Drivers won't pay. But bicyclists will -- IF the space is taken away from drivers.

If the first two hours are free, bicycle messengers, delivery people and shoppers are unaffected.

I'll gladly pay a quarter a day -- that's just $5.00 a month if I managed to ride everyday, and $4.00 is more like it. Compare that with the cost of parking a bike in a garage, in the few places listed by DOT and TA.

And, the case could be make that 25 cents per day is proportional to the congestion created by cyclists, relative to private motor vehicles. And we can demand a full lane of traffic removed from the Brooklyn Bridge and given over to cyclists, to cut the conflict with peds.

Any TA folks here? What do you think.

As for meters, obviously a bicycle doesn't take up a fraction of the space of a car. But I wonder how many bike racks could be installed if there was a charge of 25 cents for any stay in excess of two hours? I'd pay.

How about extending the sidewalk to shift from shifting from "free" auto parking to "paid" metered bicycle parking all over Manhattan, and on local commercial streets elsewhere, on that basis? The meters could double as bike hitches?

I wonder what bicycle infrastructure we could afford if all the sales tax revenue from bicycle shops, and bicycle sales elsewhere, was dedicated to it.

In the early days of the auto, some infrastructure was financed by dedicated revenues, but most was financed by non-drivers. In other words, that dedicated revenue was multiplied many times.

Later the auto came to mostly pay for at least a modest share of its direct costs via dedicated taxes and fees, but only after decades of subsidies that cleared the way for broader auto use.

What if those bicycle revenues were similarly leveraged 10 to 1? Remember, all you have to do is install a real barrier to separate a bike lane.

Fred, I'm not sure if you were being sarcastic, but I like it. We could trade car parking spaces for bike parking spaces on that basis.

And a meter by every park bench, too!

Also, to Fred: great idea. Why stop there, though? I see women parking their baby carriages outside stores all the time, FOR FREE, while some poor guy in a 3-ton SUV has to pay for the parking. Old ladies and their shopping carts also get off scot-free. Time to close those loopholes!