New York State Vehicle Amp Traffic Law: Fill & Download for Free

“Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner".Calls to abolish the Electoral College can conveniently use “one person one vote” arguments to appear reasonable. But make no mistake, that's not why they want it. The real reason these advocates want such measures is that it would make the United States a one-party nation, specifically the Democratic Party.The population of the United States is roughly 80% urban/suburban, 20% rural. You tend to get some variation in this breakdown based on how you treat “exurbs”, the very outskirts of a major metro that is still relatively easily accessible. Urban and suburban voters have a different set of expectations and requirements of their government than rural residents, because their environment differs; specifically, urban voters have more people to deal with in their daily lives, people who can assist in or interfere with that daily life. The denser the population in an area, the more limited your personal freedoms necessarily become, because the exercise of your freedom to live your life the way you want is more likely to impact someone else's life when there are more people closer to you. The flip side, however, is that with more people closer to you, the chances of getting assistance from one or more of them is higher, and further, public services designed to provide assistance to the overall population have greater economies of scale because the distances involved in running power lines, water pipes etc, as well as in responding to an emergency situation like a fire or crime, are shorter, especially on a per-person basis.So, high-density voter bases have a different set of priorities from low-density voter bases, because they have different needs and expectations of society in general. The problem is that there are many more high-density voters than low-density voters. So in an unfettered popular democracy, the high-density voters get what they want, very often to the exclusion of what low-density voters want.That's a problem because the benefits of high density living, that high-density voters assume when proposing new laws, do not exist for rural voters; they get the restrictions of the law that apply to everyone, but still need miles of power and telecom lines and water pipes per person served (much of which simply doesn’t exist because it’s impractical to provide), and have emergency response times measured in hours just to drive from the closest station to the site of the emergency, to say nothing of waiting in the dispatch queue for an available responder.The cost structure necessary to provide them the same level of utilities and public services available in the cities is prohibitively expensive, and city voters usually don’t want to pay that cost either in taxes or in higher usage rates. So rural voters can’t count on high-speed internet, 400-amp electrical service for a Tesla charger (even split-phase 200A power used by hot water heaters, HVAC and large appliances can be a real luxury), police response times in single-digit minutes, or even municipal water and sewer (wells and septic systems, usually as far apart as possible, are how you get running water and flush toilets when the nearest water treatment plant is 200 miles away). But urban majorities are still happy to pass laws restricting the ways in which those rural residents can make up the difference in services in a more self-sufficient way. Things such as water-use restrictions that prohibit well-drilling or diverting flowing water to preserve it for city and industrial use. Environmental limits on pollution from gas and diesel motors based on what will stall or reduce urban pollution from millions of these engines concentrated in a few square miles. Groundwater protection that prohibits septic systems in zones designated as aquifer recharge areas. Wildlife conservation laws that prevent unlicensed killing of nuisance pests that also happen to be threatened species. Gun laws requiring multiple days of classroom and range training at your expense, the local Sheriff’s signoff and waiting periods that have you making multiple trips into town to handle paperwork, then banning carry of that weapon even on one’s own land. I could go on. These laws benefit urban voters either in their daily lives or in their mental image of “the untamed wilds of America” that they’d like to visit on their vacation, but they simply do not make sense when you’re trying to make a long-term living for yourself off the land you own, and you and your immediate family are the only souls for two miles in any direction and a trip to the nearest population center requires a hotel stay.So, very basically, what works in a city does not work in the country; not logistically, not economically, not practically. And even among cities and incorporated areas, what works for a large metropolis of 5 million people may not work for even a sizable regional hub city of 500,000 (a “traffic tax” on vehicles entering downtown during various hours might be a really good idea for downtown Manhattan, but it makes no sense at all in Lubbock, TX where “rush hour” lasts 5 minutes). But as the common saying goes, “tumbleweeds don’t vote”; if 80% of the overall population, or even a majority of voters living in MSAs over 1 million, vote with equal weight for nationally-scoped policies that don't work in less dense population areas (or equivalently, vote for representatives like Presidents who promise to push these policies), the minority gets a government that simply will never give them what they need, much less what they want, because the supermajority is making their decisions for them.This isn't a new problem; the original 13 states all had different voter bases that wanted different things, and most of them didn't want voters in Virginia or Massachussetts deciding what would happen on the national level every time, simply because they were larger or more populous states. These more populous states, for their part, didn’t want a Delaware or a Rhode Island, with a population of a couple thousand people total at the time, having the same