Cyclists and bicycles should be licensed
Anonymity has allowed our roads to become a free-for-all, Matthew P. Harrington says.
The city of Montreal’s recent recommendations for changes to the Quebec Highway Safety Code will merely empower lawless cyclists and put both pedestrians and other users of the road in danger.
The city has taken entirely the wrong approach to safety. Rather than benefiting from special exceptions like rolling through stop signs and, even worse, riding on sidewalks, cyclists ought to be forced to comply with the same rules that apply to other users of the road.
And the city’s proposal that motor vehicles be charged with a “principle of prudence” is exactly the wrong way to go. All users of the road must bear full responsibility for their actions.
Cycling culture in Montreal has reached a point of utter lawlessness. This lawlessness is abetted by anonymity. Unlike automobiles, which can be identified by their licence plate, or drivers of vehicles, who are required to carry a photo driver’s licence, cyclists operate on our city streets and roads in complete anonymity.
This allows them to run red lights, ride on sidewalks or operate at unsafe speeds with impunity. They can break the law in full view of multiple witnesses and give the audience the middle finger as they drive on, knowing that they will never be caught.
Rather than give cyclists more free passes, as the city seeks to do with its most recent proposals, government ought to attempt to reduce the anonymity that has allowed our roads to become a free-for-all. Both provincial and city governments should take aggressive steps to regulate the operation of bicycles in this city by devising a system by which bicycles are clearly identifiable with some sort of number plate and bicycle operators are issued licences.
A politically powerful interest group has succeeded in exempting itself from the laws of safety and common sense.
Owners of bicycles and operators over the age of 16 ought to be required to register their bicycles and obtain driving permits from the municipal government. Fees from these could then be devoted to paying for the ever-increasing demands for cycling infrastructure as well as the hiring of additional police to enforce cycling laws.
No doubt, this proposal will strike many as ridiculous. And, such a characterization would have been fair 10 or 20 years ago, when cycling was largely an activity engaged in by children and the occasional adult riding in a park. Yet, those days are long gone. As cycling groups constantly remind us when demanding ever larger increases in infrastructure spending, cycling has become an important part of the transportation network. According to Vélo Québec, more than 700,000 Montrealers now ride bicycles on our city streets.
As a result, it is high time that our traffic laws catch up to the true nature of the traffic. Just as rules had to be developed when cars replaced horses, and heavy trucks were added to the roads, so our laws need to be updated to account for the fact that large numbers of people are operating two-wheeled vehicles in a dangerous fashion. Government officials are ever willing to spring into action creating all manner of complex regulations in order to protect against even the most attenuated or theoretical threats to public safety. Yet these same officials are strangely silent and inert in dealing with the utter chaos taking place on the streets.
The reason for this is not hard to glean. Cyclists make up a large and vocal political pressure group. They have clearly cowed vote-seeking politicians to close their eyes to the obvious dangers posed by anarchic cyclists. The result is that a politically powerful interest group has succeeded in exempting itself from the laws of safety and common sense. Unfortunately, this is a recipe for disaster.