[macNchz]

It’s a very widespread problem, I think, and probably has a complex mix of causes, but my perception as a NYC runner, cyclist, and driver is that there’s a fairly small percentage of extremely antisocial drivers who we allow to behave badly with relative impunity, which itself moves the Overton window of driving behavior towards aggression/chaos, so to speak.

Very frequently when there is a newsmaking incident in which a driver runs people over in some egregious fashion, it turns out that they got dozens of speed camera tickets per year. We know who these people are, we just don’t seem to have any motivation to actually do anything about it.

The city has published research on this, showing drivers who get 30+ speed camera tickets in a year are 50x as likely to be involved in crashes with serious injuries or death, but efforts to actually do something about their behavior are consistently stalled or watered down. Other research points to various causes, including backed up courts and decreased enforcement generally.

https://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/html/pr2025/nyc-dot-advocate-fo...

https://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/downloads/pdf/nyc-driver-behavi...

[spamizbad]

Yeah I feel like the United States could dramatically improve its road safety if it kept maybe 1-3% of its drivers off the road permanently.

[cultofmetatron]

the problem is that our urban planning is so F@#$ed that taking away someone's ability to drive is tantamount to sentencing someone to poverty. In most of the country, you are completely dependent on a car to hold down a job, get groceries and pretty much anything else. In most other countries, not having a car is a mild to moderate inconvenience you can work around.

[dns_snek]

That's not a good reason. Other forms of criminality and reckless behavior don't get this kind of extreme leniency.

People shouldn't have their license taken away over 1 speeding ticket but there need to be escalating punishments that include license suspension, community service, jail time. If someone works their way through all of these and still ends up speeding then they can't be trusted to drive a vehicle on public roads.

[tenebrisalietum]

Drivers licenses in most if not all of the U.S. are a joke, and people will still drive with suspended licenses, especially if they have to for work. Driving on a suspended license should allow the state to impound your car, though, then it would be respected.

[epistasis]

Jail time should also be considered too, for repeat offenders.

Cars are a weird sort of thing, where they both are the justification for a surveillance state and lots of monitoring, but we also have extremely lenient penalties. It's difficult for me to understand how the US arrived at our current set of laws.

[estimator7292]

Why do we care about this type of sentencing to poverty and not every other way we condemn our citizens to poverty, homelessness, starvation, and death?

Maybe that shouldn't be the only alternative in our society

[cultofmetatron]

The alternative is that we invest in better public transport and walkable infrastructure. then we can both increase penalties for driving badly AND raise the bar for getting a drivers license in the first place.

[BobaFloutist]

>the problem is that our urban planning is so F@#$ed that taking away someone's ability to drive is tantamount to sentencing someone to poverty.

We're talking about NYC, they'll be fine without cars.

[SubmarineClub]

Sounds like a good reason not to commit traffic crimes then.

Start punishing these people severely so that they might serve as an example to the rest

[kelseyfrog]

Has that ever worked?

AFAIK, all evidence says that people don't consider consequences. If they did, they wouldn't be behaving like that in the first place. Punitive punishment feels much much better for people who have a specific set of values.

[AmVess]

Yes, it works. The state that I used to reside in has draconian DUI/Traffic laws, and not coincidentally low traffic death rates.

Driving with license revoked or suspended was a serious charge and resulted in impound of vehicle and mandatory jail time. Repeat offenders would have their vehicles seized.

DUI laws similarly brutal. 2nd time offenders faced potentially life-altering charges and penalties. Get into an accident with injury to another person while DUI? Huge jail time. Felony DUI results in permanent loss of driving privileges.

Speeding 20 over the limit? Enjoy your reckless driving charge which is as serious a dui charge.

I read that getting a license back after a 2nd dui carries and average cost of $50k. Getting 2 dui's within 10 years automatically bumped 2nd dui to felony....no more driving for you.

Lax driving laws and penalties do nothing more than get a lot of people killed.

[almosthere]

Escalating punishments often tend to take the "1-3%" of the bad people out of society that cause all the crime.

Remember from recent history these people that had 34 arrests or 73 arrests and they're out murdering people?

[kelseyfrog]

I mean the serving as an example to the rest part. Has that ever worked?

[spamizbad]

If my choice is jail or relocate and find a new job and home in a city with passable public transit (even if its just the bus) I know which one I'd pick.

[littlestymaar]

The problem is how do you enforce that though.

The modern world is so cat centric people would rather drive without a license than accept to live without a car. And until you can reliably catch and jail license-less drivers, the bet is worth it for them.

[randerson]

If they were to catch and jail just 1% of license-less drivers, in a visible way, it would be a deterrent to the other 99%. But the rate of being caught & punished is negligible (at least in the states I've lived in) so people know they'll get away with it.

I previously lived in a country where the cops set up random roadblocks to check everyone's license & registration and look for signs of intoxication. When there's a real risk of waking up in a jail cell you're less likely to order that third beer. But in the US when renewing my tabs I feel like the joke's on me because half the cars here seem to have expired tabs or illegal plates and nobody ever checks.

