Off the Road
Columbia, Maryland, has a number of appealing features, but it also harbors a certain lack of spontaneity. The stores are clustered in the village centers, the gas stations are concealed by elaborate landscaping, bars are few and far between, and some areas resemble vast office parks, with homes appended. Yeah, I know -- I'm dissing it now that we no longer live there. There's still a lot about it that I like, or at least find interesting.
One anomaly is the presence of roadside vendors. In many parts of Columbia, including across from the Best Buy, you can purchase flowers and corn cobs from the back of a truck. These small-scale enterprises help preserve something of the organic, ye-olde-town-square feel which the original designers hoped to create, and which is suggested by some of the place names -- Hobbit's Glen, etcetera.
However, a county council member has decided that the vendors are a public nuisance. He is pushing a bill that would quash all commerce on public roads, on the grounds that "roads are for driving, not for conducting business or begging."
This strikes me as a egregious piece of legislation, the kind of thing that gives government a bad name, provides fodder for Republican hucksters, and helps undermine the idea of the public good. I mean, how much extra effort does it take to avoid crashing into a fruit stand when switching into a turn lane? Are back-of-the-truck melons really putting local (indoor) merchants out of business? If they can compete with omnipresent Giant Food, the Microsoft of groceries, they ought to be able to manage the small-timers.
Meanwhile, here in Laurel, where we live now, the council's slapped a surcharge on yard sales -- designed, they say, to combat a bunch of miscreants who were eking out a living selling used TVs and suchlike from their driveways.
9:38:06 PM 
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