We don’t want the same rights. We don’t want to be allowed on highways. Cyclists take up much less space when parking, too, so parking in an incorrect spot is not such an issue.
Also I don’t mind paying $10 in road tax if motorists pay their fair share too:
Whenever there’s any sort of bike vs car debate, the “don’t pay road tax” argument always comes up. It’s such a strange argument. While I’m sure they exist, I don’t know any cyclists who don’t also have a car / driver’s license.
When I commute to work on the bike, there’s a car sitting in the garage that I’m paying road taxes for that is not creating more traffic/pollution. It is not taking up a parking space in the city.
I’m also lucky enough to live in a city where I have a dedicated bike lane for all but the first and last few hundred meters of my commute. So I don’t buy the ‘traffic jams’ argument either. I’m actually faster than cars in the CBD, they slow me down.
Easy enough to calculate yourself. A quick Google says that an average motorbike might be as much as 700 pounds, and if we use the same “fat man” as the bike (300 lb), that’s a total of 1000 lb. The formula for comparative damage is (W1/W2)4, so plug that in and we get (1000/350)4, or motorbikes doing 66× the damage of the bike, or 0.00396.
If a cyclist had to pay a $10 fee, as @ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.de suggests, motorbikes would pay $660, while the average car driver pays a whopping $1,100,000, if you were trying to accurately account for damage done.
