Stick a fork in me

... for better or worse, I am done!

Mini-Crusade

One day while my wife was driving me to the gym she asked (randomly) "Do you think San Francisco has the most mini coopers of any city?" My thoughts were in this order:

1) What! and Why? Does this even matter?

2) Why would she think that I was familiar with vehicle registrations from county to county, or that I could even begin to answer?

3) Is this something that needs to occupy my time?


Well we were 6 blocks from the gym where after asking the question I sleepily said "I have no idea". Then we counted 6 mini coopers. One on each block. Since then I have begun counting mini coopers on every trip I take. I also count how many blocks I go and figure out my cooper/block ratio. I am totally obsessed, this is like the slug bug game from my childhood but even worse (cause I don't get to hit my little brother).

This has led me to search the dark recesses of the CA DMV website in an attempt to assuage my OCD. If I knew the number of coopers divided by the population on a county by county basis then I could stop all this counting. But alas all that I could find was a very basic statistic sheet, there are 22,086,593 registered automobiles in CA. BUT HOW MANY ARE COOPERS, AND WHERE ARE THEY!!!!!@!!??!?

Also total registered vehicles in CA is 33,539,486. According to the census there are 36,457,549 people in CA, and 26.1% are under 18. Now I know it is inaccurate but let's assume equal distribution, which means that 23.2% are <16 years old. This means that there are 27,999,397 people in CA that are old enough to drive/own a car. Which means that CA has 1.2 cars per driver. This blows my mind. I know that some people (my folks) have more cars than they can drive, but I thought there would be a lot more single car households (like mine) that would offset this number. CA has more cars than we can possibly drive. Sad.