Finland, I believe, scales fines proportionally to your income. Not perfect (the rich can more easily hide their income than the not so rich), but a good start.
Proportional fines help, but they aren’t perfectly fair.
The other end of the scale is interesting too - how do you disincentivise/punish for people who don't have any money and just aren't going to pay any fines you give them (i.e. the homeless)?
There are people who just park their car anywhere and paid parking tickets, they really don't care because it was too small amount of money.
If anything, people should realise the level of inequality has become. How unfair and unjust the system has made against the bottom half of the population.
Then someone on minimum wage of $30k will just get demerit points while someone on gross income over $200k will pay $8,500. Given that their “taxable income” after deductions is around $80k they will feel that sting.
I have heard of other countries that have similar systems.
Actually, a fee of 14 days of income sounds crippling to someone who's poor, so that's an example of it not helping at all.
It shocks me a little to think of a 14 days worth of income fine for going 45mph in a 30mph zone, yet when I think of the massive death toll from driving it's very possible my attitudes are not where they should be.
To give an example: there's a school nearby where the sign says 30 km/hour. It is an important road people who live in my neighbourhood, connecting them to their home (commute, shopping, etc). I drive on my bicycle crossing that road. Do I assume people drive 30 km/hour or 50 km/hour? Cause many people drive 50 km/hour there. When kids go to/from school people might drive 30 km/hour, I don't know exactly how that works. Many might not even know there's a school there. Even though the sign says there is, perhaps that gives the mental note: "..but it is Saturday." If we're going to arbitrarily ignore traffic rules whenever we see fit, it is going to lead to chaos.
Even winding mountain passes, which wouldn't be possible to take at 100 km/h without a race car will still have a 100 km/h limit. It's up to the driver to make a judgement as to how fast they can safely drive.
I look at the roads that do have speed limits of 45mph.
> the environment dictates the speed limit
Yep! And the roads I'm talking about are built in the same way with the same environment as the 45mph roads.
I'll back down my "all" to about "90%" though, I remembered a short road where 35 actually fits.
But in general, if we accept that the 45mph roads are actually safe at 45mph, then there's a lot of 35mph roads would be equally safe at 45mph.
Not helping at all sounds exaggerated?
Surely that fines scale with your income make them more even?
Of course a fine may STILL hit harder on someone with less income - but surely this is more "even" than if the rich guy also got a fine of say 500 € which is pocket money for him?
The solution to fines is to simply get rid of fines and instead use a more aggressive "point" system. I'm not wealthy by any means but the threat of a $200 ticket has zero impact on my driving habits whereas the threat of having my license suspended if I get 2 tickets in a 12 month span (a hypothetical example of possible punishment btw) would definitely change how I drive.
I can't really think of any crime that carries a fine rather than revocation of certain rights where this wouldn't work. The only issue is that of enforcement, you have to make the threat of getting caught a second or third time real enough that the punishment becomes psychologically meaningful.
That will be the case with any effective punishment. You can be sure they'll fight points just as hard. Ofc still way better than a flat fine.
You're assuming the problem that fines address is modifying driver behaviour. It isn't. The primary problem fines address is revenue.
Anecdote time: a friend from one of the nation's major universities was involved in a road authority funded study to evaluate the safety impact of newly installed speed cameras at several intersections.
They found there was none. Said road authority pulled the plug and pretended like the study never existed after that.
This distinction is made very clear, for example in a parliament answer by the justice minister: "...it is clear that the purpose of fines is not to increase the revenue of police departments but first and foremost to deter traffic violations and increase traffic safety."
You're contradicting your own claim.
Just because someone in a PR position says the purpose is not to increase revenue doesn't make it so. It doesn't matter where the revenue goes, the fines generate revenue. If they didn't care about revenue, they'd use penalty points - with the added benefit of not fucking over the lower and middle classes.
Just for fun, I calculated this fraction for a given year. The revenue from all traffic violation fines accounted for a whopping 0.1% of the total state revenue.
So apparently the only purpose of these traffic fines are to raise the state revenue by 0.1%, despite the explicit stated purpose of the legislation and any evidence to the contrary. Does that make sense to you?
Is this one of those things where you just know you're right because you feel it in your gut and nothing can ever convince you otherwise?
The points system disproportionately advantages the working poor. Speaking from experience, we have a mixed points+fines[1] system in Poland.
A wealthy person can easily weasel his way out of the points by either having a lawyer argue in court, or - especially in case of automated enforcement like speed traps - simply pay a third party (usually poor person who drives little or not at all) to accept the blame & penalty points in his stead by formally admitting to having been driving during the infraction. I've seen many ads for such exchanges.
Since several kind of jobs directly depend on being able to drive, the law customarily provides a way to shed the points in an expedited way. Typically it involves taking part in road safety courses and/or extra examination. You pay, you attend - or not, if you pay a little extra on the side - and your points get cancelled out. This is much more doable for somebody with expendable income and ability to shuffle work schedule around.
Absent such ability to shed or cancel out the penalty points, any working poor or middle class person who depends on ability to drive to earn the keep is under constant threat of loosing the job. Not a good position to negotiate with the employer.
tl;dr: The points system is unfairly burdensome for the working poor due to the system being much influenced by money. All the points do is to hide away the fact that money gets shit done.
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[1] the fine are fixed, and rather mild from middle class' perspective.
[0] https://www.swov.nl/feiten-cijfers/factsheet/18-tot-en-met-2...
Those fines hurt.
I also think people imagine the super rich having to pay huge fines under this kind of system, but it's the same problem as with taxing the super wealthy. Their income is actually very low relative to the wealth they are accumulating.
> ends up just being a punishment for having a good job.
No; it's a punishment for breaking the law, with (ideally) the punishment scaling to create a similar deterrent to everyone in the society.
If you have no job, you still get a ticket, unless the police officer let's you off the hook or you bribe him (which is very common). I'm not condoning bribing police officers.