A Billionaire and a Nurse Shouldn't Pay the Same Fine for Speeding | Hacker News Reader

A Billionaire and a Nurse Shouldn't Pay the Same Fine for Speeding

nytimes.com

80 pointsrafaelc96 comments

Tiny brain: We should punish Zuckerberg for speeding! That'll show him!

Normal brain: Wait a minute. Increasing fines for the 1% can solve at most 1% of the speeding problem. Okay, the 1% number is polemical, but any solution to the problem of speeding must fall mostly on poorer people, because they are the majority.

Glowing brain: Why do we talk about speeding as a crime? Any economist would tell you that the optimal amount of speeding is nonzero, so it should be solved with a Pigovian tax equal to the negative externality. Since a rich speeding person does as much potential damage as a poor speeding person, the fine shouldn't depend on how rich you are. If you want a safety net, build a safety net, don't muck around with speeding fines.

Galactic brain: Is speeding that much of an externality though? If you go fast and cause a crash, you bear about half of the cost. If you don't cause a crash, no one bears the cost. It's not like pollution where the polluter bears a millionth of the cost. So it seems like selfish decision making, with average human level of loss aversion, should already deal with the problem of speeding. Why isn't that happening?

Buddha brain: People know the cost of a crash. Speeding happens because people misjudge the risk of a crash. So perceived risk, not cost, is the right variable to tweak if you want to fix speeding. Make enforcement of fines much more fast and certain, and you can solve speeding while lowering fines. The whole article about billionaires was a distraction from a distraction from a distraction.

"Make enforcement of fines much more fast and certain, and you can solve speeding while lowering fines."

If "solve" means legitimize it, yes, you've solved it.

Google for "daycare fine study" and notice that adding a small but significant fine to a behaviour you wish to discourage increased that behaviour rather than decreasing it.

The fine shouldn't be that low. Here's the best formula I could figure out.

Let's say R1 = actual risk of harm to yourself and others, M1 = magnitude of harm to yourself and others, R2 = your perceived risk of harm to yourself, M2 = magnitude of harm to yourself. Both M1 and M2 should be based on market price of QALY (about 50K dollars?) without overvaluing you specifically. Then the fine should be set at R1⋅M1-R2⋅M2.

That's a generalization of Pigovian tax to a spectrum of behaviors: pollution (R1=R2, M1>M2), skipping medical checkups (R1>R2, M1=M2), speeding (R1>R2, M1>M2). Does that make sense?

Given that speeders more often harm themselves than others, your equation gives a negative answer.

M1 includes harm to yourself.

> Increasing fines for the 1% can solve at most 1% of the speeding problem.

Already incorrect if that 1% of the population commits more than 1% of the speeding offenses because the fines are irrelevant to them.

Point taken, but it's not enough to offset the fact that there are more poor people, and anyway the next point deals with it.

"Increasing fines for the 1% can solve at most 1% of the speeding problem."

Incorrect. 1% on the income distribution is not necessarily 1% on the speed offenders pool. But I guess that is, nevertheless, an accurate thought model for "normal brain" :)

This seems like backdoor civil asset forfeiture but it would allow them to take assets that aren't even present and/or involved at the time of the "offense".

Can you see a particularly cash-strapped town telling officers to skip the Toyota Camrys and instead pull over the BMWs? It seems ideal for abuse, selective law enforcement, and likely other bad behaviors.

Oddly enough, this would likely go away with self-driving cars as high income people switch to vehicles who "can't" break the law.

It will put strong pressure to align the law with implementation. If the implementation treads into injustice, it (the law) is explicitly designed to be against those who can shrug it off, rather than drown.

There's a big gap between a "day fine" and taking someone's house because their kid stashed some drugs in the closet.

One is proportional and happens on conviction while the other can be nuts.

Are you really worried that _rich people_ are the ones that can’t protect themselves from abuse? :)

Rich and powerful are not the same thing.

Even so, rich people have a lot bigger chances to protect themselves from abuse, than poor people. And secondly, what use is a punishment that is not punishment at all for rich people?

