Originally Posted by DivinDriver

It's a damn shame that people who are supposed to be protecting us from the truly dangerous idiots running around loose are put in the position of having to even concern themselves with a problem that from a simple standpoint of scale doesn't make a beer-fart-in-a-whirlwind's bit of difference with regard to actual, perceivable air quality; that being the emissions of the tiny remaining population of older performance-modified but otherwise scrupulously tuned and maintained cars.

There simply are not (and never have been) enough modded cars on the road to do more than jiggle the last decimal place in actual air quality now. Far worse are the more numerous rolling crap-pile pickups and other 'exempt' vehicles that are not maintained, but fall outside of enforcement of any emission standard

A smart, non-ideologically driven enforcement process would simply let you buy, for a few hundred bucks a year perhaps, exemption from the as-manufactured smog limitations for a vehicle, perhaps even tying the fee to annual miles driven, which would be a self-regulating limit on the pollution generated; you buy however many miles worth of exemption as you will use.

The money gained through the purchases, not to mention the savings from wasted LE, court, & documentation man-hours alone would be staggering - - and could be used to clean up actual, public-health-significant sources of pollution.

But it's not about logic or even about revenue per se; it's about an ideology approaching the level of religious zealotry, masquerading as public policy.