IT WAS on Thursday that my wife mentioned that we have to take our car for its annual safety inspection soon; the current inspection sticker expires at the end of the month. It was also on Thursday that the New Hampshire House of Representatives voted handily to scrap mandatory yearly inspections for car- and truck owners north of the Massachusetts border. The vote, long overdue, was 212-143; the bill now goes to the Senate.
"New Hampshire is one of a dwindling number of states that requires an annual safety inspection, which makes New Hampshire's law one of the most burdensome in the country," writes Andrew Cline, the president of the Josiah Bartlett Center for Public Policy in Concord. In at least 13 states, no regular safety or emissions inspections are required at all, while in most other states inspections are required only every other year, or only for older cars. Only in the remaining 13 states — Massachusetts is one of them, alas — are drivers required every year to pay for the privilege of bringing their vehicles in for a generally pointless safety and/or emissions inspection.
I use the word "pointless" advisedly. There is very little data to suggest that annual inspection mandates keep roads safe or the environment clean.
When New Jersey in 2010 abolished its annual inspection requirement for most vehicles, state officials said their decision was driven by the realization that they could no longer rationalize the cost and hassle of maintaining it.
 The annual auto inspection mandate serves mainly to transfer dollars from motorists to service stations, like this one in Lexington. |
"If we're going to invest millions of taxpayer dollars year after year in a program, then it is essential that we be able to justify the expense and effectiveness of said program," said Raymond Martinez, who was then the head of New Jersey's Motor Vehicle Commission. "With a lack of conclusive data, and the current fiscal crisis, we cannot justify this expense."
As Cline noted, when researchers reviewed New Jersey's decision several years later, the data confirmed it was the right choice. According to a 2018 study published in Contemporary Economic Policy, a peer-reviewed academic journal, "discontinuing the law resulted in no significant increase in either fatalities due to car failure or the percentage of accidents due to car failure." The researchers drew the logical conclusion: "Vehicle safety inspections do not represent an efficient use of government funds, and do not appear to have any significantly mitigating effect on the role of car failure in traffic accidents."
The money siphoned away from motorists to pay for these inspections isn't trivial. In Massachusetts, for example, there are roughly 5 million vehicles on the roads. At $35 per inspection, that comes to about $175 million paid by motorists each year. And for what?
It would be one thing if cars routinely failed their safety checks, or if data showed that annual inspections made highways less dangerous or the air less foul. But cars and trucks in the 21st century are vastly safer and cleaner than they were when inspections were first required many decades ago. They are far less likely to break down or to emit dirty fumes. "The massive advances in automobile reliability and safety have rendered state safety inspections difficult to justify," Cline writes. "The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration lists vehicles as the critical factor in just 2 percent of motor vehicle accidents." Driver error — not faulty vehicles — accounts for nearly all crashes.
A 2015 report by the Government Accountability Office similarly observed that while state officials are often quick to insist that inspection mandates enhance vehicle safety, the actual benefits and costs of such programs are difficult to pin down. "There is little recent empirical research," the GAO concluded, "on the relationship between vehicle safety inspection programs and whether these programs reduce crash rates. What is available has generally been unable to establish any causal relationship."
In Massachusetts, about 96 percent of cars pass their annual inspection. There is no legitimate reason to keep forcing drivers to fork over scores of millions of dollars each year, only to be told in nearly every case that their cars are fine. That money isn't purifying the air or keeping vehicles safe. It is merely enriching the state and providing income to garages. New Hampshire lawmakers seem finally to have figured out that scrapping annual auto inspections won't make the Granite State's roads any more dangerous. What would it take for Bay State lawmakers to figure out the same thing?
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Bill Buckley, Blackford Oakes . . . and me
William F. Buckley Jr., was born on Nov. 24, 1925, and the US Postal Service will commemorate the centennial of his birth by issuing a "Forever" postage stamp in his honor this year. The USPS made the announcement on Thursday:
One of the most influential public intellectuals in modern U.S. history, William F. Buckley Jr. (1925–2008) defined the conservative movement of the mid-20th century and was one of its most recognizable spokesmen. Author of more than 50 books, Buckley founded National Review, one of the nation's leading conservative publications, and hosted the Emmy Award-winning public affairs television program "Firing Line" for more than 30 years. Original art by Dale Stephanos features a portrait of Buckley, created by hand with graphite and charcoal on hot-press watercolor paper, then refined digitally. Greg Breeding, an art director for USPS, designed the stamp.
I first discovered Buckley's work when I was a 17-year-old college sophomore. Somehow I had come across an issue of National Review and was soon hooked. The magazine had a powerful influence on my ideological understanding of the world; over time it helped shape my conservative values and develop my political vocabulary. Decades later, I can still recall with pleasure and gratitude the experience of encountering words and arguments that gave shape and coherence to my own inchoate political beliefs. The importance of individual freedom, the dangers of a too-powerful government, the blessings of a free market, the imperative of fighting communism, the indispensability of faith — these were themes I encountered again and again in the pages of NR in general, and Buckley's columns and essays in particular.
 The US Postal Service will mark the centennial of William F. Buckley Jr., the journalist, commentator, broadcaster, and novelist who left his stamp on American conservatism. |
"But it wasn't only the magazine's political content that made it so invaluable," I once wrote. "No less wonderful was its style. National Review was feisty, smart, playful, elegant — just like its editor, whose contributions were the highlight of nearly every issue."
Reading Buckley's prose with a dictionary at my side, I acquired a great collection of out-of-town words: asymptotic, ineluctable, synecdoche, eristic. Even after all these years, I recall names and references that could have appeared nowhere else, from the National Committee to Horsewhip Drew Pearson — Buckley's idea of the right way to rein in an egregious columnist — to "the sainted junior senator from New York," the standard NR reference to Buckley's older brother James, who was elected to the US Senate from New York in 1970.