Not as much as poor people, sure, but keep in mind that even rich people are much less powerful than governments or even large amounts of people.

I mean, obviously a completely different scenario, but, how many times have revolutions killed all the rich/powerful people? They don't have infinite protection just cause they're rich.

I'm from a country where that happened, I'm quite aware about this aspect. Even so, fining rich people more just makes sense, to me. Fines are supposed to be a deterrent.

If we're reaching the point where we're discussing about revolutions and civil forfeiture, I think there's a bigger problem here. And it's not proportional fines.

> Can you see a particularly cash-strapped town telling officers to skip the Toyota Camrys and instead pull over the BMWs?

No I see a world where neither Toyotas nor BMWs are speeding. But if both are speeding, then owners of both should feel equal amount of pain. And equal amount of pain won't come from equal amount absolute fines (300$ is a drop in the bucket for a billionaire, significant for a poor person).

I think I'd take the other approach than exorbitant fines for the rich. Perhaps they should grow (a $3,000 fine for a billionaire isn't unreasonable), but the more important part IMO is here:

"For people living on the economic margins, even minor offenses can impose crushing financial obligations, trapping them in a cycle of debt and incarceration for nonpayment."

I think it is reasonable that a speeding ticket for someone earning minimum wage could have a lower (say $50 instead of $150) penalty. The fines are made to disincentivize behavior, not put people in debt.

The fines are made as a revenue source, not to disincentivize anything.

> a $3,000 fine for a billionaire isn't unreasonable

This sounds ridiculous to me because the idea of laws, and by extension fines, is that they apply uniformly, regardless of class, gender, whatever.

Then it could be a percentage of total assets - that would be equal, no? I do think fines are stupid though. Making people sit a day through a speed awareness course seems a better punishment to me.

Then it ends up hurting the middle class yet again.

The rich have their LLCs that purchase their houses and cars and trusts that keep the rest of their money invested. The middle class don't have the luxury and are hit with a disproportionate amount of the fine.

Better? Probably. More equal? I doubt it. “Sit a day through a speed awareness course” could cost people their job, and that’s more likely the lower paying the job is.

I've taken defensive driving to get a ticket removed from my record. You notify the state you are going to do so, then you have a certain time window (a few months) to take it. You can even take it online, which is still frustrating because you can't skip stuff.

The laws should obviously apply equally. Exactly for that reason, fines should not be the same for someone who earns $15/hr and $1500/hr. A fine of $150 is 10 hours of work for one person, and 6 minutes for the other. How is that equal application of the law?

I don't think this is "obvious" at all. There are all sorts of laws that punish larger companies more than smaller companies or base the punishment on the impact to the party. Laws are made to regulate behavior and to keep order or safety - nobody said anything about the enforcement having to be equal.

The same logic (if applied consistently) would make judges give longer prison sentences to younger, healthier individuals.

What if the judge (in their quest for consistency) considers both their wealth of health and dearth of wisdom?

... if the only point of prison is punishment.

It should be equitably, not equally.

Why not just do away with fines all together rather than trying to come up with a complex system to try to make them fair. Perhaps instead of fines a more appropriate punishment should be that you're forced to sit in your car for an hour making you late to whatever you were in a rush for.

What about people who drive hard deliberate because they can afford the fines, in their free time?

In Australia we have a demerit point system, although technically if you have enough money you can pay to get around it.

The United States has the same thing. Get too many traffic infractions in a certain time window (a year or two, might depend on the state) and you get your license revoked.

Certain states allow you to pay double the fine and ignore the points. This was used by groups[0] doing road rallies across America.

[0]https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1nstSui0tPnJtMF2OZx5tw

This is actually a very good idea. Time is the one asset we all have. Community service is also a good idea, but it lacks the immediacy of both fines and your suggestion.

Where the rich can afford a lost contract, but the poor will loose his job for not showing up on time? Seems not to solve the initial problem.

Or just do away with the fines completely.

At least where I live, a speeding ticket knocks off a couple of your license's 12hp, and they take like a year to regenerate. Maybe that alone should be enough, or maybe you should also have to sit there one extra minute for every mph over the limit you were going.

