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

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/5225346.stm

I definitely have mixed feelings about this. I disagree with the guy
from British Cycling who says a "tiny minority of cyclists" are flouting
road regulations - in my reasonably frequent cycling experience, I
reckon about half of cyclists go past me through red lights, and as a
pedestrian I come across people cycling on non-shared-use pavements
nearly every day.

On the other hand, I agree with the RAC guy who says we need to
encourage cycling rather than putting people off. I'm inclined to
believe that the benefits of registration (easier enforcement, less
anti-social cycling) would be outweighed by the disbenefits (people put
off cycling because of the hassle factor).

Then again, we've had this discussion on u.t.l many times before.

--
Dave Arquati
Imperial College, SW7
www.alwaystouchout.com - Transport projects in London

In article , (Dave
Arquati) wrote:

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

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/5225346.stm

I definitely have mixed feelings about this. I disagree with the
guy from British Cycling who says a "tiny minority of cyclists" are
flouting road regulations - in my reasonably frequent cycling
experience, I reckon about half of cyclists go past me through red
lights, and as a pedestrian I come across people cycling on
non-shared-use pavements nearly every day.

On the other hand, I agree with the RAC guy who says we need to
encourage cycling rather than putting people off. I'm inclined to
believe that the benefits of registration (easier enforcement, less
anti-social cycling) would be outweighed by the disbenefits (people
put off cycling because of the hassle factor).

Then again, we've had this discussion on u.t.l many times before.

This is totally Dagenham (several stops beyond Barking) is if not
Upminster. It's also Ken reverting to New Labour control freakery to a
degree I didn't believe him capable of. He *has* changed since he was
first elected!

It would decimate cycling in London, not to mention making life
impossible for cyclists like me who bring their bikes in on the train
from Cambridge. We certainly won't be doing anything so dotty in
Cambridge because we actually know we have to promote sustainable
transport. The alternative is total gridlock.

--
Colin Rosenstiel

Colin Rosenstiel wrote:

This is totally Dagenham (several stops beyond Barking) is if not
Upminster. It's also Ken reverting to New Labour control freakery to a
degree I didn't believe him capable of. He *has* changed since he was
first elected!

It would decimate cycling in London, not to mention making life
impossible for cyclists like me who bring their bikes in on the train
from Cambridge. We certainly won't be doing anything so dotty in
Cambridge because we actually know we have to promote sustainable
transport. The alternative is total gridlock.

Well said, Colin. It would also be entirely impractical unless it were a
national implementation. For example, how would they be able to regulate
those of us who (like yourself) take a bike on the train into London but
then cycle from one terminus to another before heading out of London to our
destination (in my case, in from Metroland and out of King's Cross to
Peterborough - perhaps Ken would prefer me to clog up the Metropolitan line
by taking my bike right through to KX, in order to avoid the need to license
it?).

Jack Taylor wrote:
Colin Rosenstiel wrote:

This is totally Dagenham (several stops beyond Barking) is if not
Upminster. It's also Ken reverting to New Labour control freakery to a
degree I didn't believe him capable of. He *has* changed since he was
first elected!

It would decimate cycling in London, not to mention making life
impossible for cyclists like me who bring their bikes in on the train
from Cambridge. We certainly won't be doing anything so dotty in
Cambridge because we actually know we have to promote sustainable
transport. The alternative is total gridlock.

Well said, Colin. It would also be entirely impractical unless it were a
national implementation. For example, how would they be able to regulate
those of us who (like yourself) take a bike on the train into London but
then cycle from one terminus to another before heading out of London to our
destination (in my case, in from Metroland and out of King's Cross to
Peterborough - perhaps Ken would prefer me to clog up the Metropolitan line
by taking my bike right through to KX, in order to avoid the need to license
it?).

It would be totally impractical to enforce, just how many bicycles are
there in the London area that would be affected? Anyone can buy a
bicycle from anywhere without need to register it. It would require and
Act of Parliament to make it legal and such a thing would never be
passed.