[littlestymaar]

> If they were to catch and jail just 1% of license-less drivers, in a visible way, it would be a deterrent to the other 99%. But the rate of being caught & punished is negligible (at least in the states I've lived in) so people know they'll get away with it.

1% is actually negligible, and would not have a deterrent effect. In fact I wouldn't even be surprised if the effective prosecution rate was somewhat higher than this already.

> I previously lived in a country where the cops set up random roadblocks to check everyone's license & registration and look for signs of intoxication.

I live in a country (France) where this is still the case, and where driving crimes are the second source of jail time after drug trafficking, yet alcohol is still the #1 cause of death on the road, and an estimate 2% of people drive without a license after having lost it (and are responsible for ~5% of accidents).

[randerson]

Alcohol will likely always be a factor in the worst accidents. But France is doing something right because your fatal accident rate per capita is one third that of America's [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...

[littlestymaar]

It's not France in particular though, America is the outlier among developed nations. In fact France is a bit behind most other European nations (but not by much).

[immibis]

How much of a deterrent can the police possibly impose that would outweigh the deterrent for not driving illegally, which (in your country) is being starving and homeless?

[randerson]

The cops will never deter everyone from breaking the law, but they don't have to. They just need to deter a large enough % of the population to have a positive effect.

Driving while intoxicated is not a crime of desperation. Even celebrities are often caught for DUI despite being able to afford a full-time limo driver.

Most people who drive intoxicated have jobs and reputations they'd prefer to keep, and families at home they would rather not be separated from or have to explain an arrest to.

And to be clear, we can't solve all the problems with a single measure. I'd like to see not just better law enforcement, but also a social safety net that ensures nobody is ever starving or homeless.

[immibis]

The crime under discussion is not driving while intoxicated but driving without a license.

But if you're going to bring that up anyway, how are people supposed to get their car home from the bar in a place where the government hates public transport?

[buildbot]

> "The modern world is so cat centric"

If only

[carlmr]

>it turns out that they got dozens of speed camera tickets per year

To me the answer is quite simple for any of these. Treat repeated small infractions like bigger and bigger infractions. E.g. double the cost every iteration if it happens within a specific time frame.

Ok, you speed once? $100. Twice $200. Thrice $400. And so on. We only reset if you don’t reoffend for any speeding in 5 years. If you want to speed 20 times in 5 years, ok, go ahead. You pay $52,428,800.

Bonus points for making it start at something relative to your salary. People will stop at some point out of self-preservation.

If you don’t believe high fines work, drive from Switzerland to Germany. In Germany the Swiss have no problem speeding, because the fines are laughable. While south of the border they behave very nicely on the street.

You could extend this to other crimes. Google and Microsoft happily pay fines, since it’s cheaper than what they make from breaking anti-trust regulations. If you doubled it on each infraction they would at some time start feeling the pain.

[__turbobrew__]

I’m strongly in favor of exponential punishment with very light punishments for first offences. It allows fluke infractions or bad luck to go without being punished too hard, but severely punish the small anti-social group that brings the rest of society down with it. So maybe if you accidentally run a red light once it is a $10 ticket, but next time it is $100, and then $1000, and then $10000, and then $100000.

[LorenPechtel]

I'm in favor of escalating punishment, but it doesn't reset, it decays. Say 3 years with not tickets and it goes down one level.

[carlmr]

That's fine as well. I just don't want to punish you for life for small infractions every once in a while. Humans make mistakes.

[macNchz]

I have noticed this going between Switzerland and Italy in particular—all of the cars going incredibly fast on the autostrada seem to have Swiss plates!

[beAbU]

Some countries have a points system, where every infraction gets points in addition to the fine. At a certain amount of points you lose your license. Pretty effective dissuade serial petty infringers!

[apothegm]

Most US states do, too. But people will drive without a license because it’s the only way to get to anywhere in most of the country. And I suspect we’re light on enforcement for the same reason.

[lukan]

"In Germany the Swiss have no problem speeding, because the fines are laughable. "

That is because in germany, cars are a religion substitute and just like there can be no speed limit on the Autobahn in general, there can be no real enforcement of speeding.

The fines actually increased a lot in recent years. Still cheap, though. And if there are radar cameras, they are often in places where speeding is quite safe to make money from fines vs places where speeding is actually dangerous (close to schools etc)

It is basically a archaic thing, the bigger the man, the bigger and louder his car and the faster he goes. It shows status.

So I imagine in New York City it works just the same. When the big guys like speeding and the big guys control the state .. then how can there be meaningful regulation of that?

(To confess, I like to drive fast, too. But not in places where kids can jump or fall anytime on the road)

[stevage]

> it turns out that they got dozens of speed camera tickets per year.

Are you saying you can legally keep driving despite dozens of speed camera tickets in a year, as long as you keep paying the fines?

That's wild.

