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Hi, Welcome to California
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Posted by Justin VanAbrahams [Email] (#32) [Profile/Gallery] (more from Justin VanAbrahams) on Wed, 29 Jan 2003 11:57:21 Share Post by Email
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Hi, and welcome to California.

As a new Californian and car-owner I'm certain the first thing you'll notice is our emissions requirements. They're far below any others in the nation, and to keep it interesting we raise the requirements every few months in secret, so you don't know what the current ones are until you show up to the smog "test only" station and find out. Speaking of which, to make it fun, we've created "test only" stations that can't give advice or make repairs, so if your car fails you'll have to go somewhere else to get it fixed, then bring it back again for another test. Since we now use dynomometers, expect to pay upwards of $50 per test in most areas. And don't even think about fixing it yourself, because if you ever need to qualify for an exemption or extension of your renewal, you'll have to prove that repairs were carried out by a California-authorized repair shop. And that isn't you.

You might think that by creating these tough smog laws - ones where we hold old cars to new standards - we're trying to get old cars off the road, but that isn't necessarily the case. You see, here in California, we just raised the vehicle tax back up to 2% of the vehicle's total value. That means if you're driving a $30,000 vehicle you'll be paying $600 per year in registration fees! Isn't that great? We've exempted cars costing $5000 or less, so those old cars that won't pass smog and aren't legal to drive are much cheaper to register - less than $50 per year! Basically, we've designed a system where poor people can't afford to drive. It's a nice system, really.

But assuming you've got a car that's legal to drive you will need insurance, and here we've done our best to surpass all the other states in individual insurance costs. A new car will probably cost you upwards of $100 per month to insure, and that number will probably be higher if you live in a city or park your car outside. That's just for liability, too. If you have financed your new, smog-passing car, you'll also need comprehensive insurance, which will cost another 50% or more on top of that. Bottom line is, we want you spending at *least* $2000 per year to drive a car - and that's not even including the cost of the car itself!

Once you get past all this and you're ready to drive, you will need gasoline. Since we're all rocket scientists and movie stars here - the cream of the crop, so to speak - we've brilliantly required fuel manufacturers to put MTBE in their gasoline. Don't mind the fact that MTBE is poisonous and contaminates ground water. We'll fix that eventually. In the meantime, it helps to keep our gasoline prices prohibitively high. Even regular unleaded costs upwards of $1.50 per gallon, which we're pretty sure is a national high. It's fine that regular unleaded is so expensive, however, because you don't have to worry about spending any more on Premium unleaded. We've determined those octane-thingies are bad anyway. To give you a nudge in the right direction we've outlawed anything higher than 91. If people don't figure it out themselves, we'll outlaw 91 too!

Why have we done this? We've done it to try and get more people out of their cars and onto mass transit. Doing so will cut down on emissions and help keep California beautiful. Unfortunately, we've not really had the budget yet to develop any sort of rapid mass transit system in most of California. If you'll be living in the San Francisco Bay Area you'll be treated to busses, cable cars, and BART, but the rest of California we'd like to see walking. We've strategically designed light rail systems that only run through 1/3 of the city, busses that summarily skip many neighborhoods, and convoluted routes that require those who do take mass transit to spent multiple hours per day doing so. It's really quite brilliant. You'd think that we'd take all the money we get from car owners to try and finance better-engineered and faster mass transportation systems, but we don't. We use it to pay for all sorts of other things, things you probably don't even know about. Heck, we probably don't even know about them. But why be smart when you're as beautiful as California is?

Welcome!

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