Yeah, the fine is never the reason I get upset about being pulled over for speeding. It was always the points on the license and the time spent waiting for the ticket.

I'm from Finland where we have this kind of "relative fines". While I generally agree with the concept, it should better take into account the household's total income & wealth.

E.g. I could get a fine of 1/2 of my monthly net income for driving 140 km/h (87 mph) on highway, which would hit hard our household (three kids, low income spouse, no savings), although no real harm or risk was caused to anyone.

That sounds pretty reasonable to me, frankly. That’s considerably over the limit, isn’t it?

The highway speed limit in a country like Romania is 130 kph, but you only risk getting fined if you exceed 140. As such, I usually do 130-135 kph on the highway in my small 1.4 l hatchback and I don’t feel unsafe at all. I feel much more unsafe on 2-lane national roads with lots of curbs and where you risk getting a horse-drawn carriage in front of you out of nowhere, even though on those roads people usually drive much slower (the limit is 90, I stick to 80-90 most of the times unless I have clear visibility for like one km, in which case I push it to 100). Point is that it’s not the speed that kills you, it’s NOT adapting the speed to the road’s conditions that does it. As such, imposing draconian speed limits on highways (like in Finland) is very counter-productive and frustrating, because those highways are actually built to “support” higher speeds (just look at Germany).

I guess my main point was that in some cases, like in my example, arguably harmless offence can result to relatively high punishment, because personal income doesn't often translate directly to disposable money. Of course irrational speed limits are also to blame.

In exreme cases this can result to absurdly high fines, e.g. as a real-world example from Finland, overspeeding at 82 km/h in 60 km/h area have resulted to 34,000 eur fine.

Three kids will benefit from a dad who learned to drive slower.

Well, I drive 2.5 hours three times per week, so 10 minute saving per day translates to 30 extra hours spent with family per year (several workdays!).

Highways are generally super safe compared to anything else and speed alone is almost never a cause for an accident (I'm strict about keeping safe distance etc).

> But the United States doesn’t need to go that far.

I see reasons to go even further, if the goal is a fair level of deterrence. If for a significant part of the population, the total wealth is less than or in the same order of magnitude as the money they earned that month, while for others, income is a relatively tiny portion of it, fines based on income alone will deter the former much more than the latter. The more fair option would be to fine based on wealth, not income.

Then, yet further, if you all you have is $500 and lose half of what you own, that'll likely have a devastating effect, possibly resulting in homelessness. For a billionaire, losing half your wealth leaves you with $500M. You won't exactly be panhandling to make ends meet. Again, the deterrence is disproportionate.

I'm not sure how to address it. Possibly by not using fines at all, but some amount of hours of social work that has to be completed in some short but manageable span of time, with the definition of "manageable" based on individual circumstances.

On some of Italy's highways, they calculate the speeding ticket from gate to gate:) Meaning that if you entered the highway at 12:00 and you exited at 13:00 at a gate 120 miles ahead, you get a fine.

Sometimes, I see people who like to speed, just sit it out at a parking cafe next to their exit.

This is already true for incarceration; a billionaire and a nurse lose the same amount of time. And one's time is paid more than the other's.

Speeding is a weird example though. If I'm driving I pay based on my income, but if my driver is driving he pays based on his?

> In 2015, it handed a businessman a $67,000 speeding ticket for going 14 miles per hour above the limit.

I just don't see how going 14 mph with zero other damage is equivalent to compensating the public $67k.

"Justice" is about balancing the action with its punishment, not gimmicks like this (that inevitably wind up with a super-complex system of loopholes, deductions, inefficiencies, etc.)

> "Justice" is about balancing the action with its punishment

Right, that's the whole point of the income-proportional fines: to ensure that the same degree of punishment is given out to the billionaire and junior speeder.

I just don't see how going 14 mph with zero other damage is equivalent to compensating the public $67k.

Speeding is a crime because you're risking the safety of other people. There's only "zero damage" if you're lucky. There's potential for a lot of damage. Considering the defined punishment is supposed to act as a deterrent I would argue $67k was actually too low.