Long before Rush Limbaugh appeared on the scene, Buckley had mastered the art of witty immodesty. ("I don't stoop to conquer. I merely conquer.") Asked once why Robert Kennedy refused to appear on "Firing Line," he replied: "Why does baloney reject the meat grinder?" Humor was as much a Buckley/National Review trademark as erudition. "The attempted assassination of Sukarno last week had all the earmarks of a CIA operation," began one editorial comment. "Everyone in the room was killed except Sukarno."
I recall meeting Buckley only once. He had come out with a new book — I think it was one of his essay collections, "Execution Eve" — and as part of a book tour was making an appearance to sign autographs at a Washington, D.C., department store. I saved up enough to buy the book — a significant investment for me in those days — and shyly presented the book for his signature. The whole encounter couldn't have lasted more than 45 seconds and my only lasting physical impression was of Buckley's yellowing teeth and skinny tie.
In the years that followed I would go on to buy and read quite a few of Buckley's books — not only his collections of columns, but his famous debut book about creeping socialism and atheism at Yale, his account of his 1965 campaign for mayor of New York City, his chronicles of cruising across the ocean in a sailboat, the lyrical memoir of his friendship with Ronald Reagan, and a narrative of his religious life. An uproarious volume, drawn from hundreds of interactions he had over 40 years with the readers of National Review, bore the inimitable title, "Cancel Your Own Goddam Subscription."
But perhaps best of all were the 11 Blackford Oakes spy novels that Buckley published between 1976 and 2005. Oakes, the protagonist of the novels, is a CIA officer (as Buckley himself had once been, briefly) and his fictional missions involve him in some of the most precarious crises of the Cold War.
Buckley was 50 when he first took a stab at writing fiction. What prompted it was a lunchtime conversation with his editor at Doubleday, Samuel Vaughan. The two men were chatting about fiction and Vaughan asked: "Why don't you try writing a novel?" As Buckley later recalled, his response was something like: "Sam, why don't you try playing a trumpet concerto?"
But the seed, once planted, quickly germinated. "Saving the Queen," Buckley's first novel, landed on the best-seller list a week before its official publication date and stayed there for three months. I read it soon after it came out. In addition to everything else I liked about the Blackford Oakes character — his fresh American self-confidence, his "startling" good looks, his thoroughgoing patriotism, his passionate hatred of communist tyranny — I was delighted by his origin. Oakes, like me, was a native Ohioan.
A passage in "Saving the Queen" gives the hero's date and place of birth as Dec. 7, 1925, in Yellow Springs, Ohio, a town in the southwest part of the state. The Ohio connection has no relevance to the plot, but I was tickled to see it.
When the third book in the series, "Who's On First," appeared in 1980, I was again tickled to see Blackford Oakes identified as a Buckeye. But I was puzzled, too. Once more there was a passing reference to his birth. Yet while the date was unchanged, Oakes's birthplace was listed as Akron — an Ohio city 180 miles from Yellow Springs, near the state's northeastern corner.
On the theory that even Homer sometimes nods, I decided the author must have goofed and that I would tell him so. In a (very courteous) letter to Buckley at his National Review office, I expressed my enjoyment of his spy novels and called his attention to the inconsistency. A few weeks later, a once-sentence reply arrived in the mail.
"Dear Mr. Jacoby," he wrote. "I shall have to clear up the discrepancy in the next novel." His brief letter was signed in red ink. "Yours cordially, Wm. F. Buckley Jr."
His next novel appeared two years later. In "Marco Polo, If You Can," Blackford Oakes is shot down over Soviet territory while piloting a U-2 spy plane along the Sino-Soviet border. (Shades of the real-life CIA pilot Gary Powers.) The story was great, but as I read it I was watching for one detail in particular. How would Buckley finesse the question of Oakes's birthplace?
And there it was, on Page 17. In one scene, Oakes supplies an interviewer with an abbreviated resume that begins:
Blackford OAKES. Born Toledo, Ohio, December 7, 1925. Schooling: Scarsdale, N.Y., HS. Greyburn Academy, England (one term). Yale, B.A., 1951, mechanical engineering . . .
Let me save you the trouble of looking at a map: Toledo is in the northwestern corner of Ohio, roughly equidistant from Yellow Springs and Akron and about as far one can get from either while still remaining within the state's borders. Far from clearing up the confusion over Blackford Oakes's birthplace, Buckley had compounded it! Had he goofed yet again? Had he forgotten the letter from his young fan pointing out the mismatch?
No — I decided that it was deliberate. Buckley had purposely expanded the discrepancy for the fun of it! It was an inside joke, a wink from the author to the one reader he knew would catch it. That, at any rate, has always been my theory — a theory I've always been careful never to confirm.
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What I Wrote Then
25 years ago on the op-ed page
From "Big money for the Big Dig," March 13, 2000:
There is no putting a shine on the news about the Big Dig's latest cost overrun. The most expensive public works project in America will come in, it is now estimated, at $12.2 billion.
Everyone always knew it would cost a king's ransom to build an eight-lane underground highway through the middle of downtown Boston. But the price tag is now 13 percent higher than the $10.8 billion budget state officials going back to 1997 had sworn was chiseled in granite. It is 17 percent higher than the $10.4 billion budget they were swearing to in 1996.
And 58 percent higher than the $7.7 billion budget they were swearing to in 1994.
And 91 percent higher than the $6.4 billion budget they were sure of in 1993.
And 110 percent higher than the $5.8 billion budget they were comfortable with in 1992.
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The Last Line
"'I must write a letter to the papers,' he said. 'Ireland is lost.'" — Seamas O'Kelly, "The Rector," from Waysiders: Stories of Connacht (1917)
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Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe.
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