Neill

In article . com,
(Neillw001) wrote:

Jack Taylor wrote:

[Ken's bike lunacy]

It would be totally impractical to enforce, just how many bicycles
are there in the London area that would be affected? Anyone can buy a
bicycle from anywhere without need to register it. It would require
and Act of Parliament to make it legal and such a thing would never be
passed.

Ken is talking of a Private Bill, something London has every year. But
it could well fall foul of the Parliamentary procedures because of its
effect on people outside London.

--
Colin Rosenstiel

Colin Rosenstiel wrote:
In article . com,
(Neillw001) wrote:

Jack Taylor wrote:

[Ken's bike lunacy]

It would be totally impractical to enforce, just how many bicycles
are there in the London area that would be affected? Anyone can buy a
bicycle from anywhere without need to register it. It would require
and Act of Parliament to make it legal and such a thing would never be
passed.

Ken is talking of a Private Bill, something London has every year. But
it could well fall foul of the Parliamentary procedures because of its
effect on people outside London.

--
Colin Rosenstiel

Colin, I understand what you say about impracticality of "local"
legally-enforced bike registration; i.e. it would have to be national
or nothing.

But, does Cambridge University not still have a mandatory College
resistration system for students' bicycles? I remember my number -
Q283, from all those years ago! I'm not sure what the sanction was for
failing to register and/or display one's number.

Moreover, all resident Members of the University were required to
obtain the Motor Proctor's written consent before having motor vehicle
in the City. I wonder whether that still applies.?

Marc.

JRS: In article
, dated Sat, 29 Jul 2006 10:38:00 remote, seen in
news:uk.transport.london, Colin Rosenstiel posted
:
In article . com,
(Neillw001) wrote:

Jack Taylor wrote:

[Ken's bike lunacy]

It would be totally impractical to enforce, just how many bicycles
are there in the London area that would be affected? Anyone can buy a
bicycle from anywhere without need to register it. It would require
and Act of Parliament to make it legal and such a thing would never be
passed.

Ken is talking of a Private Bill, something London has every year. But
it could well fall foul of the Parliamentary procedures because of its
effect on people outside London.

It has no effect on people outside London. It does have an effect on
outsiders who enter London, temporarily or permanently - just the same
as British law applies in Britain, Scottish Law applies ... .

If Cambridge decides also to require registration and number plates, the
Council will have to determine whether London plates are to be valid in
Cambridge, and /vice versa/. And, AIUI, according to present
regulations, Councillors with any interest in or knowledge of the
situation will be unable to participate. Does that also apply to
Mayors, for example of London?

--
© John Stockton, Surrey, UK. Turnpike v4.00 MIME. ©
Web URL:http://www.merlyn.demon.co.uk/ - w. FAQish topics, links, acronyms
PAS EXE etc : URL:http://www.merlyn.demon.co.uk/programs/ - see 00index.htm
Dates - miscdate.htm moredate.htm js-dates.htm pas-time.htm critdate.htm etc.

"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

Jeremy Parker wrote:
"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.

(snip fascinating reading on US experiences of bike registration)

The complicated nature of the schemes you describe seems to demonstrate
the futility of such a scheme here. One of the key problems seems to be
that registration of bikes doesn't in itself actually achieve anything
(other than some statistics about bike owners).

The goal here is to reduce traffic offences by cyclists. The preferred
method is to catch offending cyclists and punish them. There are two
ways to achieve this - manually (by having police or traffic wardens out
and about catching them) or automatically (using cameras). Ken seems to
want bike registration plates so that cameras can catch bikes
automatically, but the question is, how large does a plate have to be to
be visible for this, and where are we going to put it?

