As reported by CBC: "
Calgary police say a woman in her 50s has died a week after she was knocked over by a 12-year-old riding a bicycle on a suburban pathway.
Calgary police say the woman and her husband were walking on a pathway north of Hidden Valley Drive N.W. the afternoon of Aug. 2.
Police say the young cyclist was approaching the woman from behind when the collision happened, knocking her to the ground.
She was taken to hospital in life-threatening condition with serious injuries, where she later died."
Perhaps it's a good idea to register bicycles and ensure that cyclists carry insurance? It's understandable that cyclists would like to dismiss the cost of bicycle insurance as a needless expense. Cherry picked story or not, the impossible always seems to happen.
DISCLAIMER: Mods, please move this to the cycling thread!!!!
So let me get this straight, you give us ONE example of a fatality, involving a 12yo kid who wouldn't be registered and insured in any case, as your justification that bikes should be treated as motor vehicles?
Gimme a goddamn break. This is not even cherry picking, this is outright intellectual dishonesty.
By your logic, should we be registering and insuring pedestrians, as well, just in case?
And the cost argument makes as much sense as any of your other comments, which is basically none. Bike infrastructure cost infinitely less to build and maintain and last so much long, because of the low impact, that the actual costs, through the years, would barely register in the city budget. And cyclists already pay for it, as many others here have said, through property taxes. You claim that drivers are subsidizing them, somehow, because they have to pay additional things, such as insurance (which does not fund roads) and registration (which is drop in the bucket of road maintenance and construction), while they also pay property taxes. But let's do a math exercise here:
Imagine a little town of just 2000 inhabitants, and the only costs this town has are related to transportation and mobility infrastructure (their province is very magnanimous and pays for the rest thru income and sales tax):
Lets say that, on average over 10 years, every year of maintaining 1km of road costs $1000, maintaining 1km of bike paths costs $100 (which is a high assumption) and maintaining sidewalks and other pedestrian infrastructure costs $50 (and everyone uses it).
Lets also say that we have 1500 drivers paying $100 in property taxes each, 10 cyclists paying the same $100 (again, on average, the likelihood of a cyclist spending more in property taxes is high, since most live in more expensive, central areas) and the remaining 490 people don't either bike or drive (elderly, young kids, people with disabilities) and they all also pay, on average, some $50 in property taxes each (children obviously don't pay taxes, so...)
You have a driver tax base of $150000, a cyclist tax base of $1000 and the remainder of the population brings $24500, for a total of $175500.
Now, Edmonton has about 10000km of roads and about 200km of bike lanes and shared pathways, so around 2% of the length, so for our exercise, let's use the same proportion and say that out little town has 200km of roadways and sidewalks (and other pedestrian infrastructure) and 4km of bike lanes.
Road maintenance would cost $200000 and bike lane maintenance would cost $400, and we also still have to worry about pedestrian infrastructure (I'm not even counting transit, it's such a small town!!!), which would come to about $10000.
Remember, our tax base is $176000, out of which $25500 comes from non-drivers. Now, the cost that these non-drivers incur for the town come to $10400, which means these people are contributing $15500 more than the infrastructure they use costs, which goes towards roads used only by drivers (which are still on the red here, by about $35000, which we'll say, by the sake of this argument, is paid through the taxes paid in gas and through the registrations).
So even applying your own logic (drivers also pay property taxes), it is the non-drivers who subsidize roads, not the opposite. And even if the town would build up the bike baths to the same 200km (let's assume an increase in bike use that brings it to still under 15% of the modal share and a decrease of that same exact amount in the number of drivers):
Maintenance:
Roads (200km): $200000
Bike Lanes(200km: 50 times the prior amount): $20000
Pedestrian Infrastructure(200km): $10000
Number of cyclists: (250: 10*25)
Number of Drivers: 1260 (1500 minus the 240 new cyclists)
Non-drivers or cyclists: 500
Tax base:
Cyclists: $25000
Drivers: $126000
Others: $24500
(still the same $175500 total)
Pedestrian and Bike infrastructure costs: $30000 (a $19500 surplus)
Roadway costs: $200000 (a $74000 deficit)
Again, non-drivers subsidize the car infrastructure.
I could go on and make this example even worse for your argument, with a higher share for cyclists (considering an extensive bike lane network), reminding you that everyone uses the pedestrian infrastructure (and therefore taking a portion of everyone's income to go towards that).
I know you'll probably read through this and it won't change your mind, and you will find ways to dismiss is with logical fallacies, but I do get a kick of making you have to squeeze your brain to try and defend an indefensible position.
