"Dave Arquati" wrote in message
...
Apparently, the Mayor is now in favour of bike user/vehicle
registration, and wants a private bill put through Parliament to
achieve
this.



I see from the Times of Friday 28th July that Ken Livingstone is
proposing that bikes, and their owners, be required to be registered.
I can live with that. I used to live in Washington DC, which had at
least thirteen registration schemes in various parts of the
metropolitan area.



The schemes usually arose from "Yes Minister" type reasoning: "We've
got to do something. This is something, so we've got to do it." The
usual trigger was bike thefts. It was generally agreed by the powers
that be that assigning a policeman or two to catch a few bike thieves
was not worthwhile, and registration seemed to be the only other way
of actually appearing to be doing something.



The leader in bike registrations was the city of Takoma Park, just to
the north of the District of Columbia. Picture the Muswell Hill of
the Washington area. Takoma Park was involved with four registration
schemes, although any particular cyclist only had to deal with three,
city, county and state - the city straddles the border between two
counties.



Maryland's state scheme was voluntary, and in fact has since been
abolished on the grounds of general uselessness. The county scheme
was compulsory, at least Montgomery County's was. Prince George's
County, and the city's own scheme, I don't know about.



Bureaucratic arrangements for the different schemes round Washington
varied. Information about the registered bikes was kept on
everything from the State Department of Motor Vehicles car
registration databases to card indexes at police stations.
Arrangements for proving that the bike was actually yours to
register, rather than a stolen bike, also varied. For Montgomery
County, where I lived, arrangements were fairly informal. I had a
scheme, which I, alas, was never able to carry out, to discover the
serial number of the bike belonging to the County's Chief Executive,
so I could register the bike in my name, not his.



Arrangements for demonstrating that the bike had been registered also
varied. Most common was a little sticker, to stick on the bike's
frame, slightly bigger than the stickers that bikes sometimes carry
here, to indicate their owner's club affiliation. Some jurisdictions
punched numbers into the bottom bracket, rather in the way that
postcoding is done here. Just as many cyclists here avoid
postcoding, because of possible damage to the bottom bracket
bearings, so they did in Washington, even when it was compulsory.



Arlington, Virginia, I think it was, issued little metal number
plates, not very visible from far off, that were supposed to be fixed
to the bike's back rack. What the requirements were for those bikes
that did not have a back rack, or mudguards, I am not sure. The bike
club here, Audax UK, has a long running and proverbial dispute about
whether and when bikes on Audax rides should be required to have
mudguards. If Ken Livingstone joins in that, it will add a whole new
dimension to the amusement.



With car registration in the USA, reciprocity between states was not
achieved until sometime in the 1920s. Before then, a car crossing a
state border had to have an extra car registration, and an extra set
of number plates. For bikes there is no formal arrangement yet,
although some jurisdictions did write rules on the subject when
introducing their registration requirements. The rules were somewhat
academic, I suppose, since, in practice, nobody knew what those rules
were for any particular part of the Washington area, and any
particular kind of visitor.



Ken Livingstone will have to consider the subject of visitors, and
tell us what the requirements will be for those cyclists coming over
the border from Staines, or Watford or Epping or Dartford. Will they
have to get a temporary pass? Will there be a grace period? Will
the Tour de France riders have to be registered, or Dutch tourists?
Will a bike have to be registered if it is merely on a train, rather
than in the street?



In addition to registering, bikes, there is the question of
registering riders. American police all seem to have a standard
procedure to go through when stopping vehicles. The procedures were
all undoubtedly drawn up by people who assumed that all vehicles were
motor vehicles. Fairly early in any script comes the request to see
the driving licence. Of course I, on principle, never carried my
drivers licence when riding a bike, they being irrelevant when your
vehicle is not a motor vehicle. At the point when the script broke
down, and there was no set procedure, I could actually talk to the
policeman as one human being to another.



If London introduced a quasi drivers licence for cyclists, presumably
one would have five days to show it at a police station, and I
suppose that you could make such a procedure compulsory for five year
old children, as well as adults. You would have to make suitable
arrangements for the non Londoners, for example by requiring the
children from Watford to carry their passports.



In practice, of course, just as enforcing the rules against riding on
the pavement gets a lower priority than stopping terrorism or armed
robbery, so enforcing the bike registration laws got a lower priority
than the riding-on-the-pavement laws. The registration laws, and
their utility in hassling people, are, however, very useful for
keeping people out of the "wrong" neighbourhoods, especially for
discouraging poor black children from exploring rich white
neighbourhoods.



It will be interesting to see how Ken Livingstone's scheme develops



Jeremy Parker