There is only actual damage if you are exceptionally unlucky. Almost everyone speeds to varying degrees, with wildly successful runs of luck.

Ergo, speeding is not a crime, it is an easy revenue target for greedy municipalities with overpaid cops.

Well, no, it is a crime, in every country. Even in Germany only some autobahn, and often only certain sections of those autobahn, have no speed restrictions, because the roads are of a type (wide, long, and without pedestrians, oncoming traffic, or sudden turns) that make accidents less likely.

To add to this: there was even a motion to upgrade unintentional manslaughter into murder, if speeding was intentionally (in the specific case of car races).

Drunk drivers make it home safe most of the time as well.

Just because you can break a law and it usually works out, doesn't mean that what you're doing isn't a crime.

The issue here is that most of the time something like half of people are speeding and some of the time literally everyone on the highway is speeding. The people who set the speed limit set it with the goal of causing a certain kind of psychology on the people driving, not because "past this point your car is going to lose control and kill everyone", and the law is then defined to follow the signs (which expect people to go over) and not the reality. It is just all fundamentally broken, as you can't fix it by changing the signs or defining a "true cap" as that would also break the psychology parts and lead to drastic differences of relative speed. The result is that no one truly cares about speed limits as defined (nor should they) and so police have immense discretion to use "you were speeding" to nab almost anyone, which is giving the police departments (who are optimizing for their budgets) and police officers (who are often applying flawed stereotypes as their model of criminal behavior) way way too much power.

"past this point your car is going to lose control and kill everyone"

Actually that is one of the reasons for the speed limit being what it is. Part of the speed limit is determined by the reaction time and stopping distance of a typical driver. That's not you per se, but it has to work for everyone. While a fit young person driving a 2017 Mercedes might feel they can safely drive much faster with all the modern safety features of their car like ABS, traction control, ESP, etc, the speed limit has to also work for an 85 year old in a 1981 Toyoto Corolla that has no safety features, tyres 0.1mm above the legal minimum, and the reaction times of an asthmatic snail.

That is a popular fiction for why the speed is set lower than the design speed that someone young and fast would expect, but the real reason is to figure out how to make it so that the people who drive based on the feel of the road and the people who drive based on the speed limit have the mean of their distributions at the same place, minimizing the speed differential between people on the road (which is what is extremely dangerous).

https://priceonomics.com/is-every-speed-limit-too-low/

> Traffic engineers believe that the 85th percentile speed is the ideal speed limit because it leads to the least variability between driving speeds and therefore safer roads. When the speed limit is correctly set at the 85th percentile speed, the minority of drivers that do conscientiously follow speed limits are no longer driving much slower than the speed of traffic. The choice of the 85th percentile speed is a data-driven conclusion -- as noted Lt. Megge and speed limit resources like the Michigan State Police’s guide -- that has been established by the consistent findings of years of traffic studies.

Speeding is a crime since it is illegal by law. That the money goes to municipalities is a problem of the US system, it should go to the state/government.

The problem really isn't that you haven't caused damage, rather that you ignored the legal safety limits of the road just to get home a bit earlier while completely ignoring or dismissing that in case of bad luck you could have caused immense damage. Reckless behavior like that, where innocent third parties can be immensely hurt or killed, should be punished.

In Germany, we have strict laws all about this. If you endanger the traffic or any of the (potential) participants of the traffic, you get fined. It doesn't matter if you say "but officer the road was completely empty", the driver is rarely omnipresent to know everything happening on the next kilometer of road.

Accidents aren't predictable but preventable.

> It doesn't matter if you say "but officer the road was completely empty"

To be fair, road usage does matter.

If there is construction you will be fined more. If students traveling to school, the speed limit is lowered.

Point being that not all "speeding" is the same.

Obviously yes, if you have a higher probability of endangering someone (ie, school kids, construction sites), the punishment will be worse.

Just driving at legal speeds can be a risk to. It depends pn multiple fsctors not just speed.

Those risk factors have been considered by people who are qualified to design road systems. You can't just heap additional risk on without consequences.

