On Thu, 18 Nov 2004 01:24:48 GMT, maxo <
[email protected]> wrote:
>On Wed, 17 Nov 2004 19:34:58 -0500, Sheldon Brown wrote:
>
>> So are shoes and baby carriages and wheelbarrows and rolling suitcases and
>> roller skates and shopping carts and skateboards. Should these be
>> registered too?
>
>Sidewalks are used for those activities. Roller skates and inline skates
>are illegal on most cities' streets, btw, though that law is rarely
>enforced.
>
>Haven't seen any wheelbarrows cruising down the lane around here lately.
>
>
>
>>Traveling the public streets under one's own power is a _right_ not a
>>privilege.
>
>Says you, but can you back it up with actual legal precedent?
Yes. Most definitely yes. It's called the public right-of-way, and
it is enshrined in law since the early days of the Republic and in
other places that have traditions far older. The necessity to have
these public rights-of-way had been established long before the US
came into existence, of course, and certain restrictions on the
methods of their use have been found necessary from time to time, but
the central concept remains; the use of these spaces as a passage to
move to and through other places is the reason for their designation,
and the right to use them is granted to all. The privilege of
*piloting* a motor vehicle on them is reserved to the competent, but
anyone may engage the services of a competent driver to take them on
to those rights-of-way to their destination. And so it is that in
most states of the US, by extention of the law from long ago,
human-powered wheeled vehicles require no operator's license but their
riders are granted the *right* to use those rights-of-way so long as
the rules of vehicle operation are followed, in the same manner that
they have been since before the automobile became a commonplace
machine. It is not a privilege, it is a right with obligations.
All of that said, it would be perfectly legal for a state to require
that its own residents purchase some form of registration; it is not
reasonable, however, for a state to close its roads to outsiders,
demanding that they must purchase such a registration or be excluded
from the rights-of-way. That was established long ago as well, and
the precedents are so old that citing them is redundant in the face of
legal custom that makes it unnecessary. (This does not apply to all
commercial vehicles, however; for a variety of reasons, there are
situations in which it is held to be acceptable for a state to demand
that a common carrier doing business *in* the state must have paid
vehicle registration fees *to* the state...but even this has been
widely challenged and is no longer commonly the case. In its place,
the various states have enacted legislation that requires that common
carriers must pay a use tax for the fuel that they burn in that state,
whether they bought the fuel there or not; in most cases, if the
carrier *did* buy fuel in the state, that is held to be sufficient to
fulfill the requirement...but if they didn't, then the carrier can be
required to pay that state's use tax on fuel that was also taxed where
it was purchased. This Catch-22 situation is a very sore point for
the trucking industry, and is essentially irrelevant to this
discussion.)
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