> Of all laws that one could choose to _not_ obey, the traffic laws are among the poorest choices.
I respectfully disagree. While I try to drive legally, as a pragmatic measure because I value my driving licence, I have less respect for traffic laws than just about any other kind.
Let me be very clear: I am all in favour of promoting safe and considerate driving, and I have nothing against punishing those who do drive dangerously or inconsiderately, including punishing them severely if this is proportionate to the likely consequences of their actions. I just don't feel that the kind of arbitrary, black-and-white laws that we have today are really helping that goal.
In my country, the speed limit on our fastest roads is 70mph. If you do 71mph, even on clear roads with a well maintained vehicle on Christmas morning, then technically you are a criminal. On the other hand, if you drive past a school at 29mph, in the wet, just as the kids are coming out at the end of the day, with parked cars obscuring your view everywhere, then you are unlikely to be prosecuted unless you actually hit someone, because you're under the 30mph limit. The idea that your driving might be considered dangerous (and this might reasonably be argued in court) if you're not breaking some arbitrary technical limit doesn't seem to occur to prosecutors, and the penalties for generic dangerous driving type offences are often laughable; you can get less penalty for killing someone through absurdly dangerous driving than you can for many much less serious crimes not involving the use of a car.
Similar problems apply with:
- banning hand-held mobile phones (yes, they're dangerous, but so are hands-free kits to almost the same degree),
- drunk driving (more than a certain blood alcohol threshold and you're dangerous enough to throw to the wolves, but just under and you're fine, even though people's tolerance varies greatly and someone slightly under might in practice be driving much worse than someone slightly over),
- mandatory bus/cycle lanes (so entering them even when you can see they are completely clear for a long distance is illegal, even if it's just to pass a vehicle in front waiting to turn the other way, and traffic is required by law to queue up behind the waiting vehicle instead),
- red lights for turns that don't cut across any other traffic (so you have to wait even in the middle of the night, on a completely clear junction),
- and, yes, complete-stop-no-really-we-mean-it-lines, for similar reasons.
The problem with such laws is partly that they are designed more for ease of automatic enforcement than in the interests of justice, and partly because as a consequence of the repeated black-and-white approach, many drivers increasingly take the view that if something is not explicitly proscribed by law then they can do it, and even if it is proscribed they can still do it if they think they can get away with it.
Wouldn't it be better if we had traffic laws that were actually in sync with what most experienced drivers would consider reasonable behaviour, and then used actual police officers for enforcement, giving them actual powers to stop and challenge people who are actually driving dangerously or inconsiderately? But of course that's too expensive and requires difficult things like making a real case in court using real evidence that somene's behaviour was actually harmful, so cameras it is.