Everything asserted in “free tour of minivan” is based on court cases such as this one.
The business of using the public highways for profit, earned by transporting persons and property for hire, has been definitely excluded from the category of private or personal rights arising from citizenship. Recent decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States have determined certain fundamental principles concerning the use of the highways. One is “that the primary use of the state highways is the use for private purposes; that no person is entitled to use the highways for gain as a matter of common right.” Hoover Motor Express Co. v. Fort, 167 Tenn. 628, 72 S.W. (2d) 1052, 1055. The statement and definition of the terms and conditions upon which a privilege, not a matter of common right, may be exercised is, we think, within the declared purpose of regulation and does not amount to prohibition. In such a case the prevention of an unauthorized exercise of the privilege is clearly implied in the statement of the purpose to regulate it.
The statute under consideration is a comprehensive regulation of the use of the state highway system by both common carriers and contract carriers. It is designed, as declared in section 21, to promote and preserve economically sound transportation, to regulate the burden of use to which the highways may be subjected, to protect the safety of the traveling public, and to protect the property of the state in the highways from unreasonable, improper, or excessive use.
State v. Harris, 168 Tenn. 159, 76 S.W.2d 324, 325 (1934)
Essential elements of ‘motor vehicle’— what ‘driver’s ed’ failed to tell you