What would be the equivalent for cellphone use? Because the biggest threat for me while biking is not drunk drivers but those texting and fiddling with their phones.
If you're caught cell-driving, you either pay a large fine, say $750, or you submit to a program that bans talking while moving faster than 5mph for the next two months. The cell carrier will monitor the ban and issue citations by SMS.
So if you opt into this program, and then you're driving down the road, start talking on the cell phone, and then 30 seconds later BANG! you get a text message: "That call was $75 payable to the city hall before the end of the day". Yeah, you can't talk on the bus and stuff, but that's the "punishment" part for ya.
It's worth a try, I think.
The trick with a $75 fine for texting while moving is passengers. If you're willing to ban texting entirely while moving though, using technology to assess small fines could work!
The key is to training new habit and making it stick, according to the article, is to make punishment moderate, certain, and immediate. We can't do that across the board due to the limitations of technology, legitimate use, privacy concerns, presumption of innocence and so on. But we sure can do that to those who broke the law, especially when they opt into it.
There are three options that can be used alone or together.
1) Technology solution. Put digital eyes around the area of the steering wheel or otherwise pointing at the driver. Report drivers that frequently use a phone while driving. We can trivially build a phone identifier for a car today, given the drastic improvements in recognition technology. We could also easily judge drivers by their poor attentiveness to the road. This approach will freak people out in regards to being nanny state invasive.
2) Community shaming, education programs. This was half the battle with getting people to use seat belts regularly.
3) Traditional police enforcement. Cops start pulling people over for it more frequently, and hitting them with on the spot $100, $200, $500 fines. Perhaps it increases with each offense within a certain amount of time. The problem here is, the radical majority of people will simply slip through the enforcement cracks and not be caught. It would also be open to easy abuse, cops stuffing the budget with lots of fines. People see seat belts as a life saving device for the most part, so voluntary compliance mostly worked, but I'd wager most people do not see their phone habits as potentially life threatening. That requires greater disincentives to reach the same compliance, or a vastly larger shaming & education project.