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Comment by tshaddox | Hacker News Reader

To be fair, this is already true of driving in general. Often in commuter traffic you’ll see one guy driving extremely unsafely, darting in and out of lanes passing everyone as fast as they can. You know this person does this every day for years, saving time by putting everyone else in danger.

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Lucky to see one guy in commuter traffic. I need to drive few times per month during commuter hours and in Seattle area there are few types of such unsafe driving:

1. Trucks - not keeping the lanes, speeding (it's 70mph cars and 60mph trucks, trucks bypass me when I'm driving 70).

2. Old company vans and pickups - that's surprising to me, but I frequently see some old Gutter/Plumbing/Heating van darting in an out of lanes. I'd think they'd get fined or in accident sooner or later, but still.

3. Large pickups. They usually are speeding, going in and out of HOV lane closer to Seattle. Never saw HOV enforced on I90.

The enforcement was somehow increased this year, but only until heavy traffic (you can see it daily 5am-6:30am), but never during heavy traffic, which would be more helpful.

The solution is surprisingly simple. You just need moderate enforcement of fines that are scaled to the offenders income and that escalate exponentially with reoffense in a reasonable time period.

Fines should be designed to make it uneconomical to continue to reoffend.

You're being downvoted by people for whom this would be incredibly inconvenient.

That should only be the case if the fine was actually prosecuted in court.

Plenty of people pay the fine and admit to guilt to avoid being further penalized with court fees, etc. In other words, many people just pay a injustice fine to avoid more trouble. This would punish those type of people even more.

>Plenty of people pay the fine and admit to guilt to avoid being further penalized with court fees, etc.

The system is in fact architected to maximize this in some states. Virginia and Ohio come to mind.

More than that, you need to enforce the existing laws. Raising the fines but continuing zero enforcement will do nothing.

Pretty sure high fines would greatly incentivize increased enforcement.

Why? The police officer gets paid the same either way. And that's probably in line with how we want it, lest police officers start seeing infractions that don't exist when their daughter's next birthday comes near.

The officer, sure. But departmental policy?

That can help, but policy doesn't execute itself, it's executed through the police officers. Most cities aren't prepared to be able to follow-through to the logical conclusion the steps they'd need to take if their police force is fully intransigent with regard to following policy, so the policy itself is set based in part on what the force itself is willing to enforce.

Either I'm confused or maybe you didn't understand my point - why wouldn't the department want to execute a policy that benefits them greatly through increased revenue? If it's not profitable or desirable to do so, increase the fines.

> The solution is surprisingly simple

Has this been tested and shown to be successful or is your confidence based on feels?

Look up the concept of "day fines", which are used in Finland elsewhere:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day-fine

Surprisingly they were experimented with in the UK, for a very brief period of time. But not taken into use.

Every now and again a particularly large fine, often for speeding, will make the news. For example this story does the rounds now and again "Finland, Home of the $103,000 Speeding Ticket":

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/03/finland...

That doesn't answer the question, do they work better than flat fines and points on licenses (that lead to suspensions)?

How do you decide if something like that works? Is it by stats on "repeat offenders", or something else?

All I can say is that when you've been asked to pay €50,000 for speeding I suspect you'll be hesitant to speed again, and so I believe the system works.

So the answer to the original question is that your confidence was based on feels.

> Fines should be designed to make it uneconomical to continue to reoffend.

Great. Fine me $1 million, and I will fight the case with lawyers, thus slowing down the public legal system for thousands of other legal cases, whether traffic related or otherwise.

IDK why this is downvoted. In practice everything is this way. Anything over a few grand is basically an invitation to lawyer up and fight. Whether it's a traffic fine or some local zoning BS this is always how it goes.

And by "IDK" I mean "I have some suspicions but they're not flattering to the community".

High definition cameras are cheap, I don’t see why these “fights” would be costly.

>I don’t see why these “fights” would be costly.

Most of society doesn't share most of HN's pro-jackboot disposition so there'd be warnings, appeals, etc, etc.

As a comparison point, it took a 20yr frog boiling exercise to turn DUI into a huge state revenue stream and that's at least backed by a crime most people can agree is fairly serious. To get the same for less serious crime you'd need to invest even more up front in propaganda because people aren't dropping dead from road infractions today like they were 40+yr ago so your ability to appeal to emotion is even more limited.

We can't even release the Epstein files. We don't go full jackboot on petty crimes with a victim. To think that there's public apetite to ruinously fine motorists out of large sums of money over petty victimless infractions is Luxury Space Communism (TM) type tone deaf lunacy.

And this is all assuming you get a bunch of friendly judges because this stuff is pushing it in terms of what the 6/7/8/14th amendments will tolerate.

Like FFS, get out of your filter bubble people.

That sort of stuff makes for great fantasy for people who fancy themselves central planners but back in the real world it flied in the face of the principals of a) punishment fitting the crime b) justice being blind-ish, which "real society" values far more than internet comment sections would have you believe.

I disagree. Not charging a rich person enough to incentivize them to change means that the punishment doesn't fit the crime for them. Similarly, charging people a fine proportionate to their wealth is much more just than a fine that is devistating for the poor but insignificant for the rich.

I’m generally not a lefty type person, but aren’t resource agnostic fines actually less blind-justice than the alternative?

The wealthy speeder shrugs it off, while the poor speeder has to change their spending allocation in a way that is noticeable and could be challenging.

