Alexandria considers enforcing registration law

Note: Since originally running this story, WAMU has released another story with an opposite conclusion. Namely that Alexandria is looking to removing the registration requirement. 

Bucking the national trend against bicycle registration, Alexandria is considering modifying and enforcing its long ignored mandatory bicycle registration law. If you're riding an unregistered bike in Alexandria, you're a scofflaw cyclist and you're making the rest of us look bad.

As it turns out, nobody registers their bicycle because nobody knows about the provision, which dates back to 1963. Wilson says city officials are now looking at the existing policy to determine what kind of changes might be needed to enforce the measure.

The only change needed is to get rid of the law. It doesn't raise any revenue, it doesn't improve safety and it doesn't help with stolen bike return (besides, we don't require anyone to register other oft-stolen items like cell phones or purses). It does lead to abuse by the police though. Which is why DC got rid of the law. 

During a recent public hearing, Old Town resident Kathryn Papp said mandatory registration would be a good idea.

"Cars are registered and charged a fee. Motorcycles are registered and charged a fee," Papp says. "Almost every vehicle on the roadway is registered and charged a fee."

Papp says registration would also make stolen bicycles easier to recover, and revenues from a small annual fee could go towards building addition bicycle facilities.

Here's another person making the false fairness claim. We could just as easily extend that claim to pedestrians. It doesn't make any sense to decide on the one hand that we want more people to bike and fewer to drive - and that is what government repeatedly says - and then tax biking. 

As for recovering stolen bikes, there are plenty of things that Alexandria could do to make this better. They could start by posting photos of recovered bikes online like Arlington does. 

Comments

[Rootchopper]

Why do these people have such a bee in their bonnets about cyclists? It's so utterly nonsensical. They act as if Old Town Alexandria would be Shangri La if only they could keep non-Old Towners away.

[MB]

Having spent a bit of time emailing around this AM, I can confidently say that Alexandria is *not* planning to enforce any kind of mandatory registration scheme. In fact, they're planning to do away with it.

This report seems to be a case of a good bit of misunderstanding piled on top of a bit of NIMBY malice.

[Crikey7]

All those $.25 registration fees they are foregoing! It might have paid for 1/1,000 of the cost of the registration program.

[Eric_W.]

We should also consider registering other 4-wheel transportation vehicles like strollers!

[Kevin Beekman]

WAMU later produced another version of the story because the first sounded like Alexandria was considering the opposite:
http://m.wamu.org/#/news/13/01/24/alexandria_reconsiders_bicycle_registration

[Liz]

I can kind of imagine that there are people in Alexandria who become annoyed with all the cyclists going through Old Town, but I cannot in a million years imagine how they think that registering bikes _in Alexandria_ would somehow solve this "problem". So, they make people who live in Alexandria register their bicycles... they have no power over people living in Arlington, or DC, or anywhere else. Would they try to apply the law to non-residents? Set up tables on the Mount Vernon trail and require all cyclists to prove they are registered in Alexandria? The whole thing is absurd...

[Jonathan Krall]

There is no logic among the small, loud, anti-bicyclist crowd in Old Town other than "Old Town Alexandria would be Shangri La if only they could keep non-Old Towners away." Which isn't very logical.

What pisses me off is that some people who hold these anti-cyclist views, which border on hate speech, IMO, are members of the Waterfront Commission. I'm not sure if any of them are officers in the Old Town Business Association of the Old Town Civic Association. Alexandria depends on a strong tourist economy and we should not allow our civic institutions to be led by people who clearly display a visceral hatred of tourists.

[dynaryder]

Alexandria depends on a strong tourist economy and we should not allow our civic institutions to be led by people who clearly display a visceral hatred of tourists.

This is always amazed me;do they not realize how quickly OT would fall apart if the local businesses had to depend strictly on the locals?