DETROIT—Confirming what millions of drivers had long suspected while staring at a $1,400 repair estimate, a coalition of the nation's largest automakers admitted Thursday that it has secretly raised every curb in America by half an inch per year since 1987, "compounding monthly," in a coordinated effort to sell more rims.
"Honestly, we thought someone would notice around 1994," said Bradley Voss, Chief Revenue Officer of the Allied Motor Consortium, speaking from a podium reached by a flight of stairs. "Then the curb outside our headquarters passed four feet and nobody said a word. People just started parking very, very slowly. That's when we knew we could keep going."
According to internal documents, the program, code-named Operation Tall Boy, began when executives noticed rim sales "flattening" and determined it was cheaper to lift four million miles of concrete than to build a better wheel. Thanks to the compounding schedule, the average American curb now stands 11 feet tall. Commuters in Phoenix reach the sidewalk by rope. Several curbs in downtown Cleveland have been formally reclassified as cliffs.
"I parallel parked once," said Denise Kowalczyk, 44, of Toledo, from the bottom of her own driveway. "Once." Kowalczyk's curb-height credit score fell 212 points after her minivan "made contact" in 2019, and she is now legally barred from renting a ground-floor apartment.
Fallout was swift. The newly formed Federal Bureau of Curb Integrity announced that 9,000 drones will measure every curb in the nation hourly and report any citizen caught "looking at a curb with intent to lower it." Rim insurance became mandatory at midnight, with premiums based on the "emotional height" of your street. In Sacramento, a fourth-grade class took a field trip to the top of a curb and saw the road for the first time. Three children have asked to stay.
"People call it a scandal. I call it a feature," said Dr. Lyle Brandt, Professor of Curb Studies at the Institute for Automotive Concrete, gesturing at a graph that continued off the slide. "A tall curb is a confident curb. Americans want their sidewalks the way they want their leaders: elevated, unreachable, and watching them at all times."
Rim manufacturers welcomed the disclosure. RimCo Global reported record quarterly earnings and unveiled the Sacrificial Rim, a wheel sold pre-scratched "to save you the trip."
Still, the consortium insists the program is winding down. Officials said all curbs will be frozen at their current heights by 2031, following one final nine-foot "correction."
At press time, automakers confirmed that parking spaces have been shrinking a quarter inch per year since 1991, "for doors."
Comments
Post a Comment