If I choose to drive wearing a blindfold that wouldn't necessarily mean there's any damage but it should definitely be a crime.

>Those risk factors have been considered by people who are qualified to design road systems.

Yes and no.

Those people usually have no role in applying the speed limits.

The max speed limits for a given type of road are given by some non-technical norms, i.e. - as an example - the Law may say that for a highway the max legal limit is 130 km/h, for a state route 90 km/h, etc.

People designing the road need to conform to those Law requirements, and - as a matter of fact - those requirements are normally exceeded (i.e. roads are usually designed in such a way that they could have from a purely technical standpoint higher speed limits).

The issue is particularly relevant where in single stretches of road there is something (a series of curves, a depression, etc.) that imposes (technically) a lower than Law mandated maximum speed for the type of road.

In these cases, if (technically) the max speed is - say - 120 Km/h (instead of 130 km/h) other factors (outside the powers or influence of the designer) will result in a much lower speed limit posted, let's say 90 Km/h.

This is done - usually - in good faith and to enhance security, but often - later - that specific stretch of road becomes a good way to make cash, as noone will suddenly reduce speed from the (allowed and legal till then) 130 km/h to 90 km/h and will go through the curves at 100-120 km/h (still within the technical limits, i.e. "safe enough" but far above the posted limit) thus being subject to fines.

The $67k penalty is merely for exceeding the speed limit by 14 mph, not for actually causing a crash or harm.

You would of course be liable for any damages actually caused.

It's seeking equality of outcome which is basically communism and in no way equality as the nurse had every opportunity to also become successful in free society.

I wonder if these types of comments are designed to trash free market-ism and not communism ('Look, free marketists are so dumb. Ha ha ha')

Equality of outcome is a shared theme of communism and progressive prices, fees, etc.

IDK if I'd have framed it like dibbsonline did though.

It's part pricing the risk but mostly a deterrent to behave according to rules. If the rich guy pays the same fine as the poor, it's effectively cheaper for him, so he can allow himself to break rules more often.

There are even indirect effects: when the rich are speeding because the fines don't matter to them, speeding becomes a wealth indicator that many of the less affluent will want to imitate for that reason alone. If conspicuous consumption is bad, conspicuous disrespect of the law has to be worse.

If he does it too much he will get his license revoked, so it still reaches a hard limit. At which point the person would either have to hire drivers, or drive illegally without a license and face harsher penalties.

I'm from Finland, and I think the fine system here works well. There are some crucial differences from the US system however.

First, fines don't go to the local police departments, and local municipalities don't get any financial incentive from issuing more fines. Everything goes to the state, and amount of collected fines is not related to the budgets of the police departments. This means that there are no interests for collecting more fines from any specific demographic.

Second, there are actually two levels of fines. For minor offences (like minor speeding, jaywalking, running a traffic light slightly late) you only get fixed fine. If the offence is serious enough to go to the court, then you may get day fines that are based on the income.

Also, the most extreme fines reported from Finland usually result from cases where someone has cashed nicely from selling a company or something, and because the initial amount of the fine is just based on tax information of the previous year, this may be a very high amount. In reality these fines always become lower in the court. The fines should be based on the current income by the law, and if the defendant can prove that the previous year was just an anomaly and the current income is actually lower, the amount of the fine will be reduced.

I know some wealthy people with very nice cars. They are extra careful to never speed beyond the "safe limit" because it would hurt too much if they got a fine, and instead take their cars to closed race tracks if they want to drive fast. Most people who I see speeding on the roads drive some lower-end cars like BMWs or Audis. I take their speeding as a sign that they probably have barely enough income to afford a car like that and want to show off, because if their income was actually high, they'd be more wary of the financial consequences.

> If I'm driving I pay based on my income, but if my driver is driving he pays based on his?

That's actually a very good point, as the "backseat speeder" would likely secretly reimburse the driver if the speeding was done to order. It would make intentional speeding surprisingly cheap for a small group.

(Disagree with everything else you wrote though)

”I just don't see how going 14 mph with zero other damage is equivalent to compensating the public $67k”

This isn’t about compensating the public (is the criminal justice system ever?)

