Comments on: Licenses, loopholes and legality

By: Allan

Allan — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 21:53:10 +0000

ddougherty, I read your post earlier on BikingInLA. I thought I’d do this for myself and help support your argument regarding how bad the LB licensing program is. The only thing is, I happen to be in their system and they found me! Let me explain what I did. After reading your post I thought I’d test this our for myself. So I got a real crappy bike and registered it at the local fire station. Then I proceeded to get it stolen. So after about a month from when I registered the bike, I called up Youth Services at 570-1447. I’m not sure if they experienced a name change from “Child Protective Services” or if it’s two different departments. But yeah, I even talked to Dorothy Nulk at one point. I was transferred to her when I guess I was asking too many questions about their system. Regardless, I was in their database with this bike.

Now this isn’t an argument for keeping this system. I’m just stating my experience. I truly did want to have an experience like you did, but it didn’t happen. Personally if they just get rid of the system, it’d make me quite happy. At the very least make it optional. As was stated above, it’s a money losing system. And going through the system, I wholeheartedly agree.

By: Allan

Allan — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 21:13:15 +0000

The thing is the police force doesn’t know the CVC regarding bike licensing either. Take for example Sergeant Zapalski statement in the local paper.

Sergeant Dina Zapalski of the Long Beach Police Department – Zapalski explained that it is the law to have your bicycle registered with the City of Long Beach if you are riding within city limits.

She needed to include that “resident” part of CVC 39002(a) to make her quote valid.

By: longbeachcyclists.com » Blog Archive » Bike Friendliness and Bike Registration

Sun, 12 Dec 2010 19:33:57 +0000

[...] investigated the issue of bike registration and thoroughly debunked the myth of its usefulness. Check out his important post here. This is why other major cities have scuttled their bike registration programs, and why Long Beach [...]

By: Dan Gutierrez

Dan Gutierrez — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 23:00:29 +0000

Bicycle Licensing is a money loser for Cities, and has been for some time. The nominal fee paid for a license, which was set decades ago has not been updated, so it comes as no surpise that there is no well defined process, or personnel in LB who are responsible for keeping the database current.

Bicycle licensing at best is an annoyance and money loser for cities, at worst is is used as a tool by local police to harass city residents, since bicycle licenses are only valid in the city of issuance and only then for residents per CVC 39002(a):

CVC 39002(a) A city or county, which adopts a bicycle licensing ordinance or resolution, may provide in the ordinance or resolution that no resident shall operate any bicycle, as specified in the ordinance, on any street, road, highway, or other public property within the jurisdiction of the city or county, as the case may be, unless the bicycle is licensed in accordance with this division.

This means that a resident of Signal Hill or Seal Beach who may do most of their riding in Long Beach is not required to have a license in Long Beach! This is idiotic to say the least. There should either be uniform and properly funded statewide licensing, or none at all. Feudal city licensing as specified in the CVC 39000 series laws is a form of pre-industrial age thinking.

By: bmckeever

bmckeever — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 03:13:55 +0000

Thank you for your comment! We are working really hard to get all of you good information.

-Bernadette