Quote:
Originally Posted by sebberry
(Post 7112204)
It's sounds like you'd be most comfortable with US style traffic enforcement where if you don't have the cash available at the roadside to pay your fine, you go to jail.
I am very much in favor of the GLP because the result is generally a better educated driver who is better able to make decisions on his own based on what is going on around him. Unfortunately the cost of such education is out of reach for many, but we've already covered where ICBC would rather spend their next $20 million. (Just doing the quick math here, you could educate 20,000 new drivers for that in a full YD or DW course at a bulk rate..)
The true irony here is that I am simply arguing in favor of legalizing what the majority of drivers do on a daily basis with very few problems. I don't think there is any evidence to back up your assertations that doing so will result in mass carnage on the roads. In fact, all you need to do is look at the removal of street signs and lights in the Dutch town of Drachten (PDF) to see that when drivers get to think for themselves, collisions can decrease. I'm sure there were opponents to that experiment who held the same position as you - that there would be countless collisions resulting from people making their own decisions. | I'm more of a moderate right, and find that traffic fines (due to their high amounts) cannot be done like that. Transit fines, on the other hand, are completely ok to be done like that. I've been in many european cities, which has a rule like that, and I'm sure is a much better system than what we have.
The Netherlands, again, is a very hard country to compare to - like Germany, it is very expensive to obtain a licence - at the minimum age of 18 again. And a town of 45'000 which had an average of 8 accidents a year, is not a very good system to compare north american systems to. I've driven through many small towns in Europe that don't have minimal traffic lights or signs, and don't feel like I'm in danger, but it is certainly not a very efficient system. Just like when a traffic light here goes out, everybody treats it like a 4-way stop, it's just that traffic slows to a crawl - but might not be a problem for a 45'000 pop city, that already had numerous roundabouts in their city.
to contribute to the remainder of the discussion, I've have seen and heard of traffic tickets being given out to 10-20km/h, definitely, but not often is it given while you are driving the flow of traffic. There are exceptions, like when they had the big campaigns to slow down traffic, especially on Knight St (which at certain curves, it is actually quite dangerous for the flow of traffic to be 70km/h). But most of those campaigns were focused on the idiots who would go even quicker than the flow of traffic. |