Your Tax Dollars At Work, Part Bleah…
Just in case you had any faith left in your state government, they’ve gone and done it again. House Bill 3008 aims to force cyclists to register their bikes. The registration will cost $54 and must be renewed every two years. The bill will also make it a crime to remove or alter the serial number on a bike or to ride an unregistered bicycle. Even better, it will create a database of bicycle registrations, available to law enforcement agencies, that will track the name, address, phone number, and date of birth of the owner, a whole mess of information about the make, model, etc. of the bike, and “any other information the Department of Transportation considers necessary.” The money is ostensibly going to go into a fund that will be used to pay for bicycle infrastructure.
Furthermore, bike owners will henceforth need to notify the government within fifteen days any time a bicycle changes ownership. Even more bizarrely:
The bill says ODOT can contract with “any private person or entity or other unit of government”. The “agent” that issues the registration would keep one-third of the money and the other two-thirds would go back to ODOT.
I can’t imagine what might go wrong with that.
The bill has already outraged the smug, self-righteous cycling set in Portland (they interviewed some woman on the news tonight who complained about being shouted at by “overweight people in their cars” when she’s just out there… you know… “trying to be healthy”), which means this thing probably doesn’t stand much of a chance. In fact, OregonLive reports that the chief sponsor, Wayne Krieger, who hails from my home town, “conceded the legislation probably won’t pass, particularly with ‘everybody struggling’ in the bad economy.”
It’s too bad Mr. Krieger can’t find a better way to spend his constituents’ money in this bad economy than introducing utterly absurd legislation that even he admits is dead-on-arrival.
The ban on novelty lighters looks like the Code of Hammurabi compared to this abortion.
