There’s a reform of traffic laws where I live. A major talking point is that the penalties for offences will follow a scaling system, where if you keep committing them, the penalty increases. Penalties scale based on the severity of the crime. For example, parking on an illegal spot where you block public transport will net you a 350€ fine plus confiscation of your license for 70 days. Meanwhile, driving with over 1.1 g/l of alcohol in your blood will result in a 1200€ fine, losing your license for 180 days, plus 2 months to 5 years of prison time. If you get caught for that a second time, you lose your license for 7 years, and 10 more years if you do it a third time.
Some listed offences:
-
Not respecting a stop sign
-
Driving 50km/h over the limit
-
Parking on a spot reserved for people with special needs
-
Driving on a bus lane
-
Using your phone while driving
-
Driving under the influence (higher BAC leads to a higher fine)
-
Driving without a seat belt (cars) or helmet (motorcycles)
Also, the default speed limit in residential areas will decrease to 30 km/h from 50 km/h, except in roads with at least two lanes per direction (or two lanes for one-way streets).
Yesterday, while walking, I saw a poster from an anarchist group bashing these reforms, saying that the new traffic laws are only focused on penalties and that the police will only enforce them on poor people. I will also quote one of their closing statements: “it’s true that if the traffic laws were to be enforced for even some hours, cities would ‘freeze’”
I hadn’t given much thought to the changes to the laws, with my general idea being that they were a good change, but the poster got me thinking. Of course, penalties like these will disproportionately target poor people. Also, as leftists, we should be weary of excessively penalizing some crimes, focusing on the root cause instead. Year-long sentences for stealing food will not decrease similar thefts, but feeding people will.
However, there are no material conditions that cause someone to ignore a stop sign, scroll TikTok while waiting for the traffic lights, speak on the phone while driving or driving without a seat belt. At best you can make contrived arguments about people being on a rush to get to their jobs, but that’s what it is; a contrived argument that probably applies to less than 1% of the offenses.
Drunk driving is also a big issue. I acknowledge that some people feel forced to do it because of the lack of good nightly public transport. However, no one is forcing them to drink over the limit and drive back, or stay up so late that they can’t catch public transport on their way home, or not have a designated driver. Is wanting to have fun in a specific way a valid argument for risking your life, and worse, risking the life of other innocent bystanders?
Finally, their closing statement makes them sound like people that break traffic laws because “they know better” or “it’s better this way” even when it’s not and they’re excessively selfish. It feels weird to side with the increased penalties and surveillance, but I’ve come to believe it is a broken clock moment.
What do you think?
“Put The Peddle to The metal and LET ER BELLOW”
Bold of you to assume that we should have cars.
I have a few opinions as a stupid USA dweller.
- People in this country treat traffic laws like suggestions and a shocking number of road users constantly drive distracted and/or drunk. As a result we have something like 10,000 deaths a year from vehicle accidents. That number used to be lower but it has gone back up as smartphone use has increased.
- Most of these deaths would be preventable if we didn’t live in such a sick, selfish culture. We collectively just accept that it happens because it would be inconvenient to fix. Things like mandating more driver training or physically safer road design or building robust public transit just…do not happen for quite a few reasons.
- I think traffic enforcement shouldn’t be done by police because they can’t be trusted to not assault or kill people
- I think that the punishment for minor road infractions should be a timeout. You ran a stop sign? You get to sit in timeout for a while. This would piss off both the poor and the rich equally.
edit: on that note, 5: stop signs are stupid and bad and almost all of them should be replaced by roundabouts.
You would need to demolish half of every city in europe in order to replace every stop sign with roundabouts. But for places close to the entrances to the city, plus large interchanges they’re great.
a) fines that do not scale with at least income if not net wealth are only really punishing for the poor and a mere nuisance for the rich
b) poor people are much more likely to be stopped and charged by police than rich and influential people; poor people also have to drive themselves more as they can’t afford to have others do the driving for them
c) when a charge goes to court only the well off can really engage in a legal battle; poor people have neither the means nor the time to engage with the justice system, so they very often end up not even fighting the charges
Unless you solve these issues first no amount of reform is going to fix the underlying problem.
fines that do not scale with at least income if not net wealth are only really punishing for the poor and a mere nuisance for the rich
“you can’t park there, it’s on a sidewalk!”
“yes i can, it just costs 200 dollars”
I would argue that even if they do scale with income, if I have 2 billion dollars 10% if my total worth would hardly be noticable. while if I have 200 that could still cripple me.
Good point.
Cars reproduce neoliberal subjectivism. People roll through stop signs and answer texts because they don’t give a shit about anyone outside their car, it’s a little psychopath bubble where all the things on the outside stop mattering and it’s just you as an individual and your own individual choices.
Fuck cars.
Trains, Bikes, Feet. Cars should only be driven by highly trained professionals to help disabled people, and elderly people get around. The reason car accidents happen is because a lot of people simply shouldnt be driving. I’m one of them. I suck at driving but dont have a choice if i want to function in society. You ever seen those people who drive massive buses for a living, and drive those massive things around without breaking a sweat? We’d basically have 75% less accidents if the only people driving were legitimately good at it.
