Here’s a political idea on the edge of evil:
- SUVs, Hummers, and over-sized pickup trucks cause greater wear-and-tear on roads. Many object to these vehicles having poor gas mileage, encouraging conspicuous consumption, and receiving gratuitous tax-breaks.
- Small towns are always hurting for cash.
- These vehicles may be technically illegal on California city streets because of their weight.
Therefore:
Small cities can be encouraged to discourage SUVs by ticketing out-of-town SUVs that are over the weight limit.
There are stories periodically about the legality of these vehicles, such as http://www.slate.com/id/2104755/ or just Google “SUV weight California”. There are occasional questions about legality having to do with loaded versus unloaded weight. The real issue is that no one truly wants to annoy the bulk of its SUV driving citizens and business people.
Unless you have none. Then you have nothing to lose.
Small towns often have nothing to lose. An ideal location would be a town that is near a border, to avoid bothering in-state residents, and yet is a back roads cut-through for some tourist attraction. These towns and counties could hand out heavy fines for driving on their roads, and pay their entire road budget from these fines. These are the same towns that raise revenue by suddenly reducing freeway speeds to a crawl, so we aren’t corrupting them. Just pointing them at different targets.
If you feel this plan is not too evil, find a town and write them a letter.
Politics can have a dark side.
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