car driven society

Monday, December 15, 2003, at 01:51PM

By Eric Richardson

I found my auto insurance card today. I had taken it out of my car a while back to fill out a form and just realized a couple weeks ago that I really didn't know where it was. Though still fully insurance, and just without current record of it, driving around without my card I was close to being part of a large undocumented segment of the driving population. I think I heard in a commercial the other day that something like 20% of cars on the road in LA are uninsured. Trying to support that with statistics, I find this release from 2000 that says "California has an estimated 5.3 million uninsured vehicles, and 2.2 million to 3 million of these are in regular use."

The debate these days has been about licenses for "undocumented workers". Davis passed a law granting them the ability to get licenses, then Arnold came into power saying he was going to take that away, which he promptly did. Now there are protests that have been going on about that. Granted, I'm being a little theoretical about the whole thing, but shouldn't these people be arguing for getting illegal workers legal, and not just for giving them licenses? If you're going to argue that these people are a critical part of the southern california economy, that's a valid argument. But don't take that to say that we should give illegal immigrants licenses. License citizens. Don't work around the real problem to cure a symptom.

But that's just me...