Commenter “Gorgasal” makes a point about differential speeding fines that I’ve seen made many times by proponents. In fact, it’s the main argument for them, and it goes like this:
Speeding tickets that scale with income are the norm in Switzerland.
The argument is NOT that a rich guy who does 20 over the limit is more dangerous than a poor guy at the same speed.
The argument is that a 50 CHF is utter peanuts to a derivatives trader with UBS and will not dissuade him from speeding – but a fine in the multiple thousands just might. (And yes, this is the monetary range we are talking about.)
Much as I usually agree with Neo and the commentariat here, in this specific case I agree with this proposal.
I understand the argument, but I don’t think it holds up under scrutiny, and I’ll explain why.
Whether you think of fines as deterrents or punishments or both, it does make intuitive sense that of course for a poor person a fine takes more of a bite out of his or her income and therefore one would think it’s a greater punishment and therefore a greater deterrent, and likewise such a fine is hardly any deterrent at all for a rich person. If that is true, one would think that, per capita, poor people would already be speeding less than rich people; after all, the punishment fine is much greater for them in terms of percentage of income.
But do they? I’ve never seen a demonstration that this is the case, except for self-reports about speeding which show poorer people report less speeding than rich people report. But self-reports are meaningless in that regard, because they merely measure what people are willing to own up to when asked in a survey, rather than their actual behavior objectively measured. And if someone is very poor, that person also may not be driving as much for the simple reason that he or she may have a problem affording gasoline, or might be more likely to live in an urban area where public transportation is the norm and is more convenient.
The most objective measure I could find of how much poor people speed versus wealthier people was a study of the violations found in New York by speed cameras. Such cameras don’t discriminate. And guess what? There was no difference in speeding rates between rich and poor communities, or between races:
New York City’s speed safety camera program saves lives. The program led to a 72 percent reduction in speeding and a 55 percent drop in all traffic fatalities at camera sites during hours of operation after its introduction. There is no correlation between the number of tickets per resident and race or poverty level.
Such cameras also come at a cost: constant surveillance (which we already have to a great extent anyway). And the differential fines proposed in California (that I wrote about yesterday) have an additional cost: a record must be kept or accessed of every driver’s income in order to set the scale for that particular person’s speeding fine. Another cost is the normalization of differential “justice” penalties based on income. And – at least as far as I can tell from the quick research I’ve done – all without any indication that these revised fines would act as a deterrence to speeding. In fact, logic tells me that reducing the present fines for poor people will be likely to lead to an increase in speeding among the poor and a rise in accidents and fatalities among the poor, because the deterrent for them would be weaker than it is now.
I think you see where this is going. Why limit this to speeding tickets? There’s really no reason. Let’s have differential fines for everything, differential tolls, and differential prices for goods. Why should a poor person pay as much for eggs as a rich person? After all, the poor person has to eat. That’s far more important than the right to speed. And rich people can afford to eat more meat; perhaps we should have a rationing system to make the consumption of meat more equal.
Also, do we care why a person is poor? For example, some people are poor because they abuse substances, and low income people are more likely to have substance problems (although which is cause and which is effect I don’t think we know). Is that of any important at all? How far does our futile quest for cosmic justice go?
I looked for articles about the effect of these laws on countries in Europe that already have them. Do the laws reduce speeding, and by whom? I couldn’t find any such articles, although they may indeed exist. What I did find is this sort of thing, which contains some interesting data:
In Finland, speeding fines are linked to salary. The Finns run a “day fine” system that is calculated on the basis of an offender’s daily disposable income – generally their daily salary divided by two.
The more a driver is over the speed limit, the greater the number of day fines they will receive.
This has led to headline-grabbing fines when wealthy drivers have been caught driving very fast.
In 2002, Anssi Vanjoki, a former Nokia director, was ordered to pay a fine of 116,000 euros ($103,600) after being caught driving 75km/h in a 50km/h zone on his motorbike.
And in 2015, Finnish businessman Reima Kuisla was fined 54,000 euro ($62,000) for driving 22km/h over the 50km/h speed limit.
Switzerland uses a similar system, and currently holds the world record for a speeding ticket. It was handed to a Swedish motorist in 2010 who was caught driving at 290km/h. He was fined 3,600 Swiss francs per day for 300 days – around 1,080,000 Swiss francs ($1,091,340) in total.
The UK introduced tougher speeding penalties in 2017. Drivers can be fined up to 175% of their weekly income, on a sliding scale depending on the severity of the offence. However, the amount is capped at £2,500 ($3,310).
Such fun! Stick it to the rich!
In my search for evidence on the effect of “progressive” speeding fines, I did find research on the effect of raising fines for speeding in general. The upshot:
During the years 1995-2004, the rates for fixed penalties for traffic offences in Norway increased substantially. This paper evaluates the effects on compliance of these increases. Regression analysis was performed to determine the effects of increases in fixed penalties. For speeding in general, no effect of increasing fixed penalties can be found. For speeding close to speed camera sites, there is a weak tendency for the violation rate to go down. This tendency is not statistically significant at conventional levels.
In other words: no deterrent effect for increased fines (this paper found similar results). My conclusion is that people either speed or don’t speed for a number of poorly-understood reasons, but fear of substantial fines is probably not a big factor.
