I personally would love to pay to focus on funding more alternate transportation infrastructure improvements (not necessarily just bikes, but pedestrian, transit, etc). I'd open the proverbial chequebook in the blink of an eye.Licencing has been tried and often recinded - that's true. But times change, just because it failed before doesn't mean it's over. Cycling has had a huge uptick in recent years, there are thousands of bikes sharing the roads, both urban and rural. I'd like to see municipalities license bicycles, here's why and how I'd do it.
Why?
- simplify identifying riders for enforcement
- connect education to the issue of annual stickers
- fund cycling infrastructure
How?
- Like snowmobile and atv clubs. Let the cyclists collect the fees and drive the use of proceeds as a kicker to develop, improve and maintain specific use infrastructure.
There are about 2M+ bikes rolling around Toronto, a $10 annual fee would generate $20M to fund bike paths.
But overall, the cost to implement this bureaucracy for 2M+ bikes considering all the red tape and inefficiencies government agencies come with would probably suck up most of that $20M funding lol
And in a lot of cases, cyclists will bike around different municipalities in the GTA, so you have to have different jurisdictions work/communicate together on this and agree to this, which, unless it gets pushed by a provincial governing body, probably won't happen.
The problem too with having cyclist associations be responsible to maintain/upgrade infra is that often times that same infrastructure is handled/maintained by the municipality so we'd have a lot of conflicting priorities with those separate bodies. Snowmobile/atv/dirtbike clubs operate outside of those spheres for the most part. They build and improve on networks that are 95% of the time only being used by them, and also are in the hobbyist domain, where as the in cycling you have hobby/recreational cycling, fitness cycling, commuting/transportation cycling and each one of them tries to attain a different goal.
Then once pass those hurdles and they have their cycling licensing course/education, we expect them to redo it how often? And starting at what age? Because for other vehicles once you pass the initial courses, you can be a d!ck every year on the roads while just having to pay to renew. You just have to not get caught which millions of people do every single year, for the rest of their lives. When i helped with M2 exit course evals one summer, i saw a good handful of people fail because of bad habits they'd developed over the few years they'd had their M2 license, even after having spent the weekend doing a refresher course, what's not to stop cyclists from doing the same mistakes, they're the same human beings in the end that adapt to their imperfect environments with imperfect behaviours.
Part of this education could be delivered in schools and practiced there as well, like its already done in other parts of the world; Have it as part of gym class so they're not alien to it when growing up, that way it makes up a bigger part of the culture from a young age and behaviour around different road users is better understood.