Ugly Yellow Stickers

It is bad enough that if you are contemplating the purchase of a ultra-high mileage hybrid vehicle here in the State of California that the choices are, generally speaking, not particularly nice looking (in fact, some of the choices are down right ugly, just have a glance at the Honda Insight), but that the State of California requires that you make them even uglier in order to use their bridges. As part of the implementation of the new law allowing these vehicles to drive in the car pool lane and to cross toll bridges for free, owners of these vehicles must deface their new cars by displaying State supplied large yellow stickers on each bumper. The purpose of which is to allow the toll keepers to easily recognize the "officially" sanctioned car and let them pass. These are the people who, by the way, rarely look up when taking your money and act so bored they wouldn’t spot a elephant loping across the bridge as long as it stopped to pay the toll. What exactly will a yellow sticker or two do? Or if you believe, as the State apparently does, that theses are highly motivated public servants manning the toll booths, then is it too much to ask the these people, who, no doubt already know every car on the road by sight, as they see a thousand copies of each pass by them daily, to memorize the three hybrids that are allowed under the new law to pass through the tolls without the deprecating decals? And is it their responsibility to enforce the law anyway? Perhaps the question is, is it too much to ask the highway patrol officer, who has to study each new law and its consequences as part of his or her job, to memorize, by sight, the three hybrids that can now be legally in the car pool lane? These horrible stickers might make sense if the number of cars effected by this law was in the hundreds and they varied in size and shape. But even if the number rises above ten or fifteen, which at this point seems highly unlikely, you can bet they will all be of the same general ilk: small, egg shaped, none-discript, tiny wheeled, slightly goofy looking, easily distinguished cars. I mean please, we are talking about a Toyota Prius and a Honda Civic, for Pete’s sake. Even the most automobile challenged person on the planet can pick these cars out of a line up. And they could do so, with reasonable reliability, without the aid of a huge, dull yellow, uninteresting sticker plastered to it.

What I find more interesting, and certainly more telling, about this new law is that it allowed only allowed three hybrids to enter as officially sanctioned, high mileage vehicles. By setting the gas mileage threshold at 45 miles to the gallon, they effectively limited the cars that qualify to these three: the Toyota Prius, the Honda Civic Hybrid and the Honda InSight. The fact that none of these cars actually gets 45 miles to the gallons seems irrelevant to the government. Either the law makers in their infinite wisdom, were trying to motivate auto manufacturers through motivating the car-purchasing public to demand these higher milage cars, or they were trying to reward the current owners of the highest mileage cars and so too send a message to the pubic and the manufacturers of cars that there are further benefits to their ownership. Either way, why not do it honestly. If you set the milage threshold at a number where a small, but real number of cars can reach it, you still send the message that only the highest milage cars on the road will have these extra benefits and that the ultimate benefits of lower fuel demands and minimized environmental effects are fostered. And by setting the number at a level that actually exists, rather than a number to strive for, which seems to be what the legislators meant to do, then the consumer can actually make an intelligent buying decision and, consequently, you might get more compliance, which, seems to me, to be the point of the ugly yellow sticker.