Around here (Melbourne, Australia), you'd lose your licence very quickly. A single speeding ticket is a minimum of 3 points off your licence (of which you have 12), and bigger infringements lose more points. So at most you could speed 4 times, but probably fewer. And it takes a few years for the points to come back.

[BiteCode_dev]

For these reasons, many countries have adopted a point-based system for driving licences. E.G: in France you have 12 points, driving over the speed limit is a fine, but also removes up to 6 points depending on the speed.

If you go down to 0 points, your licence is suspended.

If you stay without a fine for long enough, you get back points.

Some countries have fines that depend on how much you make. Some countries will destroy your car if you really behave badly.

[macNchz]

New York actually does have a points system, but since they're tied to the driver's license rather than the car itself, you only get them if you're actually pulled over, not from cameras. Within NYC there's a fair amount of camera enforcement, but comparatively very little by the police directly, so drivers whose licenses might otherwise be suspended via points are still driving around.

The mechanisms for keeping people off the road are also just weaker in the US—I believe the penalties for driving with a suspended license are comparatively lighter, plus if your license is suspended you can often still get a "restricted" license that still lets you drive to work.

[BiteCode_dev]

France gets around that by assuming it's the car's owner's fault. If you were not driving the car during the infraction, the person driving the car must fill out a form saying he or she did and take the hit voluntarily.

If the car's owner is a company, the company must declare a default conductor for this purpose.

[temp0826]

What the heck? How can you get that many tickets and still have a license? (Or manageable insurance costs for that matter lol)

[macNchz]

When New York State authorized the NYC speed camera program they explicitly precluded it from reporting to insurance, and made it not part of the “points” system that triggers license suspension if you accumulate too many infractions, so all that happens is that you get a $50 ticket each time.

If you don’t pay the tickets, your car is at risk of being booted, but if you don’t park on the street or choose to obscure your license plate when you do (how did that leaf get stuck there!?), there aren’t many repercussions.

There was an attempt at a program to actually seize these cars, originally it would have kicked in at 5 tickets/year for immediate towing, but it was watered down to 15 tickets a year triggering a required safe driving class. They sort of half-assed the execution of that, then pointed at the limited results and cancelled it altogether. There’s an effort to pass a state law about this, we’ll see if it makes progress.

[stevage]

> When New York State authorized the NYC speed camera program they explicitly precluded it from reporting to insurance, and made it not part of the “points” system that triggers license suspension if you accumulate too many infractions, so all that happens is that you get a $50 ticket each time.

At the risk of hearing a depressing answer...why?

[LorenPechtel]

Because they set the speeds too low to raise revenue.

[xnyan]

Unless you live in NYC or a handful of other places, an adult in the US who can't drive (or afford to pay someone to drive for them) is in the equivalent of economic-social prison. Almost all personal transportation infrastructure is designed around car travel, anything else is at best an afterthought and at worst impossible.

Don't get it twisted, I agree with you. The US is far too tolerant of dangerous driving. We are too dependent on cars for travel, and this is a consequence of it.

[temp0826]

I'm just shocked that you can have that many offenses and not be in jail. I nearly lost my license in high school with FAR less than 30 incidents. That amount of leeway just doesn't make sense at all, you're so obviously a danger at that point.

[toast0]

Camera tickets are in a weird place legally. They might not be legal, because of the 6th ammendment and due process requirements, so states tread lightly. A light touch gets a lot of compliance and is most likely self-funding; enforcement by humans may be more effective for habitual violators, but you most likely can't have as much coverage and be self-funding.

If you had 30 speeding tickets issued in person, it would be a lot different than 30 speeding tickets issued by machine.

[jazzyjackson]

If they're talking about automated speed cameras I guess there's the problem of not being able to correlate the plate of the car with a particular human, a bill simply gets sent to the owner of the car, but maybe if we impounded cars at some point people wouldn't be loaning cars out to their licenseless friends

[ray_v]

It's simple. People drive without a license. Having a license doesn't preclude someone from driving a vehicle

[xnyan]

I once drove my car a month after it's registration expired. I was pulled over twice in the same day on the same ride home from work, in two separate counties in two separate legal systems. Completely my fault of course. I went to the courts of each county on the appointed day on my tickets, explained what happened to the clerks and had both tickets waved after showing proof of current registration.

The only problem was the two counties had shared but not integrated records systems with each other, as well the state drivers license authority. For two years, my cases got jumbled around the three systems, triggering plate and license suspensions which lead to me getting pulled over four times in that two year period.

It eventually all got sorted out without a lawyer. I didn't have to pay for anything beyond the first two tickets, and many hours on the phone. What was really notable was that by stop number four, from the perspective of the cop who pulled me over, I was someone who had been driving with suspended registration and/or license three times in a row. I was allowed to drive away three out of four times including the last time, and one time the cop would not let me drive, he waited with me patiently until my wife could be dropped off to get the car.

Maybe I'm just lucky, but to be honest I was surprised how not a big deal it was to anyone.

[deep_merge]

Perhaps they don’t have either.