Our society, while being on the whole much nicer that most of what went before, persistently behaves in ways that are mildly inimical to individuals. The power of a democracy is delegated to it by individuals. When individuals en masse disregard a law, clearly the people as a whole have withdrawn that delegated authority and the administration has absolutely no right to impose or enforce said law.
Speeding fines are very widely regarded as having nothing to do with safety and everything to do with revenue collection.
Sour grapes because I copped a fine? Sure, that’s why I’m annoyed enough to write. But that doesn’t change the facts:
- It’s about money.
- It’s not about safety.
- Punitive speed limit strategies do not improve safety.
- I’ve said this when I wasn’t ticked off about getting caught.
It’s about money
It’s dead easy to show beyond a shadow of a doubt that it’s about money: our government includes future camera fine revenues in the planning budget. That’s a commitment to fining enough people to raise a (very large) amount of revenue.
So much for no quotas. They’re not quotas, they’re targets or some such, just as surely as you can get off a murder charge by calling it post-natal abortion.
Punitive speed limit strategies do not improve safety
That’s a long title, but it’s important to make the distinction between an enforcement strategy, the ostensible objective of that strategy, and the actual result, which in this case certainly isn’t enforcement – people are still speeding.
In the nineties there was a three day police strike in NSW. It was over a long weekend, and in a departure from tradition this one was advertised in advance on the news. If speed enforcement improved safety, you’d expect a huge spike in accidents and injuries. But no, both stats dropped.
Very likely this was because speed doesn’t matter so much when you look where you’re going instead of staring at the dash, and you just match your speed to the traffic.
This is strong evidence that making people worry about strict adherence to an arbitrary speed limit interferes with their observation of the world past the dashboard.
At the time, NRMA tried to make the point I just made. Predictably, the NSW government flat refused to discuss the matter, much less officially investigate the possibility that their speed limit enforcement strategy is the real safety threat. Probably they were concerned about the threat to their revenue stream.
It’s not about safety
For the sake of argument, assume that the official position is true: speed limits actually make the world a safer place, and that the perils of ignoring them are so dire as to be intolerable.
If this were the case, genuine enforcement would be far, far more important than punishment or revenue collection. It would be vital to make it flat-out impossible to exceed the gazetted speed limit.
Can this be done with current technology at a reasonable cost? Yes, absolutely. I can think of a cheap way that would work in built-up areas, and a more expensive way that would work nationally.
The former entails speed signs that emit a directional beacon indicating the local speed limit to the car’s computer. The other involves a GPS tunit and a lot of data about roads and speed zones.
I know any public servant worth his salt can make a radio cost five hundred dollars, but it’s still not much in the grand scheme of things.
Some will claim it is draconian to impose the cost of fitting the above equipment. That’s bollocks. It’s no more financially onerous, and quite a bit more ethical the current practice of imposing heavy fines with only nominal interest in safety. And unlike fines, it would be a one-time cost.
What I really think is that the governments should *** off and mind its own business, and in particular stop wasting expensive police manpower on bullshit.
Safety might even improve. If you can’t speed, you can’t cop a speeding ticket, so you can stop staring at the dash and look where you’re going.
This is what I do now, which is a large part of why I’m pissed about the fine. I wasn’t going terribly fast, and I was completely off the throttle (down a hill).
You can’t really put that sort of speed limiter on a motorcycle, but I match my speed to the traffic. It’s all part of not smacking into the vehicle in front.