Guest post by Frank Lehnerz
HB25-1303 (Boesenecker, Lukens, Roberts, Winter) proposes a new “crash prevention fee” added to all auto insurance policies in the state. These funds would support a new transportation enterprise tasked with reducing crashes through infrastructure projects. This bill seems to respawn every year as if it’s some impossible to kill invasive weed. Furthermore, it contains the dreaded and overused safety clause.
This is yet another sneaky workaround to Colorado’s Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights (TABOR). If signed into law, it would add yet another mandatory fee with no voter approval – this time tacked onto every motorist’s insurance bill, and those taxes would be funneled into a bureaucracy with sweeping discretion.
As Rep. Scott Bottoms rightly notes in his recent Complete Colorado article, HB 1303 Ignores Colorado’s Crumbling Roads. HB25-1303, amounts to a “transportation tip jar,” diverting desperately needed funds away from Colorado’s $9 billion road maintenance backlog to pet projects with questionable utility.
Bottom’s isn’t wrong and he’s not the first to highlight Colorado’s misguided transportation spending.
If that’s all the ammunition you need to oppose this bill, that’s fine. But I’m here to point out there’s far more to this nonsense bill and the more who understand the details, the better.
The spending isn’t just financially dubious—it’s driven by an ideology that prioritizes symbolism over safety.
Safe, effective transportation depends on clear rules, predictable behavior, and a shared understanding of the road. These principles benefit everyone—cyclists, motorists, and pedestrians alike. Unfortunately, recent transportation policies in Colorado have increasingly favored ideology over practicality, often resulting in infrastructure that complicates travel and undermines safety and of course comes after your wallet.
Colorado House Bill 25-1303 is one such policy. While the bill is fairly broad in scope, most of the testimonies in support of the bill centered on safety of “vulnerable road users,“ and one subset of such users: bicyclists. The testimonies centered around bureaucrats from Boulder, the state’s largest bike lobby group Bicycle Colorado, and so-called “transportation justice“ activists associated with environmental or “equity“ non-profits.
In the recent Senate Finance Committee, my testimony was unique. I was the only individual not with either some governmental organization or advocacy group and also the only bicyclist in opposition to the bill. My views stem from a super minority of bicyclists often labeled “vehicular cyclists“ or “bicycle drivers.“ We obey traffic rules. (including stopping at stop signs, red lights, pulling over to allow others to pass, etc.) I don’t hate motorists or car driving (pry my car from my cold, dead hands), and I despise current bicycle infrastructure trend.
In other words, I’m not this guy, although sometimes I do wear the funny hat and clothing.
Though framed as a “crash prevention” measure, HB 25-1303 in fact a Trojan horse: an attempt to codify a deeply flawed, politically popular, and fiscally irresponsible vision of transportation planning that misrepresents how crashes occur, what prevents them, and who belongs on our roads. It’s part of an ideology that’s not about converting you into some Lance wannabe, they instead want you out of your car and onto a bicycle to go to work, the store, or take your children to school.
It’s also deeply unfair to the majority of Colorado motorists already being nickel and dimed with fees, high insurance premiums, driving on poor quality roads, and sharing those roads with an increasing amount of dangerous, incompetent, and often uninsured or even unlicensed motorists.
It’s also deeply unfair to the countless motorists who do obey the rules of the road and maintain insurance.
Safety Misrepresented: The Ideology Behind the Infrastructure
Supporters of HB25-1303 cite rising insurance costs and crash statistics to justify the bill. The latter is framed by some activists as an “epidemic” of “traffic violence”. They seem unwilling to look into the true root causes of those two issues, ironic because it would require them doing one of their favorite activities – admiring themselves in a mirror.
The Committee testimonies were filled with heart tugging anecdotes about safety, especially from bicyclists. The infrastructure it would fund—so-called “protected” bike lanes, curb-separated paths, and other segregationist designs. The idea is that with these designs, such heart tugging anecdotes would cease to exist. But these “designs” do not meaningfully address the kinds of crashes that injure and kill cyclists or address the fact that many intoxication is present in many bicyclist deaths. Senator Winters was a noble victim of “traffic violence“ when she darted out of a bike lane nearly colliding with truck, instead hitting the curb. In the hearing, she demanded that the term “accident” not be used, a silly pedantic trope common in this domain.
As I explained in my Denver Gazette op-ed, A Cyclist’s Case Against Bike Lanes, the vast majority of car-bike crashes happen at intersections and driveways—places where such “protection“ doesn’t exist. Paradoxically these “designs” increase accident risk by reducing visibility between road users and by introducing confusing right-of-way expectations. Turning trucks are also a major issue if bicyclists do not understand their unique operating characteristics. “Protected“ bicycle lanes force bicyclists to place themselves in conflict with right turning motor vehicles – a violation of traffic engineering principles.
Furthermore, bicyclists and other users (scooter riders, e-bike riders) using these lanes encounter debris and often collide with the very separation elements such as bollards and wheel stops that are supposed to provide the protection because these elements are outside their scope of vision or attention. I also explained in the Gazette article an inconvenient truth that runs contrary to the oppressor (motorist)/ victim (« vulnerable road user ») narrative that’s common in this domain – not all the issues can be blamed on motorists.
Transportation planner and academic Paul Schimek highlights the same dangers in his article, The Dilemmas of Bicycle Planning. He explains how many crash types—particularly intersection and turning conflicts—are not addressed by mid-block “protection.” In fact, such facilities can worsen these scenarios. Yet these are the projects that get built, precisely because they look good in campaign brochures, grant proposals, enhance the egos of politicians in performative ribbon cutting ceremonies, or provide a glorified participation trophy to cities.
But this kind of infrastructure is not about functionality or crash prevention. It’s about enforcing a false narrative: that cyclists don’t belong on the road unless they are herded into their own lanes like rolling pedestrians.
HB25-1303 locks us into that paradigm: building for optics, not for function. It further institutionalizes a cycle of spending that ignores operational safety in favor of ideological signaling.
Returning to the Foundation of Our Traffic System
To understand why this vision is dangerous, we need to return to the foundation of our traffic system. In Chapter 7 of Bicycle Transportation, the late John Forester, a widely misunderstood engineer and expert in cycling safety lays out how modern traffic laws evolved as a logical system grounded in physics, human capabilities, and shared behavior based on the Common-Law right to travel. These laws are not arbitrary; they create a predictable environment where road users follow consistent rules. This legacy lives on for the most part in Title 42 of the Colorado Revised Statutes.
Forester is famous for his mantra, “bicyclists fare best when they act and are treated as drivers of vehicles.“ He elaborates that bicyclists have long been treated in traffic law as drivers and bicycles considered legally as (non-motorized) vehicles although this has been chipped away over the years.
Karen Karabell, an instructor for the “bike-ed“ program Cycling Savvy, reinforces this in her presentation My Bike? Or My 2-Ton Land Missile? She explains that our roads were originally designed for general travel—used by pedestrians, horses, and carriages long before motor vehicles dominated. The system we still use today is built on that legacy from William Phillips Eno: a shared set of rules of movement based on cooperation.
Forester and Karabell both highlight the danger of departing from this shared logic. The belief that cyclists must be separated not only undermines the law but fuels resentment and confusion. It is a belief built on myths:
- That fuel taxes, vehicle registration, or insurance buy the right to the road (false);
- That cyclists should be licensed or registered (false);
- That special infrastructure is required for legitimacy (false).
- That bicyclists are glorified pedestrians and that drivers only pertains to operators of
motor vehicles (false)
HB25-1303 perpetuates these myths by funneling public funds into projects that segregate and stigmatize rather than integrate and empower.
The Manufactured Demand: How “Safety” Became Theater
So why is this infrastructure so relentlessly pursued? The answer lies in part in preference laundering. Preference laundering happens when activists, academics, “public health experts“, environmentalists, planners, and consultants substitute their own preferences for those of the public and then use their skewed outreach, biased surveys, and selective partnerships to manufacture a false consensus. This domain draws many parallels to gun control “studies“– conclusion-first studies from “experts“ with dubious statistics and flawed or misapplied epidemiological models. If you’ve ever heard the claim that protected bike lanes make things safer for all users, know that you not only funded the salary of an activist academic at CU-Denver who co-authored the study, but it’s also utter poppycock.
But there is a deeper, philosophical force at play. The ideology driving HB25-1303 is rooted in central planning: the belief that a small group of “experts” can design, direct, and control how people move through public space. As I wrote in the Denver Gazette, these anointed few presume they know what the public should want, and that they can use the levers of the State to manifest their vision, regardless of evidence or dissent.
Their vision mirrors the critiques made by scholars like the late James C. Scott, who in Seeing Like a State describes how high-modernist planners impose top-down schemes that flatten local knowledge and erase real-world complexity. It also echoes the warnings of Austrian (real) economists such as Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, who demonstrated how central planning inevitably fails because planners lack the dispersed, real-time knowledge held by individuals acting freely within a system.
These visionaries believe in a “build it and they will ride“ viewpoint. They insist that people “feel unsafe“ cycling on the current roads, and with their special infrastructure, we too could turn into the utopias of Amsterdam. Many detest the practicality and autonomy of the personal automobile. Some are climate change hysterics who insist cars contribute to boiling the oceans and demand all our gas pumps be affixed with a stern warning. Others insist that cars are to blame for inequality among minority groups and that bicycles are some magic solution. There’s a great deal of overlap too among these views. There’s also an entire Subreddit (because of course there is) dedicated to an irrational hatred of the automobile with the occasional nod to car-free utopias such as Cuba and North Korea.
The reality is that bicycling just isn’t that practical for the transportation needs of many people, a point Rep. Bottoms subtly alluded to in his Complete Colorado article when he noted the high percentage of people who use personal automobiles. But in the viewpoint of many of these people, it’s “motornormativity” or “car brain” that’s to blame.
When it comes to transportation, no planner can fully anticipate or engineer the choices, experiences, or interactions of people. Attempting to do so—especially through coercive infrastructure that demands conformity to a preordained flawed script—leads to systems that are not just inefficient, but dangerous.
HB25-1303 is not merely a misguided safety bill; it is a textbook case of central planning disguised as benevolent governance. It imposes a one-size-fits-all ideology on a diverse population, erodes lawful self-determination, and funds its implementation through a regressive hidden tax.
It is not a solution—it is a state-sponsored experiment in behavioral control masquerading as policy.
Conclusion
HB25-1303 is not a public safety bill—it is a policy artifact of ideological capture. It builds on the false narrative of cyclist inferiority, funds infrastructure that introduces new conflict points while ignoring real crash causes, and imposes a hidden tax through a deceptive workaround of TABOR.
It replaces lawful integration with performative segregation. It silences dissent through preference laundering. And it locks Colorado further into a fiscal and philosophical commitment to transportation symbolism over substance and practicality.
As a cyclist and a motorist, I reject this vision. As a tax-paying widget, I oppose this obvious TABOR workaround. And as (sorry) a former Californian, protect TABOR with all costs.
Frank Lehnerz is a Fort Collins-based engineer who works in the electric energy industry, and he is interested in promoting the message of Liberty.
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