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Coincidentally I had to take my car in (not for an inspection) this morning and the courtesy car driver told me that as of today the manual is about 400-500 pages smaller than it used to be. As someone in the business he was definitely thinking it's going to be less burdensome, although he also said that it's all black and white now, no shades of gray, no discretion. I do understand from the news coverage that you can get up to a year to do some of the required fixes, depending on cost.
harry, you are forever comparing Vermont to Alabama. I'm glad you like where you live but culturally it is an entirely different world vs Vermont. VT and AL have nothing in common. I've been to AL and could never ever live there. VT isn't to your liking and that's OK too, but why do you feel compelled to keep with the comparisons that always (in your opinion) have VT falling short? Embrace AL and forget about VT. We're OK and we don't want to be AL.
Although "forever" is a bit strong, I do often compare the two because of my personal experiences. I disagree with you that the two states have nothing in common, and my response to you is predicated upon that.
Reapportionment changed Vermont radically. Yes, I realize that was in the past century, but the Vermont I grew up in prior to that was the independent and outspoken upstart that had a LOT in common with Alabama. Skip the whole slavery/segregation issue - I know it is hard to do, but try. I'll make it easier by saying that Vermont had few blacks to enslave, and the issue of race was a non-issue that got overwritten by the similar attitudes concerning which church one attended - I know, I was there. Vermont citizenry is not squeaky clean on avoiding stereotyping and embracing egalitarianism. Eugenics was immensely popular in the state.
Wanna compare Burlington to Fairfax? Brattleboro to Barre? Those areas have even less in common than the states of Vermont and Alabama. My point is that, as others have also indicated, there are PARTS of Vermont overstructure and legislation that hold the state back, there are laws and regulations and rules that make life difficult for many - regardless of what happens in Alabama or elsewhere.
My OP was actually less about comparing to Alabama laws than that of a comparison with Florida and other states. Open the wiki link in it. If you see it as a direct comparison of Vermont and Alabama, I'll happily tell you that Alabama has its own problems - just not this particular one.
Governments are responsible for the safety of public roads. Got that, no problem with the concept, as governments build and maintain them. Part of the safety on those roads includes restricting what is allowed upon them. Again, no problem with that concept. However, THAT is where the line gets drawn for me, for my grandfather, for those who respect the boundaries between personal free will and rights and governmental responsibilities.
harry, one of my brothers married a girl from Northern Alabama. My parents, me, the rest of my siblings, and our families all went down for the wedding. We all stayed at the same hotel. The bride had 2 great aunts who were originally from Massachusetts who came to the hotel to find us and apologize for the rudeness of the bride's family for their refusal to meet us. The bride's family wanted nothing to do with Catholics from up north.
Another brother married a girl from Louisiana, a minister's daughter no less, and like in AL, her family refused to meet us or speak to us at the wedding.
My parents retired to a small town in Tennessee and the first thing anyone ever asked us when we were visiting was what church we belonged to. Give them the wrong answer (Catholic) and you could see their body language quickly removing the welcome mat, part of the issue being the double whammy of northerner and Catholic. After my Dad died and my mother was left there unable to drive a car and with some mobility issues, not one neighbor ever offered to run an errand or get her to a doctor's appt. or help with yard work or anything else. She sold the house and moved back to the old neighborhood. When the old couple across the road from me here in VT reached the point that they couldn't do some things, without being asked the neighbors started mowing the lawn, bringing the newspaper in, shoveling the snow, and making sure they had a good lunch every day, most of these people not being good friends of the old couple, but simply people who lived in the neighborhood who knew they needed help.
Religion is a big deal in the South, especially the deep South whereas VT is deemed the least religious State in the country as measured by frequency of church attendance. VT is instead live and let live and people don't care what church you belong to or if you belong to one at all. VT is welcoming of the LGBT community, AL eliminated marriage licenses rather than issue them to gay couples. The politics and social norms of AL could not be more different than VT.
harry, one of my brothers married a girl from Northern Alabama. My parents, me, the rest of my siblings, and our families all went down for the wedding. We all stayed at the same hotel. The bride had 2 great aunts who were originally from Massachusetts who came to the hotel to find us and apologize for the rudeness of the bride's family for their refusal to meet us. The bride's family wanted nothing to do with Catholics from up north.
Another brother married a girl from Louisiana, a minister's daughter no less, and like in AL, her family refused to meet us or speak to us at the wedding.
My parents retired to a small town in Tennessee and the first thing anyone ever asked us when we were visiting was what church we belonged to. Give them the wrong answer (Catholic) and you could see their body language quickly removing the welcome mat, part of the issue being the double whammy of northerner and Catholic. After my Dad died and my mother was left there unable to drive a car and with some mobility issues, not one neighbor ever offered to run an errand or get her to a doctor's appt. or help with yard work or anything else. She sold the house and moved back to the old neighborhood. When the old couple across the road from me here in VT reached the point that they couldn't do some things, without being asked the neighbors started mowing the lawn, bringing the newspaper in, shoveling the snow, and making sure they had a good lunch every day, most of these people not being good friends of the old couple, but simply people who lived in the neighborhood who knew they needed help.
