Lawmakers create bills to punish careless drivers
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Hoping to justify their existence and to make it appear they are actually doing something to help the voters who elected them, lawmakers in several states are drafting laws to crack down on distracted drivers. Here’s an example of one bill being considered. There’s one fatal flaw in attempting the passage of such laws. They are geared to treat the symptoms rather than the disease. If they really wanted to make a difference, here’s how they would fix the problem.
First, deputiize all citizens. Encourage them to mount a video camera on the dashboard of their vehicle and pay them half the fine for turning in bad drivers by submitting taped evidence of traffic offenses. Even though they are giving up half their fine, police revenue will jump significantly. I could bring in $10 grand a week just by taping singles in the carpool lane! For their first ticket, make the offender watch a driving safety movie and take a brief test on its contents. For the second violation, place them at strategic intersections four four hours with a video camera taping traffic offenders and then have them spot the dummy. Third offense requires mandatory enrollment in my 12 lesson driving safety course for which they will have to pay $1,000 to take (in addition to paying their fine), the money from which I will use to fund this website and my flying habit (no Sally Fields jokes here please). For their fourth ticket they get their license suspended for six months and find out how much fun it is to ride on mass transit! Hey, if they haven’t learned their lesson by that time, they deserve to be a pedestrian. I guarantee that with such a law/program in place, people would begin to pay more attention to their driving and we would be one step closer to our goal of zero fatalities. So until our elected officials start enacting laws like the one described above, I would venture to say that our politicians are just full of hot air (or something).