Imagine if we still required these in our homes?
The other day, my friend James and I were out buying magazines and looking for a bar that felt like a coffee shop. I.e. I wanted to drink, but with comfortable seating and good lighting like at Starbucks. We were not successful, but it brought up the point, from some deep crevice in my mind, that it is required in Ontario that places that sell alcohol are required to sell coffee. This, of course, is some ancient provision that dates from the days we believed drinking some black coffee would sober you right up and you could drive home. What could be more insane? This is the equivalent, in my mind, of still requiring new houses to be constructed with coal chute doors for easy coal delivery. This requirement has obviously been long removed.
However, it got me wondering, what other rules are around that just don’t fit? This past week, I’ve noticed quite a few are still around.
Watch out for the cops while you hail that cab
In Ottawa and Los Angeles and many places in between, it is either illegal to hail a cab or for a cab to pick up someone off the street. Now, I don’t know how this affects things in LA, but in Ottawa, this is completely ignored. It’s not always easy to find one, but most every cab will stop to pick you up if you put your arm out. I’m sure there was some reason once upon a time for this, safety?, but that time has passed and no one even knows about it for the most part.
Similar limitations are artificially in place all over the place, including land-use planning. Minimum parking requirements coupled with aggressive transit-oriented development plans, for instance. Requiring a parking space with every ground-oriented home is another, despite many thousands of such homes from before this rule that function pretty well without it.
Governments, citizens and business need to work harder to identify these kinds of reasonless rules and eliminate them. And if libertarians, fiscal/pro-business conservatives and the like were serious about making government more efficient, they would spend their time finding these rather than attacking women’s rights and funding for education.
