Sorry, it's a Tuesday

The bill carries the unromantic name HF 3865, it arrived this spring courtesy of a single legislator out of St. Paul, of all the places it might have come from, a city whose driveways and side streets and weekend gatherings are about as devoted to old metal as anywhere in the upper Midwest, and it now sits in the House transportation committee, which is the legislative equivalent of a waiting room where a great many bills go in and a merciful number never come out.

What it proposes, underneath the technical language, is to gather every collector class Minnesota recognizes, the pioneer cars and the classics, the street rods and the military vehicles and the wheezing old motorcycles, and herd them all under one tidy rule about when their owners are allowed to take them out.

That rule would permit a collector-plated vehicle onto public roads during daylight hours on Saturdays and Sundays, along with the occasional sanctioned outing to a show, a parade, or an organized club event, and it would leave everything else, the Wednesday errand, the long summer evening, the unplanned cruise that is the entire point of owning the car, sitting outside the fence with no clear protection at all.

Minnesota has always handed these plates out cheap, a one-time twenty-five-dollar tax and a plate fee and then never another renewal as long as the car draws breath, and that generosity always came bundled with a single understanding, that the car is a hobby and not your daily ride to the office. HF 3865 takes that gentle understanding, the kind that lived comfortably on a handshake for decades, and hardens it into a calendar with teeth.

The state has a reason for all this, and fairness demands it be said plainly and without a sneer, because collector plates are a discount and a discount is catnip to the sort of person who games things. There are people who slap a collector plate on an ordinary daily driver to dodge the regular fees and inspections the rest of us pay without much complaint, the state would dearly like that little dodge to end, and drawing a bright line around what counts as collector use is one sensible way to protect the program. That much is fair, and I will defend it at the bar to anyone who asks.

The trouble lives entirely in the line they have chosen to draw, because a rule that blesses only weekend daylight takes thousands of ordinary, harmless, faintly joyful acts of ownership and quietly reclassifies them as infractions.

You drive home from the body shop on a Wednesday to make sure your own repair actually holds, and the statute calls you a violation. You load the grandkids in for ice cream on a soft July evening, and the statute calls you a violation again. None of that is the abuse the bill claims to be hunting, and the law would treat all of it as suspect anyway.

Rubber seals dry out and crack while the car does nothing at all. Fuel turns slowly to varnish in the lines. Brakes seize, tires settle into flat spots they never quite forget, batteries surrender in the dark, and the whole proud machine eases itself, week by idle week, toward an expensive restoration that a few unhurried miles would have spared it entirely.

The only cure anyone has ever discovered is motion, the plain act of driving the car the way it was built to be driven, keeping it warm and wet and turning and catching the small troubles while they are still small enough to fix with a weekend and a swear word.

A law that decides for you when those drives may happen is a law that makes the keeping of these cars harder and dearer, which is a peculiar thing to do to the very machines a collector program stands up and claims to be protecting.

You might be reading this a thousand comfortable miles from St. Paul, with no dog in this particular fight and no intention of acquiring one, and I am sorry to report the fight has gone and found a dog with your name on it anyway.

State legislatures borrow from one another with the shameless enthusiasm of schoolboys copying homework, and a clause that survives its first committee in one capitol has a way of turning up word for word in the next, so the moment a single state commits to paper the notion that acceptable use of an old car means weekend daylight and a short list of sanctioned events, that definition stops being a Minnesota problem and becomes a template sitting on a shelf in fifty statehouses.

The precedent setting quietly underneath the penalty was always the real danger here, because a government that wins the power to decide which days you may drive a car you have paid for in full has won a power it can widen later at its leisure, through an amendment here and an enforcement memo there, long after the reporters have wandered off to the next thing. That is the ground worth holding now, while the cement is still wet and a few loud keepers can still leave a bootprint in it.