000 deaths per year in the US alone) and health complications from brake dust and tire rubber seems laughably naive to me but perhaps there are some hard numbers that say otherwise?
I too yearn for the day motorists pay for the damage they cause.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law
[2]: https://www.government.nl/binaries/government/documenten/rep...
In what way do cyclists require unique and expensive infrastructure that both isn't the consequence of interactions with cars and that wouldn't be covered by general taxation unless general taxation literally didn't pay for any infrastructure?
Maybe isolated recreational paved bike paths, needlessly expensive public lockup places, and smaller scale urban infrastructure to avoid accomodate only pedestrians and bikes in forward thinking places? If cars weren't so common, would cyclists require 8+ lane highways, or even relatively wide roads? Seems like we pay into a pool of infrastructure funding that is often already very expensive and that has little to do with cars, if they didn't exist we'd broadly be saving public money, both on direct and indirect costs such as pollution, deaths, traffic control devices, public policy, or accommodating the demands of everything but personal cars as necessary. They should be treated as an expensive luxury, which they should be, but in some cases they're a necessary burden that the poor should be releaved of.
If cars weren't default, EV or not, we'd all be like "who's going to pay for that!?"
Likewise with trains, we all pay for them with taxes, but the people who use them often pay directly for the continued operation in terms of what is not their personal obligation (maintenance, construction, staffing), usually a relatively marginal source of revenue, but it keeps it going. You pay for trains through general taxation, and you pay somehow for the continued operation of your personal vehicle, and so do bikes, but cars demand much more from external sources like trains do, and like trains, there's no free ride, unless you bike, which has relatively minimal external demands. You pay for the continuance of the operation of a uniquely burdensome private luxury, and it's not subsidizing anything.
Roads also open up some amount of significant economic commercial and personal opportunity, which should also be factored in, but also paid for like others. If it's a problematic amount, then you make different choices, and if that didn't balance out at a system level, we'd make different infrastructure choices.
Out of interest, where do you pay direct road taxes? (I've heard that some countries do this, but I don't know which ones).
this argument against common sense bike infrastructure is one of the most common, most wrong, and most dumb
bicyclists, pedestrians and transit users in fact subsidize motorists, in all countries, everywhere. this isn't up for debate. so under your own logic, motorists should have no right to the roads, because they're "freeloading" and "not paying their fair share". sigh.
ironically, even the most ardent bike infra advocates don't actually think that. they just think the money they're paying shouldn't be expropriated exclusively for motorists, while they themselves get close to nothing, especially when bika infra is so comparatively cheap and efficient (it actually SAVES the government and the public money)
the benefits of bike infra are obvious and self evident. less pollution, less noise, more mobility for children and the disabled. it benefits motorists too, because it takes traffic off the roads, and saves parents time and money having to ferry their kids around all the time etc etc.
tbh people like you seem just like hateful selfish misanthropes.
> Life is too short to care about these trifling matters really though isn't it?
I wouldn't call people's ability to be mobile a "trifling matter". In fact, I'd say it's fundamental to a free and equitable society. People should be able to move around safely and freely and the car is failing to be the solution to that.
Life is too short to spend it in a car. People hate driving. But they do it because there's no other choice. The infrastructure is car first and their bodies have atrophied to the point they can't get around without assistance.
I've seen people literally lose their minds as they sit in their car stuck in congestion day in, day out. Driving has become an adversarial pursuit that leads to anger and frustration. This is your life, and it's happening one traffic jam at a time.
A good life is not one where you utter "you absolute bellend" at least once every single day as you make your way to work.
You can really tell when somebody just repeats motorist propaganda and has never actually looked at the finical structure behind infrastructure.
Your attitude is also deeply sad and cyclical. People wanting to improve the communities they live in is a bad thing. How about the 1000s of people dying every year is not an important topic.
Imagine if there were 1 major commuter trains going into london crashing and killing everybody in the train, and this happened multiple times a year? Would you consider that an important problem?
> there are IMO better causes to champion
Like what?
Transportation, and cycling as part of that has a major influence on climate change, energy consumption, public health, accessibility, retail shopping, community building and much more.
Have ever engaged with that research?