General Road and Highway Discussion

[ijmorlan]

I am all for the wide usage of traffic cams and photo radar. Money grab arguments are absurd. How can it be wrong to police, discourage, and identify and charge those who break the law?

If the law is written so as to be impractical or unreasonable to obey, then there is a problem.

For example, in some jurisdictions it is required to stop for 2s at a stop sign. This doesn’t add anything to safety if we assume the driver was already going to come to a near stop and look around thoroughly before proceeding; it’s just a way of making it crystal clear that the police are permitted to ticket perfectly safe behaviour.

Or if it is commonly accepted that the normal speed on a road is 120km/h, then it is unreasonable to ticket somebody for driving 120km/h unless there is something that sets their driving apart from the others on the road.

Or if the yellow time at a traffic light is timed to require people either to slam on their brakes or risk a red-light ticket, then we have a problem. I understand this has been a real problem in the USA, where corrupt local administrations have set signal timing and traffic cam configuration to maximize revenue rather than to achieve legitimate engineering goals.

Having said this, if the law is fundamentally legitimate, you are correct, and there shouldn’t even be a requirement to tell people when and where the automatic enforcement is operating — they are required to drive correctly everywhere, all the time. The suggestion that always comes up that the warning sign will cause people to slow down or whatever is frivolous because they’re supposed to be doing that anyway.

There is another consideration, which is that use of automatic or ubiquitous enforcement is a de facto (even though not de jure) change in the law. As a result, appropriate changes need to be made. For example, take red light running. An officer will use judgement and won’t be everywhere, so most red light running won’t be caught. As a result, the fine needs to be quite significant to act as any sort of deterrent. If however essentially every instance of running a red light will be caught, the fine doesn’t need to be anywhere near as high. Also, there should be some leeway for minor mistakes. Personally, I would go so far as to say that everybody should get one instance per year of entering the intersection in the second or two after the light has turned red for free — they would be sent a warning notice, but no penalty would be assessed (this wouldn’t apply to brazen red light runners, presumably, although even that wouldn’t be that bad because at one per year nobody could really plan to do much with their free strike).

And finally, returning to the revenue issue, the budget must not come to depend on traffic infraction revenue. The goal should be to minimize traffic infractions, not to make money from them. I’m not sure what the best approach here is, but definitely if the revenue is significant it should not become part of the general budget. If we had a user-pay policy for roads it might be OK to put the enforcement revenue in there. Then the idea would be that offenders would pay a greater share of the road cost.