Hacker News Reader

Comment by salvar | Hacker News Reader

That's quite the brush you're painting with there. Is the primary motivation behind fining the same everywhere?

If the primary motivation anywhere was to alter driver behaviour, a points based penalty system is all it would take. Monetary fines in traffic infringements are entirely for 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.

Anecdote of my own: In my country, monetary fines in traffic infringements are explicitly not for revenue. They mix into the total state revenue and form a minuscule fraction of it. The police sees none of it.

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."

> Anecdote of my own: In my country, monetary fines in traffic infringements are explicitly not for revenue. They mix into the total state revenue [...]

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 because something is revenue doesn't mean that the purpose is entirely to increase revenue. That is the claim you made. I have presented a counter-example to that, where revenue increase is clearly not the only reason for monetary fines. We have the stated purpose of the legislation -- you can call that PR or whatever you'd like but the stated purpose is not revenue increase -- and you have the fact that these revenues do not benefit any police departments or anyone directly. Instead they make up an absolutely tiny fraction of the total revenues of the state.

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?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com