Jim Yanik like
If there were to be a usage fee, one version of "fair" would be to base it on costs to society. We've been over that - the costs of cycling are negligible. Based on that, the fee should be negligible - i.e. no more than a dime per year.
But there might be another way. We could compute it based on space consumed, and perhaps weight. Let's say, as a first approximation, the fee should be proportional to space used times weight.
Now pay attention: The space taken up by a vehicle during a typical year would be its annual mileage times its width. For a typical car, roughly 12000 miles times roughly six feet wide. That's 72,000 foot-miles.
For a typical bike? Width would be roughly two feet. Mileage? Ah, there's a tough one! An "average" American bike probably rolls less than five miles per year. Let's be very generous and say 200 miles. That's 400 foot-miles, or 1-180th as much as a car.
Weight? 3000 pounds is a light car. 30 pounds is a heavy bike. That's 1-100th. Now note! Pavement damage is NOT proportional to weight! It's proportional to weight raised to a rather high power. But we'll give the motorheads yet another break and pretend a bike does 1-100 the damage a car does.
So in the most simplistic analysis, a bike's fee should be 1-18000 times that of a car.
What's your car's annual license fee, Jim? I'll mail in one eighteen-thousandth of that tomorrow, if you like. Too bad the stamp will be so expensive!
- Frank Krygowski
