RE: engine vs california inspection

[Theron Ross <ross@sanoh.com.mx>]

A while back I heard that up in the Los Angeles area they were setting up
mobile smog tests on the side of the road. The idea was to randomly stop
vehicles and put them on the rollers to try and catch polluters. As a San
Diego resident, I figured there wasn't much of a chance of me getting caught
in one of these traps.

What do you know, about a month ago I was driving down Navajo Road across
from the Mission Trails golf course (for those of you not familiar with the
San Diego area, Navajo Road is in a middle-class neighborhood dotted with
small stores) and I see an orange, Caltrans-style diamond pop-up sign that
says "Survey in Progress" and another one indicating that one of the two
lanes was shut down. I figured that some type of land survey was going on.
However, as I got further down the road, on the side of the road was a CHP
car and a truck with a weird trailer, as well as a bunch of equipment that
looked nothing like those little tripod land survey things. Sure enough,
they had a pick-up truck on rollers on the weird trailer and were checking
it for smog. The pick-up truck they were testing belonged to a local
exterminator company. I cruised by in my '81 and nobody even looked at me.
Whew--that's all I needed on my day off.

It was positioned on a blind curve, so the location would make it real
difficult for you to stop and make a U-turn without calling attention to
yourself. And one thing that was really interesting is that there were no
signs or markings on anything to indicate what those guys were doing. It was
almost like a secret X-Files type of thing.

Just to make sure I was right about it being a smog test, I did a little
research on the internet. Sure enough, I found that when they set up this
type of road-side smog testing, they do use signs that say "Survey in
Progress" and they do it in locations that make it hard to turn around.

Damn--this thing was set up only about a mile from my house! And I figure
the next time Meze comes over they'll probably catch him! They would
definitely see (and hear) him coming!

Apparently some people are fighting these mobile smog checkers. They are
questioning the random method they use to pull over cars. Seems that some
types of vehicles are getting pulled over more often than others and that a
certain ethnic group is more likely to be driving those types of vehicles.



> -----Original Message-----
> From: Shawn C Meze [mailto:skerocdriver@juno.com]
> Sent: Tuesday, October 02, 2001 3:54 PM
> To: sfwilliams@home.com
> Cc: scirocco-l@scirocco.org
> Subject: Re: engine vs california inspection
> 
> 
> 
> On Tue, 2 Oct 2001 11:01:58 -0400 "Scott F. Williams"
> <sfwilliams@home.com> writes:
> >Wow, I've been corrected even before my post (with contrary advice) 
> >even hit the list. What's the deal with California, then? All we ever
> hear 
> >about is
> >how restrictive the CARB laws are. How can one county be like storm 
> >troopers and the next be relaxed?
> 
> 
> Its not as much about "clean air" as much as it is a way to generate
> revenue from heavily populated areas. Think about it. This is "CA, the
> TAX you and then TAX you ass again" state! 
> The smog laws WERE considered strict back in the day that NO 
> other states
> were doing emissions testing. Then the other states learned about how
> much money CA was making and have been jumping on the 
> bandwagon to CA's
> level and then some. CA has not been the SMOG nazi state for 
> quite a few
> years now although the reputation still lingers. 
> 
> 
> Shawn Méze
> 86' Jetta GLi 8V       84' Scirocco 8V           88' Corvette -SS 30-
> 82' Scirocco GTi -FSP 54-     79' "Project FSP Scirocco"
> The Fastest, Quickest, Cleanest and best looking Scirocco(s) in all of
> San Diego!
> http://www.Geocities.com/MotorCity/Speedway/1308/index.htm
> 
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