say as a Massachussetts, New York or Virginia with hundreds of thousands of people each.This tension between different states with different populations and different needs is why the Federal government uses a hybrid elector system, based on a combination of population and equal state representation. The Legislature is bicameral; the House is the equal-population representative body (or as close as we can get with the understanding that every state still gets at least one Rep and there are only 435 seats for 325 million people), the Senate is the equal-State representative chamber where each State gets two votes regardless of location, land area, population, economic activity etc. The President, therefore, is elected by a system that gives each State a number of votes proportional to their total Congressional representation, which created a hybrid of the two approaches to select the single head of state.You want proof that a direct democratic election would be a major problem for small-town America? Look at California and New York. New York City, population 8 million, and New York State’s portion of the tri-state New York-Newark-Jersey City metro area (mostly in the lower Hudson Valley and Long Island), represents the majority of the population of the State of New York (approximately 12 million out of the state’s 19.7 million people). As such, it gets the majority of representation in the State Assembly. So not only can the City reserve for itself a significant amount of autonomy in its own borders by voting down measures to pre-empt local laws at the state level, voters living or at least working in the City tend to get what they want applied statewide as well. Rural “upstate New York” residents, and even residents of smaller cities like Buffalo, Rochester and Albany, can pretty much pound sand if they don’t want what NYC wants for the State of New York; a Representative elected by the residents of about 10 blocks of Midtown Manhattan can cancel out the vote of ten entire small towns upstate, and there are way more 10-block areas of the City than there are upstate small towns.Similarly, in California, the LA Metro (13.3 million) and the Bay Area (7.7m) represent 21 million people out of the state’s total population of 39.6m, or 53%. That’s not counting California’s third metro area of San Diego (3m), less intensely Democrat-leaning in part due to the influence of the area’s military bases including Camp Pendleton. Overall, the opinions of urban and suburban voters of these three metro areas, combined with California’s system of statewide ballot initiatives (true “one person, one vote” direct democracy to enact legislation) that are separate from and usually override actions by the General Assembly, have made California all but a one-party state since the Clinton Administration, to the detriment of the other 18-ish million residents of the State of California that live inland up in the Sierras, or even a few miles in from the coast. Even Sacramentoans and Fresnoans are saying “waitamminit” to some of the stuff being proposed and passing according to the will of the residents of a metro that outnumbers the rest of “NorCal” by about 50:1.Overall, of the country’s 323 million people, the majority live in the nation’s 36 most populous metro areas, comprising less than 7% of the country’s land area (the top 50 MSAs total 295k sqmi out of a total of 3.8m sqmi, and that’s not taking into account that MSAs are defined at the county level, while cities like Phoenix and San Diego are relative pinpoints of urbanization in their surrounding counties). 182 million, 56%, live in 53 metro areas with populations over 1 million, 2/3 of the country in the top 75 MSAs with populations >750k. That leaves a hundred million Americans spread over about 90% of the land area of this country, largely disenfranchised by straight majority rule on issues of national scope favoring the needs of denser populations over their own.“So tough luck, majority rules, if you don’t like it you move to a city where you get the benefits”. Yeah, that works really well for a few months until you realize there’s no more beef. Or wheat, or corn. Because all the farmers and ranchers in that 20% living in the less dense half of the country just gave up, retired early off whatever they could get for the land and equipment nobody wants anymore, and moved to a nice cozy house in sleepy suburbia or exurbia, where they actually have a chance to get basic services provided municipally once statewide or nationwide regulations prohibit digging wells, running diesel generators or owning a gun for one’s own protection. I’m not seeing any high-rise hydroponics farms in downtown Manhattan growing enough calories to feed 21 million people in the metro, to say nothing of egg or dairy farms or beef slaughterhouses.Even if you’re vegan, that all-natural non-GMO certified organic garden burger comes from ingredients grown by the very same small family farmers out in “flyover country” that Elizabeth Warren is kicking in the teeth. The cities may move a lot of money around and thus contribute the supermajority of the GDP, but that stock trader’s or software programmer’s job gets a lot harder when they’re doing it on an empty stomach, because nobody’s bothering to grow food (or mine minerals or pump oil or log timber) for a country whose majority voters are content to totally forget they exist otherwise.So rural voters, and their needs and opinions, are to be respected on the national stage even if they differ from yours, because the cities need the country and vice-versa. To that end, more populous, more urban states do get more representation nationally, but not so much more that they can force whatever they like on less dense states. Anyone calling for an end to that system isn’t out for equality; they want to be able to get the top job by going to NYC, LA, Dallas, Houston and Chicago, appear on these cities’ major media markets with an appealing message to urban voters and have it repeated in the next 20 smaller media markets, and win a national election all without having to temper that message to appeal outside major city centers.