I really don't think the expense of the scheme would be worth the
benefit in reduced offences, especially when it is likely to put people
off cycling. A similar argument has been waged in Australia where
helmets are mandatory in some places - such a law may put people off
cycling, which in turn may lead to higher accident rates as fewer cycles
on the road leads to a lower awareness by other road users. The
long-term health benefits of cycling are also an important
consideration, especially when more and more people are likely to suffer
from illnesses such as heart disease.

Another point mentioned in the US scenarios is that some people just
won't bother to register. The "worst" offenders are those least likely
to register and therefore stand just as little chance of being caught as
they do now.

My opinion is that a "soft" publicity-based campaign against antisocial
cycling would be far more effective. It wouldn't put people off cycling
(and could even be designed to encourage it by highlighting how you have
a lot of control over your own safety, a factor which puts many people
off cycling) and would be far more cost-effective.

--
Dave Arquati
Imperial College, SW7
www.alwaystouchout.com - Transport projects in London

Dave Arquati wrote:
Jeremy Parker wrote:
"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 can't. The whole idea is completely ridiculous. But then I'm
strongly against biometric ID cards too. The issue is both cases is
the same - a desire by the state to inconvenience everyone so that law
enforcement is easier. Absolute identity is unnecessary for law
enforcement. It is only necessary to establish identity between the
offender and the defendant for each offence.

(snip fascinating reading on US experiences of bike registration)

The complicated nature of the schemes you describe seems to demonstrate
the futility of such a scheme here. One of the key problems seems to be
that registration of bikes doesn't in itself actually achieve anything
(other than some statistics about bike owners).

The goal here is to reduce traffic offences by cyclists. The preferred
method is to catch offending cyclists and punish them. There are two
ways to achieve this - manually (by having police or traffic wardens out
and about catching them) or automatically (using cameras).

All registration would achieve is diverting police effort from
enforcing real offences to enforcing compliance with registration.

Police priorities are not always well-chosen, but on the whole they
realise that red light jumping by cyclists is not worthy of as much
effort as red light jumping by motorists, for example.

Would anyone care to argue that motoring offences are at an acceptably
low level? Enforcement of speed and red lights is still treated as a
game, with a slap on the wrist if you are dozy enough not to spot a
bright yellow camera. Elsewhere, 90% of drivers treat speed limits as
advisory.

The idea would not achieve its objectives, and would dramatically
reduce cycling if enforced effectively - just like that other
half-baked anti-cycling idea, compulsory cycle helmets.

If Ken genuinely wants to reduce pavement cycling and red light
jumping by cyclists, he will:

- install Advanced Stop Lines (ASLs) for cyclists at all traffic lights
- fund National Standards cycle training for all children, all adult
cyclists who want it, and all cyclists caught committing an offence
- exempt cyclists from all one ways unless signs specifically say
otherwise
- stop councils building off-road cycle 'facilities' where the road is
perfectly OK to cycle on, or could be made so with lower traffic speeds
- employ many more traffic policeman, and give them these priorities,
in this order:
-- wrongly registered and uninsured motor vehicles
-- all forms of dangerous driving, especially where it endangers
cyclists or pedestrians
-- universal compliance with speed limits
-- use of mobile phones while driving
-- red and amber light jumping
-- violation of ASLs
-- once compliance on these is largely achieved, and only then,
they can get heavy about cyclists' offences.

This programme would achieve a more cycle-friendly road network, and
cyclists capable of using it responsibly and safely. With more
responsible cyclists, the irresponsible ones will stand out, and maybe
the media will stop the nonsense that cyclists should be criticised as
a class rather than for their own individual actions.

My opinion is that a "soft" publicity-based campaign against antisocial
cycling would be far more effective. It wouldn't put people off cycling
(and could even be designed to encourage it by highlighting how you have
a lot of control over your own safety, a factor which puts many people
off cycling) and would be far more cost-effective.

Agree totally. It is barely possible that Ken's threat is meant to be
part of this.

Colin McKenzie

--
On average in Britain, you're more likely to get a head injury walking
a mile than cycling it.
So why aren't we all exhorted to wear walking helmets?