Sometimes little places give birth to big ideas.

The little place that brings this to mind is Arlington, Va. Known by most of the country for being the home of the nation’s premier national cemetery, a burial place for heroes and presidents, a bunch of other famous people and at least a handful of people whose names we don’t know, it is neither city nor town.

 

Arlington is, in fact, a county – the smallest self-governing county in the United States at 26 square miles. For comparison, Santa Barbara county is a somewhat chunkier 3,789 square miles.

So, what’s the special idea that Arlington begat? It chartered a new taxicab company.

For many years, Arlington had two cab companies – Yellow Cab and Red Top Cab – and that seemed so perfect a number for a county of that size that there was tacit agreement that the government wouldn’t permit another company to muscle its way in. After all, too much competition can be a bad thing if it proves fatal to one of the existing players. So, for several decades, would-be new taxi operators found the gates barred in Arlington. Until last year.

That’s when investors brought forward a novel idea that spun the county government around: they proposed to create a new company with a fleet made up entirely of hybrid automobiles, cars that ran part of the time on electricity. The thought of passengers being whizzed from door to door without the attendant pollution created by conventionally-powered vehicles was simply irresistible, so the investors got their charter.

 

The logic was pretty simple: hybrids are better for the environment than gas-guzzlers, and environmentally-conscious Arlingtonians were likely to call the green cabs first, which would force the other cab companies to begin retiring their fleets of full-size sedans and replacing them with – more hybrids. Eventually, the thinking went, the existing cab companies also would have all-hybrid fleets as well, and the world would be a better place.

Economics – that’s what we’re talking about here – actually works that way. Consumers make choices that reshape the competitive landscape.

 

What makes it a big idea is that it has all kinds of applications beyond the Potomac River, which defines Arlington’s northern and eastern boundaries.

Unfortunately, the folks just across that river at the headquarters of the Environmental Protection Agency don’t get that. They’re still tied to the protection model, the one where competition is forbidden in an attempt to ensure the survival of the existing businesses.

The EPA took its stand when it denied a request put forward by the state of California for a waiver of EPA regulations. The waiver would have permitted California to implement its own law to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by motor vehicles. California’s law is stricter than the comparable federal law, and the EPA acted to preserve the supremacy of the federal law, apparently against the advice of its own scientific and legal experts.

 

Why would EPA do that? Because a surprisingly high percentage of automobiles sold in this country are bought by Californians, and allowing California to set stricter rules would leave the American automobile industry in a quandary. The question for Detroit would be: do we write off all of our California business, which represents nearly a quarter of all the cars sold in the country? Do we build cars for California and other cars for everybody else, which would be, eventually, a public relations nightmare? Or do we build all of our cars to California standards?

Two things happened on Jan. 2 related to this: the state sued the EPA in the 9th Circuit, which is notoriously left-leaning and probably not very sympathetic to EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson or anybody else in the Bush administration. And California’s Democratic senior U.S. Senator, Dianne Feinstein, acting as chairman of a Senate subcommittee, demanded that the EPA’s inspector general investigate his own agency’s chief and the way he arrived at the decision to refuse California’s request.

 

Without getting into the hazy politics of that swampland between Maryland and Virginia, we think it’s high time somebody called on those self-important back-room wheeler-dealers to put their money where their mouths are. They’re the ones who keep talking about letting things sort themselves out in the marketplace. Well, why not do that? Give California an opportunity to demonstrate whether, if it leads the campaign for clean air, the rest of the country will follow.

Maybe they won’t. But if they do, wouldn’t this be a better place? Isn’t it possible that little Arlington had a big idea, after all?

 

That’ll be 2 cents, please.