Road rules

Friday, Apr. 30, 2004 @ 11:53 a.m.

FRIDAY!!!! Ah, that glorious, glorious word!

I've been obessed with that song from Maroon 5, "This Love". It's been stuck in my head, playing like a broken record all throughout the past couple of days. It's real catchy. And it was the soundtrack to my dream last night. I hope I don't have to pay royalties for that.

It's no surprise that this country is full of dumb laws, but I just thought of a really absurd one yesterday. See, the whole purpose of the law is so that if anything happens, everyone can channel the blame to one or more culprits, who will then be held fully responsible for it. It's all about pointing the finger and finding a scapegoat. Humans must have someone or something to blame. My gripe is this traffic law that says that it's the responsibility of the owner of a vehicle to check that it's in perfect road-worthy condition. Sounds reasonable, right? For the most part, yeah. But not quite.

According to Californian law, you're responsible to check that all the lights and blinkers on your vehicle are in working condition. It just so happened that one of the brake lights on my car blew a couple days ago, and I just happened to have one of those new cars that actually tell you if something is malfunctioning. So I knew, and French Fitch got it fixed for me yesterday. Okay, so what happens if I'm driving an older car that doesn't quite have the sophisticated sensing abilities that my car has? Most of the cars on the road are like that. So how would they ever know that their brake lights are busted?

They wouldn't. And there's absolutely no way to check all your lights before you drive off. In order to check your brake lights, you have to step on the brake and be at the back of your car to see the brake lights at the same time. And unless you're that stretchy rubber man from the Fantastic Four, I see absolutely no way that anyone can do that. Especially if you're alone, which is most of the time. But yet if you're pulled over by a cop for a failed brake light, it's your fault for "endangering the safety of all other motorists on the road around you". And "But there's no way that I could have known about it" doesn't constitute as an excuse.

Absolute rubbish, if you ask me.

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Road rules