AFAIK, there traditionally are three arguments for punishment: revenge, prevention of repetition, and punishment. This, I think is about the latter two.

Your third argument for punishment is "punishment"? Did you mean something else there?

I think the US criminal justice system frequently does make an effort to compensate victims where doing so is straightforward and a necessary part of "unwinding" the crime. For example, someone convicted of wire fraud typically forfeits their ill-gotten gains and where possible, those funds typically go to the victims.

There is a broader concept of criminal restitution, though you're right, more frequently, making amends to victims happens on the civil side.

This isn't a criminal case though; it's a civil one.

Civil law is focused on restitution.

At lease some kind of mention of equality under the rule of law should be done and refuted.

Percental equality is still equality, even improved equality.

The 'pain' (as in 'felt punishment') inflicted by the fine should be equal in all cases. If you have more money that means a higher fine is needed to inflict equal pain.

By what right should the officer be able to learn my net worth the moment he or she thinks I made a moving violation? Do you want possibly unscrupulous officers learning your net worth anywhere you travel?

Moreover, do we as a society want to spend money on discovery procedures to accurately identify speeders' net worth? What do you do if a corporate executive tells the officer he has no assets or income? Personally, if we think speeding is a problem worth spending on, I'd rather hire two more traffic officers than one lawyer and one accountant to adjudicate fine amounts.

This may be one of those good ideas that falls apart on implementation.

As far as I understand, Germany implements this system, and it seems to work pretty well

Do you know how they validate income? I suppose you could take historical tax filings, which it looks like is what Finland does. Even with that, though, you create the potential to significantly over-burden people with irregular income streams.

It looks like the UK tried day fines in the early 90s and dropped it (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/4173913.stm).

In most of the world, the officer looks at your id and puts your details in the system; They do not collect any money on the spot, and you have the right to appeal said ticket before paying.

You get a copy of all the details (including how to appeal, how much to pay, etc.), and while there would be a need to cross this against the income tax database (the way it is done in Finland), it doesn't usually go through a person.

I generally agree with this, but then, I would also take into consideration that driving at, say, 70MPH with a Camrys is not the same that doing it with a BMW. All other things being equal, you are way less dangerous for others drivers in the latter case and this should also be used to "equalize" the fine for speeding.

Or is this too unfair for the people that cannot afford a BMW ?

I thought that points were designed for that. At least in NJ you can get both fines and points depending on a type of a ticket.

I would love to see this happen in many places. But in the US - probably the last place it will ever happen.

the doctrine of equality of outcomes is evil which is what article is trying to achieve. being successful is not a crime or morally wrong as much as the likes of sanders/corbyn like to fantasise that it is. the fact that one person can handle a fine easier than another is no more consequential that the fact one can run faster than another.

The fine should be the same. No free lunch for someone who chooses to be a nurse instead of a portfolio manager.

the point of a fine is to act as a deterrent... billionaire isn't going to care about $100.

They aren't going to care about $1000 either, but at least it's doing more social good.

> care about $100

He will care if he loses his driver's license after a certain number of tickets, though, which is the law for everybody, equally applied.

In reality, even that isn't equal. A poor person who has moved out of the city because they can't afford housing inside of it losing their license would probably mean losing their job, as public transportation options may not even be available. A wealthy person could just hire an Uber everywhere and wouldn't even notice the cost.

While the punishment is equal, the impact it would have on different populations is unequal (which is the same issue with a fine of an absolute amount).

"No free lunch for someone who chooses to be a nurse instead of a portfolio manager."

That's true. Portfolio managers are wined and dined pretty frequently by brokers and others who earn fees from the portfolio managers' employers.

Nurses might occasionally get a $10 box of chocolates from a grateful patient.

Yeah and while you're at it why not make tax a flat fee too?

Hard pass

Reminded me of Steve Jobs refusing to put a license plate on his car.

I thought that was done legally by leasing a new car every few months. And that loophole is part of the motivation for the new temporary plates in CA.

Edit: reference https://arstechnica.com/cars/2016/07/steve-jobs-loophole-clo...

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