I never made any statement about the tax. Oh and incidentally, road tax these days has nothing to do with the roads.
Myabe, but I was just pointing out the origin of road tax.
There's always an apologist for cyclists behaviour trying to blame the motorist... I see far more disregard for the law and dangerous behaviour from cyclists on an average journey through the city centre than I do from drivers... And let's not even discuss cyclists, road rage and their apparent propensity for criminal damage when they lash out.
Or I was asking a valid question, as a lot of large towns and cities (including Cambridge I think) have cycle lanes that appear about 50m before traffic lights and have a box in front of cars for cyclists. I was just asking him if he was sure there wasn't anything like that where he was.
And no, there are more dangerous drivers than cyclists, who are also far more dangerous to pedestrians than cyclists. For example if I hadn't been looking at a drivers hands on the wheel a couple of days ago as I was about to cross a side road I wouldn't have seen that he was about to swerve into the road I was going to cross, who needs indicators?
Oh and in 18 years of cycling I haven't hit anyone, whereas I have been almost knocked off my bike about a dozen times by drivers looking (or not) but not seeing when pulling out, and going round corners on the wrong side of the road, and my sister almost had her ankle broken (and her bike was damaged) by a car driver in a car park who either didn't care or didn't notice that she had just run over a cyclist, and sped off...
I think cyclists should undergo training before they're allowed to cycle any where. They're an annoyance on the roads to cars and a danger to pedestrians on the paths as they have no sense of the highway code.
I've worked in London and Cambridge where both are infested with cyclists who use any surface despite signs and road markings to get to their destination. Every day I see cyclists nearly run over by cars and idiots cycling on packed paths. I do think in these sinarios that cyclists need to be regulated but as for road tax I don't think they impact enough on the roads to incur fees to use them.
Most people do undergo training, I did, a lot of schools do it. If car drivers weren't cucooned in their own little world they might notice just how bad some of them are too, problem is they have a big box of steel round them, so if they get bumped or scraped all they have to worry about is a dent in the paintwork, whereas that same accident could easily kill a cyclist. I strongly believe that as part of learning to drive you should undergo a few months of road cycing to make you aware of just how vunerable cycling can be, and to recognise how cyclists behave (not bad behaviour, just different), also more emphasis on the rights of a cyclist (i.e. the same rights/more (in some cases) as a car driver.
And again as for the age old excuse of cyclists cycling through red lights, well every day I see car drivers speeding up to get past the amber traffic light, "ooh, sorry officer it wasn't safe to stop at that red light so I went through it"... And there is on occasion the trafic light that isn't sensitive enough (usually on smaller roads with motion sensors) to pick up a cyclist, so in that case you either wait until you get bored of life (and the cars behind you are bibbing furiously) or you get of the bike and walk onto the path and faf around going accross the roads on foot to get to the road you want, or you check there are no cars and cycle through. I'm not trying to be an apologist for cyclists actions, just pointing out that if you don't cycle (regularly) you may not realise there are a multitude of reasons for cyclists to do things that you as a car driver thinks is wrong. Of course there are a load of unsafe cyclists on the road, but that is still outweighed by car drivers.
And as someone else pointed out, if you are a pedestrian walking on a cycle track then you are just as bad as a pedestrian walking on a road, so get off the ******* cycle track!
