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Bicycle number plates from Edmonton (CC BY-SA 2.0 licensed by woodysworld1778 via Flickr)Sussex PCC calls for bicycle registration
The Police and Crime Commissioner for Sussex Katy Bourne has said cyclists should "wear some form of identification" so "you can prosecute them for breaking the law.”
According to Rachel Millard of Brighton and Hove paper The Argus, Bourne was repeatedly asked questions about cycling at a public meeting she hosted on Monday.
She told the meeting: “I would like to see cyclists wear some form of identification like cars have.
“So when they go through traffic lights, you can actually identify them and then you can prosecute them for breaking the law.”
As it's not the Police and Crime Commissioner's role to set policy, though, she said the idea was “one for the legislators.”
This was a “debate that should be had,” she said.
After the meeting, Bourne told The Argus: “It is something that has been at the back of my mind for a long time.
“Because when you use the road, if you are driving a car you have your number plate. Other people register, they pay to use the roads.
“Cyclists don’t, admittedly.
“But there have been occasions when I have been sat at red lights and seen cyclists go through.
“And it is never the responsible cyclists that do this – the ones that belong to the clubs, they are great, they are the ones that adhere to all the laws, so it is the few that ruin it for the many.”
Tony Green of the Brighton and Hove Cycling Campaign said that drivers don't pay to use the road. Road.cc readers will probably not need reminding that Vehicle Excise Duty is a charge related to emissions that goes into the Treasury's Big Money Pot and is not ring-fenced for roads.
Green said: “Cyclists are seen as the easy target. I don’t really know what it is, but maybe people think they are getting something for free.
“I agree there are cyclists who break the law but then ten or one hundred times as many motorists break the law.”
Carlton Reid, cycle campaigner and author of Roads were not built for cars, has a thorough debunking of the idea over on ipayroadtax.com.
John has been writing about bikes and cycling for over 30 years since discovering that people were mug enough to pay him for it rather than expecting him to do an honest day's work.
He was heavily involved in the mountain bike boom of the late 1980s as a racer, team manager and race promoter, and that led to writing for Mountain Biking UK magazine shortly after its inception. He got the gig by phoning up the editor and telling him the magazine was rubbish and he could do better. Rather than telling him to get lost, MBUK editor Tym Manley called John’s bluff and the rest is history.
Since then he has worked on MTB Pro magazine and was editor of Maximum Mountain Bike and Australian Mountain Bike magazines, before switching to the web in 2000 to work for CyclingNews.com. Along with road.cc founder Tony Farrelly, John was on the launch team for BikeRadar.com and subsequently became editor in chief of Future Publishing’s group of cycling magazines and websites, including Cycling Plus, MBUK, What Mountain Bike and Procycling.
John has also written for Cyclist magazine, edited the BikeMagic website and was founding editor of TotalWomensCycling.com before handing over to someone far more representative of the site's main audience.
He joined road.cc in 2013. He lives in Cambridge where the lack of hills is more than made up for by the headwinds.
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46 comments
And I suppose enforcing existing laws, such as 20mph zones, should be left to her discretion...?
for me the acid test is will it mean more kids can cycle (or walk) to school?
sometimes holding public office means telling the public some ugly truths about their attitudes and about having a vision for a better society
licensing cyclists would temporarily fix the earache for those that lack a backbone but contributes nothing to fixing the problem of a car dependent culture
Won't make a blind bit of difference.
Would it? Licensing drivers and cars doesn't stop people getting injured or killed on the roads.
It would just be a very expensive appeasement exercise, that for a short period would shut motorists up.
Then would come the compulsory insurance argument, then the 'taxation' one, then the MOT one and so on.
Then you take away the beauty of cycling as a transport form, that it has very minimal costs after the outlay of a bike.
No doubt she'll cook up a scheme to save lots of money by stopping the electricity to all the cats eyes in the middle of the road soon!
A true candidate for tory party leadership if there ever was one - why let the truth get in the way of a good rant about the 'undeserving' in society!