Religion is a big deal in the South, especially the deep South whereas VT is deemed the least religious State in the country as measured by frequency of church attendance. VT is instead live and let live and people don't care what church you belong to or if you belong to one at all. VT is welcoming of the LGBT community, AL eliminated marriage licenses rather than issue them to gay couples. The politics and social norms of AL could not be more different than VT.
Again, I find the differences you cite as not fully accurate or representative. There was a huge push in the Vermont church communities at sometime around 1960 to embrace a more open and ecumenical tolerance for different faiths. I remember being in a church group that visited the two other main denominations in town, Catholic and Methodist, as well as a Jewish temple, to experience the services and sermons. Even then, IIRC, the Baptists did not participate fully. That drive for fraternity was partly in response to dwindling power within the churches and congregants leaving.
I am not sure why the shift away from churches in Vermont was stronger than in other states, but it was palpable at the time. Some factors may have been women working on a more regular basis, education and science, greater mobility, the dying out of a generation of autocratic ministers? Whatever the causes, my experience was that it was an abrupt shift that roughly coincided with the completion of I-89 and decreased isolation in the state.
Prior to that decade, I had not been allowed as a child to play with the Catholic kids, and the paternalistic direction of the Catholics' lives from Rome was actively despised. The early impressions of Barre that were indoctrinated into me was that it was an entire city to be best avoided because it was primarily Catholic. Goddard College? That was a godless hippie party college stuck off in the woods in the minds of most residents. The Vermont of then and the Alabama of the recent past have undeniable similarities.
Religion is a big thing in the south, but shifts are rapidly happening to it as well. However, drawing back to the point, the state of religion in my area of Alabama is very similar to that experienced in Vermont in the late 1950s/early 1960s... as is my experience of the balance between governmental and personal power.
(FWIW, organized religion never "took" with me, so my discussion is more academic than based in supporting some dogma.)
Bringing it fully back on-topic, the progressive drive in Vermont - largely from transplants to the state - has changed the character of the state into one that has less in common with my life experiences there than what I experience here. One can't go home, but one can recognize the factors that made home home and how many of those are now gone. I have similar recognitions about the multitude of changes that happened in south Florida as I lived there.
Will Alabama ever go with extensive vehicle inspections? Perhaps on commercial vehicles, which do present a greater hazard, but I suspect the ambulance chasers will delay even that.
Harry, the VT of 1960 doesn't exist anymore. Maybe AL hasn't changed dramatically over the ensuing decades but most States are unrecognizable from their 1960 selves. There is nothing unusual in VT having changing socially and politically. The bottom line however is that 2019 VT has little in common with 2019 AL, and I would venture that most people in AL don't want to be like VT and most people in VT don't want to be like AL.
Coming back to car inspections. It is more than safety. Inspections cover environmental concerns as well.
Harry, the VT of 1960 doesn't exist anymore. Maybe AL hasn't changed dramatically over the ensuing decades but most States are unrecognizable from their 1960 selves. There is nothing unusual in VT having changing socially and politically. The bottom line however is that 2019 VT has little in common with 2019 AL, and I would venture that most people in AL don't want to be like VT and most people in VT don't want to be like AL.
Coming back to car inspections. It is more than safety. Inspections cover environmental concerns as well.
We are in general agreement, although my brother would be one of those far happier if Vermont stepped back. IME, the amount that Vermont changed is extreme though, compared to states in the southern tier on average.
Yes on the environmental concerns being part of inspections. That is an outgrowth of the heightened awareness in Vermont. I'm ambivalent on that, as modern cars are so advanced above the cars of the 1960s that I wonder whether the early junking of cars that fail testing just moves the environmental issues to the environmental cost of making a new car. As salt is probably a larger factor, the shift in timeframe for junking would likely be minimal in Vermont.
" IME, the amount that Vermont changed is extreme though, compared to states in the southern tier on average."
Reconsidering my statement, I think I was wrong. The south has changed considerably in the intervening years as well, just in different ways. Racism has continued to die back overall, the giant Florida sugar plantations have mostly closed and the land turned over to conservation efforts, urban center taxes have increased, etc. When immersed in an environment, the speed of change seems slower than when suddenly confronted with changes that may have appeared on a similar timescale.
Harry, the VT of 1960 doesn't exist anymore. Maybe AL hasn't changed dramatically over the ensuing decades but most States are unrecognizable from their 1960 selves. There is nothing unusual in VT having changing socially and politically. The bottom line however is that 2019 VT has little in common with 2019 AL, and I would venture that most people in AL don't want to be like VT and most people in VT don't want to be like AL.
Coming back to car inspections. It is more than safety. Inspections cover environmental concerns as well.
Well said!
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