Perth Amboy, New Jersey is a largely working-class and non-White city over the Outerbridge Crossing from Staten Island, New York. Last month, Perth Amboy cops stopped a group of boys on bikes who were popping wheelies and weaving in and out of traffic. The cops could have used that stop to talk to the boys about bicycle safety. One of the officers did that, but the situation devolved into the cops confiscating the kids' bikes and handcuffing one of them.
The charge? The kid they took into custody was riding without a bicycle license.
While the city has had a bike license ordinance on its books for decades, that incident marked the first time, to anyone's knowledge, that it was actually invoked. That it was used to bring in a boy--who, guess what?, is Black--was, to be polite, specious.
The incident garnered national attention, which raised the question of what, exactly, are the reasons for, and purposes of, bicycle licensing regulations. Most were enacted decades ago (That Perth Amboy's license costs 50 cents should give you an idea of how old that policy is!), ostensibly for purposes that are no longer, if they ever were, applicable. Or increasingly-militarized police forces use them as yet another way to bully, intimidate and harass people less powerful than themselves. (The Perth Amboy cops could just as well have said they were arresting that kid for Riding While Black.)
Yvonne Lopez lives in Perth Amboy. She also represents Middlesex County, of which the city is part, in the New Jersey State Assembly. On Monday, she introduced a bill (A5729) that, according to its synopsis, "prohibits municipal ordinances from from requiring license tag to use bicycles within municipality." Currently, a few other New Jersey municipalities require tags or plates on bicycles, but specifics of those regulations vary.
In order to become law, the bill would have to pass in both chambers (Assembly and Senate) of the state Legislature. I haven't heard any prognostication about the bill's chances of passing, but I suspect they're good, if for no other reason that the State probably would prefer uniformity from one jurisdiction to the next but doesn't want to be tasked with creating a state bicycle license system.