And we let people with such a loose grip on understanding run a police force??? Oh no sorry we dont the current government do because putting untrained numpties in charge is what politics is all about! Pity they are now doing that with the highest paid public sector management roles too!
Paslode nails or hot melt glue
Surely you'd brand a reg number onto the right rump? Horses not cyclists... Oh but hang on... Branding. It the new tattooing!
As for running as for office. If it only takes 9% of the population to choose a halfwit from another halfwit maybe someone should run on a 'pro motorist' ticket and then reveal their pro cyclist leanings when they win? That'll get some attention for the issue.
Wow, because that would work except for
the number plate would have to be big enough to read ruining the aero effect on modern road bikes.....will it come in carbon?
it would cost a fortune to run. Imagine the police having to stop people and check their credentials are not forged. It would however create a whole new tv series - police, camera, pedal.
Don't even go near the tax issue.
I have been sat at red lights and regularly see drivers go through them, and i don't see them being caught on a regular basis, same goes for using a phone whilst driving.
We would also need to stick a number plate on horses arses
-for equality-which by definition means Katy Bourne would need one as well. Glue would be cruel so maybe some sort of velcro that can use the horses hair for purchase.
Pedestrians should also have a number plate on their back as they cross the road and are therefore in scope.
So, so pointless.
I invoke Godwins law....
I am sure the Nazis had a habit of tattooing numbers on people....
More seriously, Number plates don't stop drivers, illegal parking, speeding, RLJing, dangerous driving, etc etc. Yes they might help on the odd occasion and I suppose that number plates do have some uses. But to be of any use they have to be big enough to read easily. ie number plate sized any smaller and they are a waste of time and money.
Then we can move onto licences, drivers are trained and licenced and still break the law.
How about funding, well, I pay 20% vat on the bike, I pay income tax, VAT, Council Tax, RFL, all these taxes and the roads are still $**t, but none of these are dedicated to road repairs, I guess the only thing I can think of that might be is the Severn Bridge Toll? As an aside, France has peage, Switzerland has Vignettes, maybe that is why their motorways are well kept????
It's worse than that.
Has anyone tried actually reporting a red-light running driver to the police, with numberplate? Do the police give a monkey's if there's no accident? Budgets are stretched and it's not a priority.
Cyclists mostly aren't capable of doing the kind of damage that warrants police time.
Also Horses. How do you fix a number plate to a horse?
I believe that people are allowed to walk on many roads too. Let's just RFID chip everyone everwhere all the time.
Because registering and licencing vehicles has stopped them breaking the law... oh wait...
Costly, impractical and it just creates another barrier to cycling in a country where car pollution is so bad that it kills more people than RTAs. Where air pollution is so bad that it regularly breaks EU law. Where inactive transport is one of the biggest reasons behind the fat crisis that is costing teh NHS billions and is arguably the leading cause of death.
I can just imagine the cost of the infrastructure needed to read cycle ID tags or RF tagging and it's mega bucks. What is the aim of these ideas? To improve safety? Generate Revenue? Keep pig headed drivers feeling like they are in the right?
I can't see where this makes any practical sense. Can we get back to some proper police work now please Ms Bourne?
Does she say the same about drunk drivers ruining it for every other driver? Or about rapists ruining it for every other man (or John Worboys ruining it for every other black cab driver)?
No? So fuck her and her retarded stupid collective responsibility bullshit nonsense.
If she spent more time thinking about it than a her usual reactionary brainfarts, she would realise that the scale of the bureaucracy alone would render the implementation impractical.
There was a short debate on Radio 5 about 11.30am today - it had her and Carlton Reid and obviously the usual phone calls/texts from frothing-at-the-mouth listeners.
As usual, it ended having created the right amount of web hits, text messages and controversy and won't have changed anyone's viewpoints on the matter.
“Because when you use the road, if you are driving a car you have your number plate. Other people register, they pay to use the roads.
“Cyclists don’t, admittedly.
Yes we do (I know talking to the converted) - I own a car so pay tax on that and pay income tax - when will these numpties get the message?
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