Breaking News: CoA Municipal Court going to sit down and discuss bicycle fines.

I just got a MOST INTERESTING call from a friend of ours that works for the City. First off a little backstory. Back in June there was some interesting discussion on ATXBS and the bicycleaustin.info forums (thanks to DougMC) regarding the unfairness of the brand new bicycle-oriented fines on the revised City of Austin Municipal Court fine schedule. Specifically, riding without a light on a bicycle is $10-15 more than driving without lights, and going the wrong way on a 1-way street is $34-51 more on a bicycle than it is in a car. Now which form of transportation would you consider more hazard-causing? We obviously see how the City Municipal Court believes. I emailed Annick and Lee on the 22nd trying to figure out what the deal was, and they forwarded my email to some other people within the city. Emails went back and forth between people at the Bike/Ped program, the APD, the Municipal Court and myself but with July 4th coming up it petered out when people left work for a long weekend.

In early July there were some additional emails back and forth between Lee Davila from APD, Rebeca Stark of the Municipal Court, Nadia Barrera of the CoA Bike/Ped program, initiated by Dan Norton of TexBike, where he quoted my website and asked why the bike fines were higher than the related car fines. Somehow I was left out of the communication loop but Lee made sure all the emails were forwarded to me so I could chime in with my madness and try to figure out what was up. The bottom line we were given was that the fines were set at the discretion of the judge, a bike red light crime was different than a car red light crime, and that they didn't HAVE to set equal fines for the different offenses.

Well, once again I got dropped from the conversation, but Lee came to my rescue and made sure I knew what was up. It seems that Dan Norton, Rebeca Stark, Judge Solomon and I don't know who else set up a meeting for the 21st at the court house to discuss the fines, but Lee actually went and asked the judge if I could attend as well, and I got the go-ahead. He also sent me some interesting .xls spreadsheets with numbers about car and bike tickets, but a lot of numbers don't show up so I'm going to ask for more info. It seems like the whole thing's real hush-hush and invite-only, but I'm real glad I've got a seat at the table. Thanks for looking out for me Lee! Hey the rest of y'all, keep me in the loop will ya? My sources are good enough to quote in your emails but I can't hang with you? Must be my biker BO or something...

Heh. See y'all there, this should be interesting.