Where I live, people driving big busses are the #1 assholes causing traffic problems on the street. They treat the road like might makes right and bully people around constantly. Maybe it’s regional, but give an asshole a bus, and he’s just an asshole with a bus.
There can be issues if the proper regulation isnt used for sure. Like professional drivers can be poorly trained, or over worked and sleep deprived. But if someone is properly trained and has no impairments they do drive much safer in general.
I think we should lessen the number of cars by 90%
I’m in awe of how selfish and stupid people act in their cars on nearly a daily basis.
That said, harsher penalties only work in the way we want them to when criminal justice is reformed, same with increased controls.
One idea for fines is to set the penalty at a multiple of daily wages, thereby much reducing the load on the poorest among us while also becoming somewhat of a check against rich people doing what they want because the fine means nothing to them. Some countries already do this.
Rich people don’t have wages though
Yes of course. A portion of wealth, and maybe a community service element could work as well.
I can easily afford to pay a lawyer out of pocket to beat traffic charges for a much higher cost than the fees effectively making me immune to most of the traffic laws even if the financial penalty is higher. Im currently doing this in real life.
At my first hearing I watched a girl with the same charges plead guilty with no public defender and on the spot they put her on probation with a suspended license.
Me and my lawyer used delaying tactics to get out of court until later when we could come back after tilting the board more in our favor. My lawyer expects none of the charges to stick on technicalities that most people could use if they could better navigate the court system.
I don’t know how it works in your country but here in America unless you fix the legal system that favors the rich and punishes the poor enhanced penalties are going to beat down the working class and while the rich can still mostly ignore them
There’s a reform of traffic laws where I live. A major talking point is that the penalties for offences will follow a scaling system, where if you keep committing them, the penalty increases. Penalties scale based on the severity of the crime. For example, parking on an illegal spot where you block public transport will net you a 350€ fine plus confiscation of your license for 70 days. Meanwhile, driving with over 1.1 g/l of alcohol in your blood will result in a 1200€ fine, losing your license for 180 days, plus 2 months to 5 years of prison time. If you get caught for that a second time, you lose your license for 7 years, and 10 more years if you do it a third time.
Some listed offences:
Not respecting a stop sign Driving 50km/h over the limit Parking on a spot reserved for people with special needs Driving on a bus lane Using your phone while driving Driving under the influence (higher BAC leads to a higher fine) Driving without a seat belt (cars) or helmet (motorcycles)That is some banal shit
Fr, reminds me of batshit laws passed in the US to deliberately give cops easy ways to fill quotas and lock up minorities.
What exactly is batshit about these laws?
Almost always, laws which punish people for “More” or “higher percentage” intoxication have always disproportionally been used to harass and punish minorities, case in point, war on drugs. To trust cops to handle this kind of judgement when pulling people over is asking for disaster.
Laws against drug posession and use target people that 99% of the times pose no harm to others. Drunk driving laws target people that can potentially harm, handicap or even kill innocents. This seems like an important distinction to me.
I concede that cops will probably disproportionately target minorities, but I doubt they need these laws specifically to impose their will or harass them.
“Higher intoxication” laws are necessary for DUI, imo. Is the severity of someone driving with 0.1 g/l over the limit the same with someone driving while scoring 1.2 g/l? It’s like scoffing at increased charges for murder vs assault.
One of the first things I always consider with a law, or potential law, is “how hard is this to enforce and what would be likely to occur in order to enforce it?” I learned it from abortion laws because it’s important for swaying people who are morally opposed to abortion, but can still see that laws against abortion directly harm women’s health overall.
With driving under the influence, my understanding is one method is setting up checkpoints. Considering how deadly serious the consequences of drunk driving can be for everyone on the road, this seems fair, provided there’s no racial profiling or the like going on.
Some of the rest of it I assume can be caught with cameras, like at certain stop signs. However, might be tricky depending on the kind of road and how it tends to be, and whether the offense is considered to be not stopping at all or also slowing and continuing. To be clear, I think in 99% of cases, the safe thing to do is always to stop completely as you are supposed to. There can be edge cases where there is no traffic anyway and the design of the road is such that slowing down a lot gives you plenty of time to check. I don’t condone driving based on what you personally think will be safe, but the point is that it edges onto difference of letter of the law vs. preventing harm and if this is enforced purely on letter of the law without any consideration of harm done or lack of harm done, that can be a problem.
The using your phone, I’m not sure how they’d catch that. Maybe with certain cameras? I don’t know. It is probably about on par with drunk driving in terms of danger to everyone on the road, but it may be hard to enforce unless someone gets in an accident and there is evidence they were on their phone.
I don’t want to go through all of them, but those are some thoughts. Another thing to consider is, what is the enforcement like, historically, where you live. Is there a history of racial profiling, for example? Or of poor people being targeted? Is that where these anarchists are coming from?
The other thing about poor vs. not, is not so much about who is targeted and whether it’s legit as it is, what the penalty means for them. A poor person loses a lot more from a fine, they lose a lot more if they lose their main means of getting around. A rich person can just take the fine and (if they are losing their license too) hire someone to drive them around. In this context, the road is arguably safer either way, if the offense was a danger to others, but the end result is class stratified. The rich person will not be much inconvenienced by it, but the poor person’s life could be made significantly worse by it.
