This Act is Necessary for the Immediate Preservation of the public peace, health, or safety.
A look into a draft bill to impose new motor vehicle registration fees to fund Bike Grift
“CONCERNING THE CREATION OF AN ENTERPRISE TO PROVIDE INFRASTRUCTURE IMPROVEMENTS THAT PROTECT VULNERABLE ROAD USERS,” opens a draft bill currently making rounds among a committee in the Colorado Legislature.
If the bill were to make it through the legislative sausage making machine and onto the Governor’s desk to signature, it would create a “vulnerable road user protection enterprise” within the state’s Department of Transportation (CDOT). States are mandated by the Federal Government via the Federal Highway Administration (FHA) to address such issues which extended to reducing and eventually eliminating all roadway fatalities via “Vision Zero.” To fund this along with some “other data-driven strategies,” the author of the bill insists such an enterprise will require to charge a “vulnerable road user protection fee.” This is likely because the state’s Taxpayer Bill of Rights (TABOR) requires all tax increases to be approved directly by voters and Proposition 117 which places limitations on “fees,” being imposed without voter permission.
Ultimately this new arm of CDOT would, with these fees collected, fund projects labeled as being for “vulnerable road users,” such as bicycle lanes (many of which paradoxically cause more crashes!), road diets, and for automated speed cameras. The enterprise would be governed by a board consisting of an employee of an regional transportation organization such as RTD , a “representative of a community organization involved in environmental justice,” two CDOT bureaucrats with the requirement that one be an engineer, and an “employee of the office of health equity in the department of public health and environment who works on issues relating to healthy equitable livable communities.”
But it will be the source of this new, er, fee, that if this bill makes it out through the legislative sausage-making machine and is actually signed by the Governor that will be the most controversial. Such fees are to be imposed and paid for by owners of certain motor vehicles: light trucks and passenger cars.
The bill defines1 as “light truck” as a non-commercial pickup truck, SUV, or minivan, that has two axles, at least four wheels, and with a weight not exceeding 9,500 pounds. In other words, the state considers a Toyota Sienna minivan (a vehicle known for high crash test ratings in vehicle-to-pedestrian tests), and a Ford F-350 to be in this same category. A “passenger car”, also defined as one with the same axle and weight requirements but that is not a pickup truck, SUV, van, or minivan. The fees would be charged based on whether the vehicle meets these definitions of “light truck” and “passenger car” and their weight.
The fee schedule is as follows:
These values would adjust yearly as needed to inflation and if the enterprise collected more than 100 million dollars (that amount is not specifically tied to inflation) in the first five fiscal years, then the fees would need to be reduced.
So what’s the driver for this?
One part physics, another part ideology.
In the bill’s Legislative Declaration, the text goes on for multiple pages about the risk of injury or death to a vulnerable road user should he or she be involved in a collision with a motor vehicle. These individuals lack any sort of protective device that will counter the forces in such a collision. This is the simple physics part. The bill fails to cite a source but insists on exact percentages a pedestrian is subject to injury based on an exact speed of a motor vehicle. For example, 10% in a collision with a motor vehicle traveling at 16 mph, and 50% for one traveling at 31 mph. It also conflates mass and weight, while citing the equation for force, which equals mass times acceleration. Pedantry aside, they get the basics right though: greater speeds and/or greater mass often results in greater collision severity. Interestingly enough, the fees have nothing to do with the speeds these vehicles can achieve or an individual vehicle’s crash test ratings.
In the case of both bicyclists and pedestrians, the focus on the motor vehicles alone places little to no focus on the behavior of the pedestrians or bicyclists who unfortunately can be in many cases responsible for their own collisions with motor vehicles.
It should be noted, at least in the context of bicycling crashes, that even low speed crashes can be severe. Right hooks, left crosses, driveouts, and doorings can all occur with motor vehicles, regardless of size, moving as slow speeds. Right hook collisions, sometimes a “feature” of so-called “protected bike lanes” often involve large trucks but moving at slow speeds. It’s likely these fees will fund more “protected bike lanes” and “road diets” (recall it was an Oakland road diet that resulted in the door zone bike lane where Maia and her father were cycling) These crash types are completely preventable though although this advice is largely tailored to bicyclists opening the door of “victim blaming” accusations from Platitude-driven cycling advocates and their radical arm, Cluster B(ike) activists.
Both these groups along with a growing portion of the Colorado’s transplant-driven political class operate on Woke Victim Ideology. In other words, it’s a battle between oppressor motor vehicles and vulnerable road users. Anything that happens to the Noble Victim is always the fault of the oppressor.
There are several reasons to oppose this bill.
While the fees can be argued to be minor, this money would go to entrench the interests of transportation activists in the Bicycle Infrastructure Industrial Complex, grift groups such as People for Bikes, and racist NACTO. Despite being “for bikes,” these groups are often hostile to safe and legal cycling so long as their overpaid staff can parasitize off the hard work of normal people. The warnings of PM Summer ring true here when he noted over a decade ago about the “new breed of bicycle professionals” who “are most often urban planners and landscape architects, who have become virtual social engineers.”
It would also further animosity against bicyclists under the common (yet debunked) claims they don’t “pay for the roads”, are not entitled to use them unless they do pay, or are only allowed to use road with special bicycle-only infrastructure. Bicyclists could find themselves banned from roads where segregated bike facilities are located adjacent such as College Avenue in Fort Collins. Anti-cyclists may also want to impose discriminatory mandatory use laws such as those in New York.
General “bikelash” would continue along the lines of the warnings from John Finley Scott, too.
The bill closes with the absurd notion, and part of this post’s title:
The general assembly hereby finds, determines, and declares that this act is necessary for the immediate preservation of the public peace, health, or safety.
Given the past several years of State abuse in the name of “public peace, health, or safety,” such a statement is grotesquely manipulative.
This bill should be opposed by both bicyclists and non-bicyclists alike.
These definitions are missing from any part of the state’s actual laws, in particular the definition section 42 of the Colorado Revised Statutes. They also define “vulnerable road user” surprisingly without the usual hysteria that surrounds the term as used by activists, as someone who lacks protection from an “outside shield” when using the road. The definition specifically includes bicyclists, pedestrians, but oddly not motorcyclists.