Crap cycling in Germany

It's 9:30 a.m. on a sunny spring day when a Toyota collides with a young mother in Berlin's Köpenick neighborhood. Her bike is knocked onto the street, the child seat falls off, and her two-year-old son is suddenly lying in the roadway screaming. The boy is lucky. The other drivers manage to brake quickly enough, but his mother is hospitalized with broken bones.

It's the first serious bicycle accident of the day in Berlin, but there's another one roughly every half hour that follows.

But not to worry. Germany is a place where the Greens occupy positions of real power:

The first member of the Green Party to become a German police chief also wants to make the rules for cyclists much more stringent.

If Wimber had his way, license plates would be required for bicycles, so that those riding against traffic, running red lights and fleeing the scenes of accidents could be tracked down after the fact.