Here’s an idea, since traffic enforcement is ostensibly about safety and not money :rolleyes: instead of giving the traffic fines to the court, why not put them in a interest bearing account that is distributed at the end of the year to all the drivers in the state who did not get any tickets? That way speeders are still punished, and safe drivers are rewarded!
Okay, but you’ll just end up spending it on taxes to make up for the budget shortfall in your local police department.
IMHO, “good drivers” are relatively few. The rest of us just haven’t gotten caught yet. Bluehairs driving 20 mph under the limit on a freeway will never get a ticket yet can be just as dangerous.
The rolleyes betray the truth. It is about money.
I’m all for this idea. 22 years of driving with no tickets or accidents.
cha ching
I think you would need to make law enforcement personnel exempt, i.e. they (and their immediate families) can’t participate in the safe driver rebate.
Wouldn’t the likely ‘windfall’ per non-ticketed-driver be pennies?
If you roll in administrative costs, we could end up sending in money.
I always thought one of the best ways to stick it to the man was for everyone to drive like they should. The revenue loss would be huge. They would need to devise a new solution to the random tax.
The logistics of this would be impossible. What about those that have a driver’s license but don’t drive? How do you split money between a weekend driver and a commuter? There’s no way to even know how much driving people do. All you know is if they have a driver’s license or not, and how may tickets and/or accidents they’ve received.
Add in everyone quitting smoking and I think the state government would collapse overnight.
Sigh.
It is about safety, whether you want to believe it or not. The concept is that if you are fined for breaking the law, you won’t do it again. Does it work? In most cases, yes. Is it abused? In some cases, yes.
It’s not about sticking it to the man. Nobody stops to think about the fact that if people drove obeying the traffic laws, we’d have less traffic jams and a helluva lot less than 50000 people a year dying on the streets in traffic accidents. But no, there’s always some asshole who thinks the speed limit (or stop sign or red light or whatever) laws don’t apply to him.
In what sense is it “random”? I never speed, and I’ve never gotten a ticket. Maybe I’m just lucky, but I suspect there’s at least a correlation between those two factors…
How about, instead of giving it directly to the safe drivers, we spend it on something that will benefit the safe drivers? Like road construction, road improvements, better police protection/traffic enforcement, etc.
What happens to the money now?
Pretty much as you described. Traffic fines go to the same budget pool as tax dollars. So, in a way, “safe drivers” already get paid in the form of various social services. Just like everyone else.
Safe drivers already get a discount on auto insurance. What more d’ya want?
This very much reminds me of an old story in National Lampoon - from back in the late '70s, if I’m not mistaken. ‘Baba Rum Raisin’ or one of the other made-up ‘Guest Columnists’ wrote a pretty compelling article stating that instead of paying people unemployment, we should make the unemployed pay for not having a job.
Seemed pretty straightforward to me at the time.
What’s that city somewhere in the environs of Cleveland,Ohio, Linndale(?) I think that has a stretch of highway about the length of a football field and apparently always has a traffic cop waiting to ticket. The city only has a few hundred people in it if I recall correctly.
I am of the opinion that any agency that has the power to levy fines (such as police) should not be able to keep or benefit from the fines in any direct or even somewhat strongly indirect way.
For example, cities should have any fines collected (like police tickets) added to the general funds of the federal government or some such.
Allowing a city to have the power to fine AND keep said fines is a conflict of interest.
The problem with this is that police departments can’t afford enforcement. Now, this might be good for you, but I’ve had 2 tickets in 35 years of driving, and I’d like to see a few more cops out on our freeways, if just to catch the 4 lane switching morons every so often. Pretty much the only ones I see are looking for carpool cheats, and that seems to be for keeping the speeds up to get the funding.
When I was on site council of our high school, we discussed the large amount of dangerous driving in the mornings (usually parents, not kids.) At the time I thought the police got the money, so I figured that more enforcement would be self-supporting. Since your preference is how it’s done in CA, it turns out the police couldn’t afford to keep students safer. They did send someone every so often, but they didn’t have the manpower to cover all the schools.
The main street of the little town I lived in in NJ was on the way to the interstate, and there was kind of a speed trap. I know plenty of people who got caught. A shame, but it did keep the speeds in front of the elementary school down to reasonable levels. Most of us living in town were all for this.