Why should the punishment have a different impact based on wealth? The felt impact of a monetary fine fundamentally depends on how much money the offender has. Whereas the classic “locked in a cage” punishment affects everyone equally.

The fines are already plenty high, it's just that they are essentially not enforced at all. You could definitely illegally commute everyday in a carpool lane, and expect to maybe get a $409 ticket between 0 and 1 times every 5 years or so.

A $490 ticket every 5 years works out to only $1.88 per week- effectively free for anyone that makes enough money to commute in a car in the first place.

They increase the fine for repeat tickets.

Saving a tiny amount of time

Yes, I think Myth Busters did an episode on this. It saves surprisingly little time.

Is it surprising though?

The thrill of weaving through traffic vs the tedium of being the traffic might be the real incentive, whether the driver is consciously aware of that or not.

Its a facto, but I think people also do think it makes more a difference than it does.

One thing I have noticed from using satnav is that even with a mostly motorway journey the difference between driving fast and driving at a more leisurely pace is never more than a minute or two per hour compared to the predicted time.

I knew it from seeing how often I later caught up with someone driving very aggressively, but quantifying it made me realise just how consistent the small difference is.

I'm not sure this is true. In Atlanta, on a very busy two-lane city-street commute into work, I follow traffic laws scrupulously, and have excellent driving skills, but I take every advantage I can that's not illegal or antisocial -- e.g., I always pass people going slower than me, preemptively change lanes to avoid buses and cars I can tell are slow or turning, take small shortcuts that add many more turns to the trip -- which means lots of lane changes, etc. My wife, on the exact same route and time, does not do any of this; she just follows the car in front of her until she arrives. My driving shaves a solid 10+ minutes off of her 40-minute commute this way. That's significant (>25%), and adds up to 20 minutes more time at home with my kids, etc.

And fwiw, I abhor illegal and antisocial driving and wish there were much more enforcement of traffic laws. And where it's a necessary cost, I'd be happy to have a longer commute if we were all safer for it.

I think congestion pricing is probably a net win, and the lesser evil right now, but tolls are so regressive I wish we could do better by making public transport not suck.

> The thrill

I think it's more of the self-deception that they're more important than others and that they're meaningfully getting ahead of others. This is a major issue in American culture where it's not just about doing great, but about doing "better" than others (competitive in areas it's pointless to be competitive about)

I just drive normal and stick to the right unless I'm passing and try to maintain a good speed the whole time - no breaking and reaccelerating. I often see the people weaving and then pass them 5 minutes later because they tried to pass on the right and got stuck behind a semi. Ha.

Idiots that try to pass on the right should get their driver's license revoked immediately.

It generally isn’t even possible or useful to pass on the right if people follow the traffic laws of keeping right unless passing. It becomes necessary only when people are illegally hanging out in the left lanes going slower than the normal flow of traffic.

It’s legal to pass on the right here in MN. States should enforce left lane for passing only, but they don’t. This creates a situation where the left lane has effectively become the right lane and thus you can use the right to pass instead.

E: it is not legal to pass on the right in MN, unless you’re on a multi-lane road; which is basically all major arteries and thus makes this law unenforceable for all intents and purposes.

If you're getting passed on the right, you're doing it wrong.

I don't know why you assume this is about me? Participating in traffic is better if it's predictable, people passing on the right break that assumption.

Not really, it can save serious time if done properly and carefully in a consistent way on a long distance drive. Driving the length of California on I5, you can easily get stuck behind side-by-side slow traffic and spend the entire drive averaging about 60-65mph. Or you can aggressively cut through this isolated 'island' of slowness, and average 80-85mph. Over the ~400 miles from SF area to SoCal, this saves about 1.5 hours each way.

I used to have to do this round trip commute, and could consistently save ~3 hours per week of time by driving more aggressively, and I never got a ticket driving like this doing the commute weekly for years.

I do however try to be as courteous and safe as possible, and would time my lane changes to maintain safe following distances and not actually cut people off. If people would stay right except while passing like they're supposed to, this wouldn't be needed.

Correct.

Whoever downvoted your comment has either never driven this stretch of the 5 or they are the reason it is so bad.

It’s the idiots in cars who insist on doing exactly 65 in the left lane next to a semi that cause the problem. Get past just one idiot holding back hundreds of cars and you will find miles of completely open road.

Its all of those rolling hills where you are going up and down over and over. People don't pay attention and let their car slow down up hills, then let their cars roll up to 90 going back down the other side. Do it over and over and you get the whole centepede effect, except cars far enough back have to practically stop.

You can think of it as basic math. If the speed limit is 60 and you go 70, across a 10 mile drive you save at most 2 minutes... and only if everything is perfect. I stopped driving so fast once I realized that leaving a touch early was the dominant factor.

This is one of those things that suffers greatly from selection bias and language games. The people unbothered by minor impolite stuff don't come on the internet and complain. The people who think everyone going 5-over is a crisis do.

If you define dangerous as "how dare that BMW not use a blinker" type moves, yeah that stuff is everywhere.

If you define dangerous as "Y likely to cause an accident given X exposure" then it must be tautologically rare because if people were behaving seriously dangerously get bit by it in fairly short order. I can't remember the last time I saw a "wow, that was really pushing it and in poor taste" move. Weeks perhaps.

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