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Can this work? High state-level fines for driving offenses
Say you are driving 78 mph on the Capital Beltway and a state trooper tickets you for "reckless driving -- speeding 20 mph over." You will probably be fined $200 by the judge. But then you will receive a new, additional $1,050 fine from the Old Dominion, payable in three convenient installments. So convenient that you must pay the first one immediately, at the courthouse.
Coming to Virginia, July 1. Imagine all the people braking as they cross the Potomac coming from Maryland. The argument against, of course, is simply that traffic cannot work at 55 mph and this puts too much discretion into the hands of police. Or will some poor offenders simply flee and set off a police chase? (If you can't pay the fine you lose your license.) The goal of the fines is to fund state-level public works and perhaps the precedent is not ideal either.
Addendum: Larry Ribstien piles on.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on June 23, 2007 at 02:07 PM in Law | Permalink
Comments
What's so wrong with revenue raising through fines? Better than - say - income taxes.
Posted by: otto at Jun 23, 2007 2:44:09 PM
Wow. Who lobbied for this anyway?
Posted by: David at Jun 23, 2007 2:47:54 PM
Glad I dont live in that state. There is nothing wrong with especially high sin taxes of this nature as long as we dont have to pay the rest of the litany. A 1200 dollar speeding fine on top of all of the other taxes that Virginia residents have to pay is probably unconstitutional.
Posted by: John Pertz at Jun 23, 2007 2:53:59 PM
Great. Does this mean that Virginia will be cutting taxes for law-abiding citizens? Yeah, thought not.
Gives new meaning to "highway robbery", though.
Posted by: Methinks at Jun 23, 2007 3:03:58 PM
If you really want to bring down this terrible idea, just start a campaign to get people to pay their fine in pennies.
Posted by: Keith at Jun 23, 2007 3:06:12 PM
I used to drive the beltway every day to work. The speed limit never seemed to be an
issue, since traffic is lucky to hit 30 mph. Even at 2am, there's a good bit of
traffic on the beltway.
Posted by: Jay at Jun 23, 2007 4:04:29 PM
Make it progressive.Tall ,rich ,pretty,and libertarians should pay more.
Posted by: Lowrie Glasgow at Jun 23, 2007 4:26:31 PM
Did the legislature factor in the price elasticity of speeding and giving tickets? I would venture that the number of reckless-by-speed tickets drops, as drivers slow down and police officers become wary of sticking someone with a $1,000 ticket for speeding.
One of Arlington's finest clocked me driving 20 over a few months ago and informed me that 20 over the speed limit is reckless driving in Virginia. He then wrote up a ticket for speeding - without the reckless charge. From various anecdotes I understand this to be commonplace. Officers have a lot of discretion and are generally willing to cut [polite] drivers some slack.
Posted by: Ben at Jun 23, 2007 4:36:48 PM
We have something similar to this in NY state - six points in 18 months and the state fines you an additional $300 over 3 years. It's effectively a tax on bad driving. Sufficiently few people are aware of it, however, that it doesn't seem to be changing driver behavior. I know several people who've been hit with it and it's come as a complete surprise.
Posted by: Melinda at Jun 23, 2007 6:10:02 PM
Since faster driving uses significantly more gas, couldn't this also be viewed as a tax on inefficient gas usage? Finally taking that first step towards limiting our dependence upon foreign oil!
Posted by: mike d at Jun 23, 2007 6:33:20 PM
Notice that according to the state, it's not a "fine" - rather, it's a "variable registration fee". They've also noticed that "discounts some of the time" sound better then "increases some of the time" - it's all in how it's framed:
'Michael S. Davis, a veteran Fairfax defense attorney, said he plans to file a legal challenge to the fees the first time he encounters them. "If somebody from out of state does not have to pay the same price," Davis said, "I think there's clearly an equal-protection issue" under the U.S. Constitution.
Albo said he would agree with that view if the fee were imposed as criminal punishment. "But it's not," he said. "It's a variable registration fee based on the lousiness of your record. We're giving people with good driving records a reduction in their fee. And we can't charge a registration fee on people from New York flying through Virginia."'
Posted by: Michael Stack at Jun 23, 2007 6:34:02 PM
Otto:
My objection is that the way that speed limits are set in the first place has almost nothing to do with public safety. Our speed limits are *already* artificially lower than they ought to be. Study after study has shown that the 85th percentile is the safest speed to drive at. Yet, shockingly, our speed limits are in practice much lower than this. I wonder if this has anything to do with revenue generation via tickets? I wonder why auto insurance companies are so eager to fund things like radar guns for law enforcement?
http://www.motorists.com/mi/85th.html
I'd have less of a problem with what VA is going to do if the existing speed limits were set by the engineers who designed the roads rather than pencil pushing beaureaucrats.
Also, I don't trust the police to enforce the laws fairly in the first place. I don't believe that they treat all groups equally before the law. All else aside, I think this puts way too much power into the hands of the police.
