Bike law

So, on the heels of an awesome bike video, an article makes me want to write about how bikes are treated legally.

Traffic law does need to require bike riders to behave responsibly. We should be allowed to use the road, but we also should be required to obey signs and signals.

But the idea, often floated, of requiring bikes to pay for road-building? Doesn't make sense. We require people to pay vehicle registration fees because a truck does damage to the roads. Over time, we need to maintain the road surface and those fees compensate. Gas taxes are even more fair because you pay based on how much road you use.

But bikes do no damage to the road surface - they weigh far too little. We don't require pedestrians to pay a license to be allowed to walk on the sidewalk; we figure out how to maintain a decent surface by paying for it other ways. Oregon's existing funding system of devoting 1% of all road funding to bike projects is a great way to go: the infrastructure gets built with funding generated by people that use it, and a fringe is created for biking.