Say you are driving 78 mph on the Capital Beltway and a state trooper
tickets you for "reckless driving — speeding 20 mph over." You will
probably be fined $200 by the judge. But then you will receive a new,
additional $1,050 fine from the Old Dominion, payable in three
convenient installments. So convenient that you must pay the first one
immediately, at the courthouse.
Coming to Virginia, July 1. Imagine all the people braking as they cross the Potomac coming from Maryland. The argument against, of course, is simply that traffic cannot work at 55 mph and this puts too much discretion into the hands of police. Or will some poor offenders simply flee and set off a police chase? (If you can’t pay the fine you lose your license.) The goal of the fines is to fund state-level public works and perhaps the precedent is not ideal either.
Addendum: Larry Ribstien piles on.
What’s so wrong with revenue raising through fines? Better than – say – income taxes.
Glad I dont live in that state. There is nothing wrong with especially high sin taxes of this nature as long as we dont have to pay the rest of the litany. A 1200 dollar speeding fine on top of all of the other taxes that Virginia residents have to pay is probably unconstitutional.
If you really want to bring down this terrible idea, just start a campaign to get people to pay their fine in pennies.
Make it progressive.Tall ,rich ,pretty,and libertarians should pay more.
We have something similar to this in NY state – six points in 18 months and the state fines you an additional $300 over 3 years. It’s effectively a tax on bad driving. Sufficiently few people are aware of it, however, that it doesn’t seem to be changing driver behavior. I know several people who’ve been hit with it and it’s come as a complete surprise.
Notice that according to the state, it’s not a “fine” – rather, it’s a “variable registration fee”. They’ve also noticed that “discounts some of the time” sound better then “increases some of the time” – it’s all in how it’s framed:
‘Michael S. Davis, a veteran Fairfax defense attorney, said he plans to file a legal challenge to the fees the first time he encounters them. “If somebody from out of state does not have to pay the same price,” Davis said, “I think there’s clearly an equal-protection issue” under the U.S. Constitution.
Albo said he would agree with that view if the fee were imposed as criminal punishment. “But it’s not,” he said. “It’s a variable registration fee based on the lousiness of your record. We’re giving people with good driving records a reduction in their fee. And we can’t charge a registration fee on people from New York flying through Virginia.”‘
Is this really so bad? If this causes traffic fatalities to fall, then it’s forcing the driver’s to internalize their own externalizes to other drivers. So long as drivers can read, and signs are posted, then they should have plenty of time to adjust their speeds before hitting these premium ticket areas.
Isn’t this the sort of thing that leads people to conclude that the law is an ass? The law in general
that is. A possibly significant externality that perhaps should be taken into account. In Australia
monetary fines for speeding are often doubled during periods such as the Christmas holidays but these are
times when there are more drivers on the road and speeding does become more dangerous, so this law does
not really resemble an ass. Significant efforts are made to inform people of when the increased fines are
in effect.
The scandinavian system of scaling traffic fines to income sounds like an excellent idea.
I think scaling fines is more to do with ensuring the rich and poor are equally deterred from speeding
and has little to do with how much damage one can cause, otherwise fines would probably be based upon how
much your vehicle weighs.
“otherwise fines would probably be based upon how
much your vehicle weighs.”
Here’s a novel idea, sparky. How about if the fines are based on violating the law and then we let the supreme court worry about whether the law is constitutional or not in the first place.
If the law discrimates between poor and rich, then we are not equal under the law – the only place we should be equal. And don’t give me the tired old excuse that in handing out sentences, judges are harder on the poor (if you can find actual proof of that). Even if that were true, rogue judges are one thing, institutionalizing inequality by encoding it in law is quite another.
If you are going to be more heavily fined for money wealth, then you will seek non-money wealth (think “privilages” in Soviet Russia). If government increases the penalty on wealth, people will have no incentive to create it. Then what will our saintly politicians in government have to steal?
“This is one reason that the demonization of taxes can lead to idiotic results.”
Sure. Let’s not demonize taxes. Let’s make them 100% for everybody. Let’s let government prioritize our ends for us instead of letting individuals choose for themselves. The underlying assumption you’re alluding to, of course, is that government has the moral right to arbitrarily confiscate the fruits of people’s productive labour and that there is no limit to how much they can confiscate to reach its chosen end.
We’ve tried that before. You may not have noticed, but it didn’t work out very well.
IMO, the bigger issue is about using traffic laws as revenue sources. That’s just a terrible idea, even though it’s so entrenched in the US that it’s hard to imagine getting rid of it. Use the fine money to fund some good cause very far away from the local cops, like feeding starving Ethiopians or starving postdocs working on cancer genetics or something, and the speed limits will likely be set and enforced based on public safety, not based on revenue requirements.
I bet the the fine revenue is nothing compared to the revenue they’ll take in from taxes on the increased fuel consumption.
I actually know well (and at one point worked with) one of the guys who thought up this plan initially; it made much more sense in its initial form.
The initial plan was not focused on revenue, but on traffic flow–and actually made some sense. It imposed high fees on reckless driving in congested areas specifically. The thinking was that an accident in the Beltway/I-95 corridor ties up traffic for hours, and fines for the kind of recklessness that frequently causes accidents are a reasonable way of deterring accident-causing behaviour.
SamChevre,
that actually makes sense to me. The concept is that high negative consequences will act as a deterrent, no?
What I wonder is if this new fine doesn’t reduce the number of accidents, will the state abandon it? Government usually has the luxury of inefficiency that private individuals just can’t afford. Are there any provisions for killing the plan if it doesn’t work?
methinks, why is a fine scaled on income level not equal? Charging poor people the same dollar amount as the rich takes a much larger percentage of their income, and thus impacts them much more significantly. It’s not clear to me that the constant dollar amount fine is necessarily more equal than a fine of, say, 0.1% of income for reckless driving. The impact of the 0.1% fine on behavior is arguably more equal across income levels than that of a constant $100 fine.
99pa and methinks:
If the purpose is to reduce the impacts of speeding, then you’re wrong. The wealthy person who speeds is more likely to be able to pay damages if he hurts someone, than a poor person would be. That is, the “recovery rate” for torts by rich drivers is higher than that of poor drivers. So yes, you need less of a fine to deter the more, but, unfortunately, recklessness by the poor is more costly.
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What kind of police state are we creating? The new bad driver
fees are bad idea. Here is the problem: police do not always tell the
truth. They have incentive to stretch the truth regarding traffic
violations and they do. In VA I have have had two occassions when traffic
cops have lied. And I am on record in Fairfax County with a complaint
against one officer Johson in one such incident. If you go to court you
can not win. The judge ALWAYS believes the cops. So when I get a rare fine
I just pay it and move on. However, now you have placed taxing authority
in the hands of the cops! Does it seem strange that NO cops ever get
traffic tickets? Your new taxing authority is not even handed. The
reckless driving charge is subjective and the fee is over $1000. Now your local
cop can hand out $1000 fees at will.
If you they money for the traffic mess that is Northern VA then muster the
political will to raise taxes. When they become too high (fast
approaching) we can move out of state. Or how about taxing the developers
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