[Leanan]

That e-bike designed by Lee Iacocca had a solar battery charger as an option. It added another $500 to the price, IIRC.

You might want to be careful about Li-ion batteries, though. All the major manufacturers are discontinuing them, for safety reasons. They have an unpleasant habit of exploding. The same thing happens with computer laptops from time to time, but those batteries are a lot smaller. The ones on bikes tend to be large. When they explode, it's like a grenade. Not something you really want under your butt.

[gg3]

Dooberheim, in a strictly literal sense, your assertion is true that the state could license the machine itself. However, the state cannot license the operator.

If you research the case law, what you find is the following:

The right to travel is repeatedly affirmed as a fundamental right. To get to the root of it, freedom of association and the right to conduct commerce depend upon the ability to congregate with others: which in turn depends on the ability to leave your house and travel on the public roads.

In some cases the courts go so far as to specify "the common conveyances of the day," which would seem to imply that any restriction on travel is impermissable. However, the majority of case law establishes the right of states to regulate usage of automobiles as per the "compelling state interest" in protecting life and property from unsafe operation thereof. That is, states may decide who can and who cannot operate an automobile. This is where the driver's license comes from.

No case law has ever affirmed a right of state or local jurisdictions to deny adults the use of human-powered vehicles on local roads. Limited-access roads may limit such usage, but *not* where there is no other means of getting to and from houses and workplaces. That is, if the only road through your town is a state highway, you are able to walk, ride a horse, or operate a human-powered vehicle on it, period.

State and local jurisdictions may establish licensing fees for ownership of human-powered vehicles, but may not prevent individuals from operating them. I don't see any case law on whether those jurisdictions can confiscate unlicensed (untaxed) bicycles; in all probability that would stand, for the same reason that any other tax-related property confiscations have historically stood.

However, a tax upon the machine is not identical with a permission to use the machine. By analogy if you purchase a printing press and somehow circumvent the sales tax, the state can fine the seller or yourself for the tax offense, but cannot establish a system of permission for operating it. (Radio-frequency spectrum is licensed because it is a limited resource; occasional proposals to license access to the internet have been non-starters because they would immediately go down in flames as a violation of freedom of press.)

There is no precedent for jurisdictions establishing limits on *who* can and cannot operate a human-powered vehicle, or for issuing revocable or deniable permissions (operator's licenses) to do so. It has never been done, and any such attempt would be overturned immediately.

Now we get to the velomobiles. Having established an irrevocable right to travel under one's own power at speeds customary for bicycles, the right to use a motor as a functional replacement for one's legs necessarily follows. The relevant characteristics as far as the law is concerned, are the speed and power of the vehicle. Thus in California we have the requirement that the power be limited to 1.8 hp or 1,000 watts, and the speed be limited to 20 mph on level ground, and the added limitation that the combined power of muscles and motor not exceed this speed (though muscles alone can do so, as per conventional bicycles).

The reason government does not attempt to regulate velomobiles and suchlike is that it would quickly become an intractible can of worms and lawsuits, and government would lose.

Disability rights groups would immediately jump into the fight, as would seniors/retirees' groups. Once it had been established that members of these groups have the right to their motors, the reciprocity of equal protection would establish that everyone else has the same right, just as people with ordinary physical abilities have the right to use other public facilities that were originally intended to provide access for disabled people. (The hypothetical of disabled-access parking spaces does not apply here: parking spaces are a strictly limited resource, whereas space on roads has never been considered such, even where local traffic congestion is extreme.) (And to head off another irrelevant hypo, the establishment of a right does not establish an entitlement: we are not discussing the issue of whether the state is obligated to furnish individuals with velomobiles, bicycles, etc.)

As for your point about no rights unless guaranteed by force, that is where the 2nd Amendment comes into play: the ultimate right of the citizens to protect their rights by force. ("The Second protects the First and all the rest.") Which debate we'll save for another forum.

(Leanan, your item about lack of wheels in Native North America is irrelevant in this context; neither did the Europeans invent gunpowder but that did not disparage the right of their offspring in the thirteen colonies to make effective use of same. Though, I agree about Li-ion batteries, as a purely practical matter.)

[Revi]

Now is the time to try out some other form of transportation. Try our EV's and small motorcycles. We might be ahead of the game when most of us proles are walking. Which may be in the not so distant future in my humble opinion.

[oowolf]

In the state of Montana driving a personal vehicle was a right until May 1 1935. (State vs Johnson 1926, Willis vs Buck 1928; 2 state supreme court cases that concerned licensing COMMERCIAL vehicles used on public highways. Suddenly a law appeared which converted a right into a privelige-a direct violation of the US constitution; "A right cannot be converted into a privelige" numerous US supreme court decisions.

[gg3]

That gets even more interesting, as it flies in the face of the entire premise of a free-enterprise economy.

Strictly speaking, what happened in many states from the beginning was that idiots with no understanding of the technology (automobiles) declared them intrinsically hazardous and started insisting on idiotic proposals (pardon the tautology) such as having a person with a warning light walk ahead of the machine.

A century later (literally), we are in the position where in a practical sense the right to travel (legal right, inherent and inalienable) is dependent upon a privilege (can be denied for any reason or no reason whatsoever) to the point where they have become virtually identical.

And in some places, for example California, it can be denied for unrelated reasons such as failure to pay child support: thereby setting the precedent that gets us the "refusal to supply a DNA sample" hypothetical.

A sane transportation policy would a) provide sufficient alternatives to automobiles that most people have no need of using them, b) treat the usage of an automobile as a subset of the right to travel, c) penalize hazardous driving with criminal sanctions and civil liability toward the victim. (You can be quite sure that drunk driving would be markedly reduced by the prospect of jail time, which would also "dry out" many of the alcoholics whose illness is at the root of the offense.)

Yet we do apparently have an inalienable right to bicycles (and by extension, tricycles, with or without protection from the elements), and to the use of motors to accomplish no more or less than legs would accomplish in a machine of that type.

I get the impression that the confluence of these two streams of rights and privileges could lead to some interesting changes in the post-petroleum world. More later...

[lawnchair]

There is no entitlement, as far as I know, for you to have wonderfully engineered roads to move your velomobiles on. Even a modern country gravel road entails some mighty expensive engineering, and on a very regular basis. We've got paved roads due to the surplus of energies we've found in the dirt. Things go bad but inequitably, expect states to sell more and more roads to toll operators (to stanch their budgets), and your right to a free road curtailed for the convenience of a few wealthy drivers.

[Leanan]

They won't be able to afford it. It costs about a million dollars a lane-mile to build or resurface a highway. They need the middle class to be driving.

That's why GM bought up all the public transportation systems and killed them. They wanted to force people to buy cars, because otherwise, there wasn't enough taxpayer support to build roads. The wealthy could not afford to build their own roads.