THE RIGHT THING: A LITTLE TOO MUCH INTERSTATE COMMERCE

Perhaps I'm not the ideal person to address this week's topic, which concerns automobiles. I live in a city. My wife and I own only one car, which she primarily uses to get to work. I rely on public transportation as often as possible.

Partly our choice to own only one car stems from the recognition that, as a city dweller who lives three blocks from a subway stop, I have other methods of transportation available. But another big reason is that the insurance premiums for my neighborhood are among the priciest in the city. I'd rather not pay such a steep price for a car that will sit idle most of the time.

When our kids were younger and we did own two cars, though, we paid those hefty insurance bills. It never crossed our minds to register the cars in some other town or state where one of our relatives happened to live so that we could cut our insurance premiums.

For one thing, it would have been illegal to misrepresent where we lived simply to get a lower insurance rate. For another, this is the neighborhood in which we chose to live, all its benefits and all its drawbacks included.

Most often the decision to play fast and loose with vehicle registration in order to garner lower insurance rates doesn't require such active deceit. Instead drivers who move into a new neighborhood with higher insurance rates choose to do nothing, rather than change their registration and pay higher premiums.

That's the case with a reader who moved from rural Tennessee to San Francisco, where the insurance rates are much higher. She continued to register her car in Tennessee.

"I believed that, as long as the car was registered in the United States, that it was fine," she writes.

A co-worker took issue, however, after my reader boasted that her premiums were less than a tenth of what he was paying for a similar car that he'd registered in San Francisco.

"He told me that my actions were patently illegal and unethical," she writes.

My reader has since left California, but she continues to be bothered by the accusation, which she believes was made simply because her co-worker was miffed that she'd found a way to pay less.

"Was registering my car out of state really unethical?" she asks.

In a word, yes. Her co-worker wins this fight hands down. In acting as she did, my reader cheated other San Franciscans who were paying their fair share.

What's more, she was breaking the law: In California, once she got a job, she was required to register her vehicle there within 20 days.

Laws vary from state to state as to how long you have to register your vehicle after arriving, but once you start living someplace you're obligated to register your car there. If you don't, you're subject to hefty fines if you're caught. And, if you should have an accident, you might have difficulty collecting from your insurance company. Furthermore, since all state departments of motor vehicles post their rules about switching registration online, there's no excuse for ignorance. (50 State DMV Links & Links to Canadian DMV Sites)

The urge to save money by taking advantage of what looks like a loophole is understandable, but the right thing for my reader to do was, and is, to register her car where she lives. Anything short of that is a lie.

She would have been wise to research the cost of owning a vehicle in San Francisco before moving there. If she couldn't afford it, she should have considered leaving the car home and using public transportation instead.