And they think a gun registry will work?
In a city with a biking culture so vibrant it’s one of only five American communities to have achieved, in 2015, “platinum” status for bike-friendliness from the League of American Bicyclists, not even the people who control and influence city policies on bicycling bother to register their bikes.
Current, former mayors missing
Absent from the list of about 9,700 people who own one or more of the 13,982 currently registered bicycles in Madison are 19 members of the 20-member City Council, Mayor Paul Soglin and both “bicycle advocate” appointees to the city’s Pedestrian/Bicycle/Motor Vehicle Commission, Grant Foster and Aaron Crandall.
Also missing: Dave Cieslewicz, the former Madison mayor who pushed for Madison to achieve platinum status and started the Ride the Drive event, in which a couple of major arteries are closed to vehicle traffic and opened to bicyclists. After leaving the mayor’s office, Cieslewicz served as executive director of the Wisconsin Bike Fed for four years.
He did not respond to requests for comment.
Foster, who also did not respond to requests for comment, is president of the local bicycling advocacy group Madison Bikes. Of the 17 current and former board members listed on the group’s website, only four showed up on the registry.
Although I think this was my favorite “duh” comment in the article.
Madison police officer Howard Payne acknowledged that recovering stolen bikes is not as high a priority as, say, investigating violent crime, and that bicycles stolen as part of larger burglaries will probably get more attention than bicycles stolen by themselves.
Bike registration is an absurd regulation that never works.
Madistan’s political elite – “Registration for thee but not for me.”
To be fair, maybe a few of the council members and the aged current mayor don’t have bikes, but surely Cieslewitz, Foster and Crandall have illegal bikes.