Someone show that to His Orcuttness, who is no doubt doing this so he can work on driving the wedge wider between rural and city folk for his own political gain. Divide and conquer, y’know.

Though I am very pleased to finally see an honest statement from you, that “the way any tax applied doesn’t matter” because you simply want everyone to pay their “fair share” as long as it isn’t you. Did you happen to participate in the Occupy Movement? It’s funny because that’s the feeling I get from reading opinions. Ironically, this tax makes you part of the 1%. In case you havent figured it out, its not actually a cyclist tax, its a luxury tax.

But in any event, I say it’s a “generous assumption” because I took 3-year-old data for downtown Seattle (a 4.3% mode share for cycling), rounded up and extrapolated it statewide. It’s in the same report that average commute length was taken from: http://www.commuteseattle.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/2010-Commute-Seattle-Center-City-Mode-Split-Report-FINAL.RELEASE-6.141.pdf

And the way any tax is applied doesn’t matter; I’m reacting to the concept that cyclists are somehow not paying their “fair share” because we aren’t paying a separate cycling tax.

Bike lanes in this area are pretty much exclusively an after-thought. They add little if anything to the cost of constructing a road. Drivers drive in or obstruct the bike lane all the time. Law enforcement uses bike lanes for traffic stops. Bike lanes are poorly maintained. They aren’t swept clean, and indeed public works departments around the region commonly use the bike lane as a staging area for their clean up of the road and adjacent sidewalks.

On top of all that, it’s a fallacy that gas tax is a major contributor to road maintenance. Even statewide, transportation budget is only about 25% covered by gas tax, while the remainder is funded by revenue sources we all pay, including cyclists. By that calculus, motor vehicle infrastructure should be funded only about 33% more than any other given kind of infrastructure. And yet, it accounts for a much bigger proportion (I don’t have the exact figure off the top of my head, but it’s in the neighborhood of 80-90%).

Frankly, I’d be more than happy to see bike lanes on motor vehicles roads disappear completely. But only under the condition that bike infrastructure gets its fair share of funding, which would allow for an entirely separate and regionally-connected bike infrastructure, which in turn would make using a bicycle for transportation actually reasonable and accessible for the average person, instead of requiring that one be a die-hard cyclist with a death-wish, just waiting for that distracted, careless driver to wander into the bike lane and run them over.

I’m all for keeping a balanced view, but frankly there are a lot of people out there all too willing to overlook the incredible _unbalanced_ state of affairs that exists now, in which the needs and wants of motorists are given the lion’s share of funding, at the expense of other types of transportation modes that _all_ are in practically every way better for people and the environment than private motor vehicles.