Posted on 04/05/2008 6:56:50 AM PDT by kellynla
It's 1:45 p.m. on a Wednesday in February and a Toyota Camry is driving west on the 91 Express Lanes, for free, for the 470th time.
The electronic transponder on the dashboard – used to bill tollway users – is inactive. The Camry's owners, airport traffic officer Rudolph Duplessis and his wife, Loretta, have never had a toll road account, officials say.
They've never received a violation notice in the mail, either. Their car is registered as part of a state program which hides their home address on Department of Motor Vehicles records. The agency that operates the tollway does not have legal access to their address.
Their Toyota is one of 996,716 vehicles registered to motorists who are affiliated with 1,800 state and local agencies and who are allowed to shield their addresses under the Confidential Records Program.
An Orange County Register investigation has found that the program, designed 30 years ago to protect police from criminals, has been expanded to cover hundreds of thousands of public employees – from police dispatchers to museum guards – who face little threat from the public. Their spouses and children can get the plates, too.
This has happened despite warnings from state officials that the safeguard is no longer needed because updated laws have made all DMV information confidential to the public.
(Excerpt) Read more at ocregister.com ...
That said, what would happen if the tollway and other agencies that got stiffed by the totalitarian anarchists were to start up a web site posting their license plates and what was owed? From my read of the article, people who have those special plates aren't legally exempt from toll and other requirements--it's simply very difficult to collect from them. On the other hand, public exposure might cause such things to calm down pretty quickly.
Actually, I think we're on to something!
Let's offer the illegals and the Aztlan crowd California. Then watch Pelosi and Boxer and Feinstein and Waters and the rest of the Dems scream and yell and demand that the illegal invasion be stopped. Let's call their bluff on the open borders and amnesty crap and let them carry the battle flag to protect their own jobs.
The final irony will be that all those California Dems and RINOs office holders will be soon replaced by Latinos just like they were in Los Angeles, which is no longer part of America.
Diamond lanes are a better option that what we have here in Houston - a SINGLE lane, blocked off in the middle of the highway, that takes real estate for 3 lanes, used one way for the morning, and one way for the afternoon. It’s horrible. When there is an accident, the entire lane is shut down, and police/ambulance/fire block a lane or two of regular traffic, so they can get to/from the accident.
Why would anyone in this metropolitan area of 5+ MILLION people make an interchange ramp of one lane? I mean, seriously, if you’re redoing the ramp, build it at LEAST 2 lanes wide.
Who documented that it blew up 200,000 years ago?
Some leftist group, and they blamed Bush.
/sarc
That's the official USGS position. I'm not saying I agree with it.
The purpose of HOV lanes is palpably NOT to move bodies (and traffic) more efficiently. Every public transportation authority in the country, if they're honest, will admit that their purpose is instead to make freeways even more inefficient and drive commuters into public transit.
Thereby, of course, doing away with the evil SUV...
Absolute truth. Ask them sometime.
Response: Yep.
If you think that “California is essentially a Third World slum” then the only thing piling up is your bull crap.
Reminds me of Patrick Kennedy's little Capitol Hill accident about 10 years ago when he hit a barricade at 2:45AM. Witnesses claimed to have seen him drinking at a local bar. Yet he used the same "I was on the way to a vote" excuse.
Geez, thanks for that reminder. I had totally forgotten that one. It rankled me no end to pull over someone pushing 100 mph on I64 only to shine the spotlight on a Senate-1 plate.
“That’s the official USGS position. I’m not saying I agree with it.”
Probably my liberal ass brother in law who works for the USGS.
HOV lanes also give police, public transit, and certain other vehicles a “fastlane” bypass to serf-traffic.
Actually the express lanes on the 91 are toll lanes. You get the privilege of paying up to (I’m not sure of the max) $12.00 one way to avoid the congested lanes for 10 miles.
How many wildfires last year were started by homeless immigrant camps?
there are some areas too where lights are deliberately out of phase to encourage use of the “speedy” toll road.
Added idling and congestion don’t help air pollution standards. But then civil engineering doesn’t make cleaner air a factor in designs, despite what they may claim.
"Law enforcement came to me and asked me to sponsor it," said Oropeza, D-Carson.
This year, Assemblyman Sandré Swanson, D-Alameda, is sponsoring a bill that would add some zoo veterinarians, animal control agency workers and humane society shelter workers to the program. After introducing the bill, he added firefighters and code enforcement officers, as well.
____________________________________________________________ Government employees are now able to avoid red light cameras, parking tickets etc.
Government employees are clearly above the law.
Ya think government tyranny is just isolated to Cal? Right.
And yes, the year round great weather is worth a small fortune to me. While you're pulling icicles off your face and trudging through frigid brown snow, I'm golfing.
:o
Perhaps you should pose that question to the founder and owner of FR, California resident Jim Robinson.
I think we should forcibly deport all illegals and their facilitators to the north eastern states. They are, in many ways, already as socialist as California so the move should be welcome. At the same time our economy here would improve dramatically and many of our worst politicians would get to return to the region that spawned them. Then we should build that fence between Ca and the rest of the country.
Yeah, that's the ticket.
Michael Frazier
More Californians have given their lives fighting in Iraq than any state.
But hey, instead of fighting big gov, that's infected every state in the country, lets give California to Mexico. Good thinking slick.
Glad you ain't here, and I can only hope any other cut and run types like you that are still in California...leave.
Among the top violators on OCTA's list were Dwight and Michell Storay (he's a parole agent with the Department of Corrections), with 622 violations; Lenai and Arnold Carraway (she's an Orange County social worker), with 239 violations and Susie and Mike Stephen (she's a Chino Police Department dispatcher), with 227 violations.
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