Tuesday 11 September 2012

Bollocks to Number Plates


"They need number plates" is a classic piece of bike-hater bollocks, now being reprinted in articles in the Daily Mail, quoted in the London Transport Committee, etc. They also cite Geneva as a case in point, "Switzerland has licenses"

Maybe, but here's something those fuckwit fascists don't say "Geneva is surrounded on three sides by france -and as they don't have licenses, nobody gives a fuck about whether a bike is registered or not."

The little fact that major suburbs of the city -places like Annemasse a couple of km from the centre means that a large proportion of commuters don't have license plates. Which means that all attempts to enforce cycle licensing on the streets of the city would fail.

Another quirk: that license plate is forever -no need for renewals, no need for paperwork saying the bike has changed. And given Switzerland's "One registration number for any number of cars" rule, you can probably swap your plate onto another bike.

Together that means something important that the cycle-haters don't recognise: "cycle registration is meaningless". If it works in Switzerland it is because the native residents are so law-abiding they bother to pay however many swiss francs it costs -but nobody else does.

There's also something else that the fuckwit fascists don't realise that Geneva has -and which they won't be demanding: Geneva has armed police on Mountain Bikes.

Imagine how differently drivers would be if there is an off chance that the bike they saw and chose to cut up happens to belong to a policeman who could be pointing a gun at their head in twenty seconds while they wet themselves and promise to behave. Imagine how happy you'd be in a bluewash cycle path if you knew that in your group of cyclists was a policeman who could do more than just shout back at the taxi driver that swings into you sounding his horn.

Remember that the next time someone says they want to copy the swiss rules -ask for the armed cycle police as that would also improve car/bicycle relations.

Returning to the licensing issue -are they really going to propose a license for every bicycle? How big will it be? As the Swiss one is a tiny red plate that you could easily obstruct with a light or a saddle bag -and if your light is in the way, what are they going to do -have a new law "obstructing a registration plate"

How is it going to be enforced? Are the police really going to pull over every cyclist that they see without registration and say "where is your license plate?". And if so, what are they going to do when you reply in French saying "Je suis ici en vacance?". Or are they going to have some extra law saying "all bicycles brought into the country are required to also have a license" -which would mean some global licensing scheme with cross-country registration and enforcement. Even then -how would they deal with the "my license got stolen" gambit?

Returning to fuckwit commenters and columnists in the newspapers, they always say "registration would be good for cycle theft". Bollocks. How would that be implemented? An international set of strictly issued Vehicle Registration Documents for all bicycles? It couldn't be based on registration numbers, as they would be easy to steal and re-use -so it's frame numbers, which have no global numbering scheme.

What would make sense from a theft perspective is something else.

  • Every new bike issued to have an RFID tag in the frame
  • Every bike owner to have registration documents showing they own the bike with the frame.
  • EBay to require that the resale of all bicycles retailed after the roll-out date of the mandatory RFID scheme must have their RFID marked, that all purchasers should have the RFID tag of any received bike checked at their local bike shop, and that if the bike is shown to be stolen, the purchaser gets their money back, the bike gets returned. The sell would get nothing but a visit from the police.

That would work. A piece of plastic cable-tied to the back of a seat post won't. It won't help the fuckwit's goal, something to call the police about whenever they want to complain about a bicycle.

Why then, do fuckwits keep asking for registration? It's because they are fuckwits.

2 comments:

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  2. Another thing the fuckwits forget is that vehicle registration and the entire operation behind it is paid for with Vehicle Excise Duty (what car drivers like to call "road tax," even though it doesn't pay for roads). Cyclists don't pay VED because bicycles are zero-emission vehicles. So, if mandatory registration was introduced for bikes, the cost of doing so would be paid by increasing VED on vehicles that DO pay it - cars, mostly. So next time a motorist says he or she thinks bikes should be registered, point out that he or she will be paying the bill if it ever happens - and there are an estimated 25 million bikes in the UK, so it ain't gonna be cheap.

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