Krieger: Bike Registrations Improve Bike Safety

"Krieger also sees this as a way to improve bikeway conditions (and therefore bike safety) in Oregon. Like he has done in committee testimony, on the phone Friday he brought up people riding on the coast near his home in Gold Beach. "They are riding on the edge of the fogline," he said, "with their butt and elbow into the traffic lane even when they have a bike lane to ride in. They do that because the bike lane isn't swept. If there was a bit more money in the pot, maybe ODOT could sweep it more often."

Krieger said bikes are long overdue in having to help pay for the infrastructure they use:

'Talk about a time when you need some revenue for transportation bikes have used the roads in this state forever and have never contributed a penny. The only people that pay into the system are those people who buy motor vehicle licenses and registration fees.'

When I brought up the fact that bikes cause little to no damage to our transportation system relative to motor vehicles, he disagreed, saying, 'I don't think it's a legitimate argument simply because the majority of the bike lanes are adjacent to the highways so if we made our highways wider, with more engineering, that drove up the cost for bikes.' His point was that the engineering and planning costs to include bikeways into highways was considerable enough that it needs to be recouped somehow."