Comment 117464

By jorvay (registered) | Posted April 05, 2016 at 15:11:49 in reply to Comment 117462

In my experience biking and driving, the rate at which people break laws is about the same in both modes. The laws that road users tend to break may change but people diving cars break tonnes of rules every day. I'm not even factoring speeding into this. If you consider speeding, then motorists are no doubt worse offenders than cyclists. The best way to get more cyclists with licenses is to making cycling more attractive. Let's assume that a snapshot today would show that 60% of adults that bike regularly in the city have drivers licenses (I'm guessing it's higher, but it doesn't matter for this example). So for every 100 cyclists, 60 have licenses already and 40 don't. Now imagine that the city makes a year long push to attract more people to regular cycling (dedicated infrastructure, road rules that actually make sense for people on bikes, etc.) and sees an increase of regular cycling of 25% year-over year. So for every 100 cyclists a year ago, we now have 125. Some quick math would suggest that we now have 75 cyclists with licenses and 50 without (60% / 40%) but realistically, the 40 from last year that didn't have licenses isn't actually going to grow that much. People without licenses a year ago would choose to bike more often for lack of choice. Really what we'd see is probably something closer to 83 cyclists with licenses and 42 without, or 66% / 34%. So the best way to increase the number of licensed cyclists is to encourage people to switch to biking. It's probably a lot cheaper than developing and enforcing a whole new cycling license, even before you factor in the cost of increased traffic caused by dissuading potential cyclists from leaving their cars at home.

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