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Comment by jakobobobo | Hacker News Reader

A $3 fine is a good portion of someone's disposable income and a $300 fine is not much of someone else's.. A civil penalty of that nature almost guarantees some part of the population will view it like the $3 fee.

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This is exactly why license points (leading to suspension) are better than fines.

If the ticketing decision made by an automated camera system is deemed acceptable when issuing mere fines akin to parking tickets, but deemed unacceptable when issuing other penalties (which don't have this wealth inequity issue we are discussing now, at least not exclusively), that's effectively a poor tax.

More broadly, I think it's important to distinguish (more than we do) what aspect of justice a fine is supposed to be for, particularly between restorative versus punitive. The first is what it costs to fix measurable damage-done, the second is what we need to ensure the person cares to change their behavior.

Restorative fines should include not only measurable damage but also compensation for damage that you can't easily measure or quantify, which is why these things get blurry a bit.

This is exactly why in some countries traffic fines are proportional to income.

Which is still a poor tax unless the proportion increases with total income as the burden of an expense is relative to disposable income after necessities and not total income.

The government operating automatic camera citation systems, almost never is interested in improving safety or even minimizing undesirable behavior- often the placement of such cameras is done to maximize revenue (as when red light cameras are placed at long-cycle-time intersections vs intersections with a history of accidents). And it’s been documented that some cities have reduced yellow light times (which almost always leads to more citations) rather than increasing yellow light times (which usually leads to fewer people running the yellow, because people are less likely to take a chance after the light has been yellow a long time).

There’s a lot of compelling evidence that these systems are just revenue machines.

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