People are saying they can do no wrong? People are saying they want to play God? Where? Where, Terry? Cite it, right now. Every strawman you set up further hammers any scant trace of credibility you have left. It's not enough to just lie, it's not enough to come up with ill-conceived concepts for regulations that are vehemently anti-bike, but you've gotta put words in people's mouths too.

Your constant call for direct and exclusive taxation on those who use given facilities doesn't work because that's not how our society's built. Time and time again, you call for this, and whenever anyone calls you out on everything else that people don't directly pay for, you ignore it. If you want "user pays", it's time for you to start ponying up for everything somebody else is funding for you. Which means kissing all the advantages of mutual secondary and tertiary benefits goodbye. This ranges wide, from public education to public recreation to freeways to bike infrastructure to subsidies for various industries that make stuff go, be it agriculture or manufacturing or energy concerns. The "everybody needs freight vehicles!" tirade we've heard from you at numerous meetings is the same thing. The subsidies the oil and auto industry receive that make America one of the cheapest places to own and use an automobile are the same thing.

And yet you remain inconsistent. You seem to want to pick and choose. It's almost as though what's good for you specifically is what's right and what's good for others...well, maybe it's okay, just so long as it's still good for you in a very direct and immediate way, and whatever isn't should be done away with. But this is still not quite true, because we still never hear you advocate for the removal of other tax-payer-funded services (i.e. public education). Unless of course it's transportation related. You call for hikes in Tri-Met fares. You call for bicycle taxes. The burden goes on everyone else -these people you continue to call "freeloaders", no matter how many times you are taken to task for spouting this lie- but you're still happy to take advantage of oil and auto industry subsidies that everyone chips in on and allow you to pay as little as you do for your car, you're still happy to pay in to keep roads you seldom drive on going so the trucks can bring you consumables, you're still glad to pay in to make sure the kids down the street can get a basic education.

What is it, Terry? What is it that so tremendously incenses you against everyone who uses some form of transportation that isn't an automobile --incenses you so much that you have to jump in and spout your standard lines in a discussion about *safety issues*? And yeah, go back before the break and read that again: uses. Not "uses exclusively." Not "doesn't drive a car". Just plain uses. A lot of these folks are using multiple forms of transportation, and it's for a number of reasons. You constantly ignore that one, too. "Freeloading pedalpushers," you say. Sorry pal, most of 'em -somewhere around 80%, last I checked- own CARS! If there was any ring of truth to what you're always crying at the moon for -this business of how these people don't pay in for gas taxes and automobile registration fees- your beef would be with the incredibly tiny percentage of folks in Portland who don't drive cars at all.

And yet even that doesn't hold up. As we all continue to point out, we all still pay in if we work and/or live somewhere where we either pay property taxes as owners or pay landlords who use some of the rent to cover the property taxes, and this money goes to a large number of places, and we don't all use all the services that these taxes pay for in a direct way. Just as you may not personally use the bikelanes some of your tax dollars go towards, I don't personally use the freeway my tax dollars go towards. This is no different from how I don't have any children of school age, and yet I pay in so my neighbors' kids who are of school age. This is no different from your freight vehicle example. This is no different from the auto/oil subsidy example. There are mutual benefits to all of this stuff (outlined time and time again by others, ignored by you time and time again still) and that's why the taxes are in place: they make our society workable and livable for us all.

Your refusal to acknowledge any of the above, time and time again, is a clear indication of your own lack of objectivity. You are as much a raving and drooling fanatic as the post-adolescent weekend anarchists who clamber aboard their bicycles and ignore traffic laws they disagree with while taking no part in pushing for change in legislature. You are the biased man with a personal mission whom you constantly accuse Sam Adams of being - in so many ways, his mirror image, from your lack of well-reasoned arguments, to your inability to make consistent statements, to your complete and utter lack of authority in terms of office, title, or expertise. You are, in scale rhetoric of, so similar to those whom you rail against in such inaccurate and even perverse caricature, that all it takes to dismiss the majority of your statements is in fact quite simple: a cursory examination of reality.