sten_super
Brain Surgeon
You can call it what you ****ing like, it's still a road tax!
No, it really, really isn't, and your refusal to admit this is really undermining any valid argument you may have. If it was a road tax it would be dependent upon the distance travelled - it's not. It's a tax to use a motor vehicle, based upon the amount of CO2 emitted by that vehicle. Use of a pedal bike emits less than 130g of CO2 per kilometre, so it's zero-rated. A car that does the same is similarly zero-rated.
Only this morning I saw a woman (yes a fully grown woman, not a 10 year old on his BMX) using her feet on the floor to break. What if she had to stop suddenly and couldn't, sent herself over the top of a car, no fault to the driver and died. How do you think that driver would feel?
There's absolutely no way you can win a completely hypothetical argument about road accidents between a car and a bike, no way. I mentioned earlier that I was given only about 6 inches of space by a car this morning on my way into work - what if the driver had sneezed, and I had been knocked off my bike, how do you think I would feel? (I suspect the answer is a short blast of extreme pain and then death, by the way)
One of the girls that works for me rides into work and thankfully she got busted jumping the lights. She had the choice of going on a course from the law or getting a £60 fine. She went on the course and she now appreciates how much a nuisance she was to law abiding, tax paying motorists. Shame more of you aren't like her.
I don't know who this 'you' are that you're talking about. You could make exactly the same argument about a driver speeding, yet I wouldn't accuse all car drivers of speeding just because one did.
All you're doing is constructing complete straw-man arguments about all cyclists based upon a small number of examples. Everyone (cyclist, car driver) is able to do that - do you really think that means that all car drivers or cyclists behave like that?
edit to add: I'm not a militant cyclist, I'm really not. I've only been doing it (over any reasonable distance) for four weeks or so. I'm a law-abiding cyclist that hasn't even (so far, touch wood) had a major run in with a motorist. But the ridiculous level of animosity and venom directed at cyclists by other road users (particularly motorists) I find really worrying, especially taking account of their seeming inability to admit any flaws in 'their own' (using such generalisations really makes me just as bad!). As far as I can see the continuation and potential escalation of this is only going to increase the chances of me having an incident with an angry motorist while I'm out on my commute.
Last edited: