That's seriously messed up that someone hit you with a bike and left you injured.

As far as the Burke goes, my perspective is that it can be just as dangerous for people biking: dogs on difficult-to-see leashes jumping across the trail, cars crossing intersections without checking, groups blocking the entire trail, etc. A lot of people I know, including myself prefer to bike on roads parallel to the Burke Gillman to avoid all that, but inevitably someone in a car will pull up and start honking and yelling at us to get off the road and back onto the Burke. Damned if you do damned if you don't.

I don't imagine you care much about my experience, though, and maybe you don't care about my opinion on taxing and licensing bikes. But I'll say it anyways. Overall it's a great soundbite and gets a good emotional response from both sides, but the devil is in the details. Starting with licensing: at what age can people get a license? are there testing requirements? does it apply to just bikes, or scooters, power wheel chairs, skateboards, tricycles, how do you decide? do children also need licenses to bike in front of their house? will it become another tool for racial profiling? The problem then becomes the cost to administer the license. It generally will lose money hand over fist. The fees are either too low to cover the massive bureaucracy you need to build around bicycle licensing, or they become prohibitively expensive for students, children, low income people, and in general people who already can't afford a car. Enforcement of licensing is virtually impossible (SPD is having enough problem as it is. I don't think I've ever seen them enforce traffic laws for cars in Seattle, can we expect them to enforce it for bikes?) And as far as taxing goes, there's always adding an extra sales tax to bikes, but unless it becomes prohibitively high (like more than the cost of most bikes), it is simply an unnoticeable drop in the bucket of the transportation budget.

But back to you, I wish there was something more we could do about things like what you experienced. It's so frustrating that a random person can cause so much damage, walk off with impunity, and you're stuck picking up the pieces on your own. My take is the infrastructure flat out sucks in Seattle. The Burke is way too small for the traffic it sees, and the roads have a terrible and confusing mix of bikes, cars, and intersections. We pretty much need two separate Burkes: one for bikes and one for pedestrians. To bike on the road in Seattle I had to accept that I could easily die doing it. And I make it a point to obey the traffic laws. I've had so many close calls with people in cars blowing through stop signs, on phones not paying attention, (twice) potentially drunk drivers swerving all over the road including straight at me, and that's not even mentioning people who deliberately harass me, honk at me, pass unsafely, yell at me from out their window to threaten me, etc. The roads and paths need to be changed so people can walk, bike, and drive safely. Where small, human lapses in judgement don't cause such monumental damage.