Not in Your Front Yard (or your trunk)

While we are on the subject of Glendora, I wonder if anything happened at the recent city council meeting which considered making it illegal for RVs,"motor homes, campers, boats, trailers, planes and disabled vehicles" to park "in front of houses...on the curb, lawn or driveway." See Alison Hewitt's Pasadena Star story on how Glendora is getting all uppity these days.

Glendora, which is frequently called a "GOP stronghold," and whose residents, as you might remember, recently stomped the pathetic attempts of an out-of-state developer to gain land and build via an easily seen through initiative, faces numerous, more important development issues like all foothill cities. I'm not sure how many other foothill cities have anti-RV laws, but one hopes the city could solve such disputes without simply adding more regulations to the books.

Speaking of regulations, it was the tragic deaths of two Glendora kids that sparked the recent "anti-trunking" law which increased fines against riders in the trunks of cars. I'll allow that raising awareness of the dangers of "trunking" may have its merits, as I remember being involved in such nonsense in my high school days. Not long after we chased a friend into the trunk, we were scared half to death by a felony pullover involving several police cars full of cops, many of which began waving guns at us. Someone had called us in, reporting an apparent kidnapping. It took a while to sort things out, but they let us go scot free, no doubt figuring we'd learned our lesson.

CHP spokesman Tom Marshall said that with people dancing on top of moving cars, hanging out the windows and riding in trunks, laws that penalize them for riding outside of their seats do help.

"There is no vehicle code we can site them for for being incredibly stupid," he said. "So we use these instead."