Posted by: MjrMjr at Jun 23, 2007 7:14:36 PM
Is this really so bad? If this causes traffic fatalities to fall, then it's forcing the driver's to internalize their own externalizes to other drivers. So long as drivers can read, and signs are posted, then they should have plenty of time to adjust their speeds before hitting these premium ticket areas.
Posted by: jason voorhees at Jun 23, 2007 9:01:23 PM
Well, at 15 over, they could ticket half the drivers on 95 on any given day. What's even worse is that, in Virginia, you can be given a *felony* for speeding (or failure to use a signal, or many other minor violations which aren't criminal in other states). Virginia is the only state to ban felons from voting for life. How the 14th Amendment allows a state to disenfranchise somebody for driving 81 in a 65 is a complete mystery to me.
Posted by: cure at Jun 23, 2007 10:14:31 PM
Isn't this the sort of thing that leads people to conclude that the law is an ass? The law in general
that is. A possibly significant externality that perhaps should be taken into account. In Australia
monetary fines for speeding are often doubled during periods such as the Christmas holidays but these are
times when there are more drivers on the road and speeding does become more dangerous, so this law does
not really resemble an ass. Significant efforts are made to inform people of when the increased fines are
in effect.
Posted by: Ronald Brak at Jun 23, 2007 10:48:28 PM
Jason: Yes it is bad. Speed limits should be based on the 85th percentile, not some imaginary number chosen by politicians with assistance from the police and insurance industry.
Just today, I saw a cop pull over someone driving about 125 to 130 km/h (yes, I'm in Canada) in a 100 km/h zone. There was very little traffic and driving conditions were ideal. There was no way that individual was a danger to anyone, especially, when the highway was designed for 115 to 120 km/h. Properly designed highways with speed limits based on science are the safest roads to drive on.
Posted by: Vincent Clement at Jun 24, 2007 2:42:23 AM
The scandinavian system of scaling traffic fines to income sounds like an excellent idea.
Posted by: Peter Clay at Jun 24, 2007 4:55:58 AM
do they scale operating room prices to income also?
Really. "Scaling fines" implies that one can do less damage to others if one is poor.
The old dilemma. How to deal with the people's whose discretionary cost of living exceeds their income level.
Like having 5 children when you can't pay your rent, fund their education, etc.
Posted by: Delirious at Jun 24, 2007 5:29:32 AM
I think scaling fines is more to do with ensuring the rich and poor are equally deterred from speeding
and has little to do with how much damage one can cause, otherwise fines would probably be based upon how
much your vehicle weighs.
Posted by: Ronald Brak at Jun 24, 2007 5:53:43 AM
The legislator who introduced the bill just happens to be a co-founder in a law firm that specializes in traffic law cases. So he passes a law that guarantees him a steady income. http://www.albo-oblon.com/albo.html
Posted by: rob at Jun 24, 2007 8:16:17 AM
"otherwise fines would probably be based upon how
much your vehicle weighs."
Here's a novel idea, sparky. How about if the fines are based on violating the law and then we let the supreme court worry about whether the law is constitutional or not in the first place.
If the law discrimates between poor and rich, then we are not equal under the law - the only place we should be equal. And don't give me the tired old excuse that in handing out sentences, judges are harder on the poor (if you can find actual proof of that). Even if that were true, rogue judges are one thing, institutionalizing inequality by encoding it in law is quite another.
If you are going to be more heavily fined for money wealth, then you will seek non-money wealth (think "privilages" in Soviet Russia). If government increases the penalty on wealth, people will have no incentive to create it. Then what will our saintly politicians in government have to steal?
Posted by: Methinks at Jun 24, 2007 10:14:26 AM
This is one reason that the demonization of taxes can lead to idiotic results. These new fees are as much a tax as anything else, but they fall unequally. Most will speed, but only a random few will pay. Adverse consequences, but it doesn't involve the T word
Posted by: graeme at Jun 24, 2007 11:47:39 AM
"This is one reason that the demonization of taxes can lead to idiotic results."
Sure. Let's not demonize taxes. Let's make them 100% for everybody. Let's let government prioritize our ends for us instead of letting individuals choose for themselves. The underlying assumption you're alluding to, of course, is that government has the moral right to arbitrarily confiscate the fruits of people's productive labour and that there is no limit to how much they can confiscate to reach its chosen end.
We've tried that before. You may not have noticed, but it didn't work out very well.
Posted by: Methinks at Jun 24, 2007 1:03:02 PM
Methinks, noone is arguing for 100% tax rates. I believe taxes are necessary for a functioning society. This is probably what graeme was getting at. When you demonize all taxes then you end up with random taxes without the T word.
As a VA resident I'm appalled at this bill.
Posted by: eriks at Jun 24, 2007 1:55:45 PM
IMO, the bigger issue is about using traffic laws as revenue sources. That's just a terrible idea, even though it's so entrenched in the US that it's hard to imagine getting rid of it. Use the fine money to fund some good cause very far away from the local cops, like feeding starving Ethiopians or starving postdocs working on cancer genetics or something, and the speed limits will likely be set and enforced based on public safety, not based on revenue requirements.
Posted by: albatross at Jun 24, 2007 5:49:07 PM
