The only reason we ever hear about Coral Gables, Florida, is when they decide (again) to enforce their pick-up truck ban.
2011:
Starting this month, the city of Coral Gables will issue warning notices to owners of pickup trucks who do not park their trucks inside their garages at night.
Since the 1960s, the city has banned people from parking their pickup trucks in their driveways or on city streets from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m.
Flashback to 2003 and one of my first blog posts:
In Coral Gables, Florida, you cannot park your pick-up truck on the street or in your driveway between 7 pm and 7 am lest you be mistaken for someone who actually has to work for a living. The city enacted the law in the 1970s to preserve its sense of uniquely fake Mediterranean decorum, to keep property values and tax assessments suitably elevated, or simply to thrash property rights whereever it can, and most of Coral Gables was fine with it until recently.
The pick-up owners have rebelled. Now that pick-ups have evolved from utilitarian cargo haulers to 250 XXL Buses-With-Lidless-Trunks-For-Beds, the pick-up owners think their trucks are no different than SUVs, so the SUVs should be banned from driveways and streets at night. And the powers that fill the city’s coffers with ticket revenue agreed. Dadgum, SUVs are trucks!
History repeats itself, but on a shorter time cycle than Nietzsche imagined.
(Link seen on Dustbury.)