Are roads heavily subsidized

[TheTigerMaster]

How would you even collect fees from cyclists? Do we collect fees from little ten year olds riding their bikes on the road?

I would love to see the bill for that. It would probably amount to a few cents/year.

 

[TheTigerMaster]

Don't forget that using a bicycle causes the cyclists to eat more food (more production required) and use more air than they otherwise would (more CO2), causing more greenhouse emissions.

The effect of that is totally negligible compared to the emissions of a personal vehicle.

 

[picard102]

One thing which always kind of pissed me off is that those in Northern Ontario only pay half the annual fee to register their cars compared to Southern Ontario.

Having a car in Northern Ontario isn't a small thing. It's not Southern Ontario, getting the lion's share of road infrastructure, and public transit networks.

 

[Electrify]

I would not know how to go about this calculation, but I always wonder if bicycles pollute more that cars.

There is a whole bunch of pollution required to pava a road, and then there are very small amounts of pollution produced by each car - and none by bicycle. Now if you divide the paving pollution up in the ratio of 1.5 to 3.25 for bicycle and cars (bike lane = 1.5m, car lane = 3.25m) and divide by the number of users for the life of the road (which is probably several orders of magnitude higher for cars), then it could well be that the bike lane and bikes using them produced more pollution than the car lanes and the cars.

Wow... have you considered a job at the Toronto Sun? That is some crazy mental gymnastics.

For kicks, let's take your math at face value. First, this conclusion is based around the idea that it causes so much pollution to pave a road that the amount created to add an extra lane detracts from the benefits of cycling infrastructure.

Second it assumes that the paving would not be necessary if it were not for bikes. For better or worse, paved roads are the norm. The sky is blue, dogs chase cats, and streets are paved. Now perhaps if we decided to create a place where the roads are gravel while the bike lanes are paved, there would be an argument. But I can't think of any city, at least in the Global North, which does such practice.

Last but not least, in case you forgot, the bulk of the air pollution is from cars driving, not the initial construction. If you were to graph this, the line representing the road with no bike lanes may start lower, but would quickly increase beyond the extra pollution required for the road with a bike lane since likely fewer people would would drive since they have a safe alternative. Let's also assume that the lane is a complete failure and not one cyclist uses it, the extra pollution to construct it would be negligible over the lifespan of the road.

Even if all cars become zero emissions, it will always create more pollution to build a car than a bike.

To conclude, this is a case where you are missing the forest because you are too focused on the tree.