This Louisiana Town Runs Largely on Traffic Fines. If You Fight Your Ticket, the Mayor Is Your Judge.
This Louisiana Town Runs Largely on Traffic Fines. If You Fight Your Ticket, the Mayor Is Your Judge.
Fenton, population 226, brings in over $1 million per year through its mayor’s court, an unusual justice system in which the mayor can serve as judge even though he’s responsible for town finances.
Fenton, population 226, brings in over $1 million per year through its mayor’s court, an unusual justice system in which the mayor can serve as judge even though he’s responsible for town finances.
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Reading the article, there is obviously there's some shady-ass conflict-of-interest shit going down in this specific case.
However.
Literally any municipality in America could make bank if they enforced the traffic laws to the letter. Conditions permitting, most drivers regularly go 5-10mph over the speed limit. Distracted driving is common, and evolving (apparently the new things is people watching streaming videos while driving). In certain areas drivers leave their cars parked on sidewalks, blocking crosswalks, inside bike lanes, etc. Laws about stopping for pedestrians waiting to cross the street may as well not exist. Buzzed (and more recently, mildly-stoned) driving is socially acceptable. My local municipality could probably fund itself exclusively off tickets from drivers who don't have their lights on in the rain.
To be very clear: enforcement is a terrible way to get people to follow traffic laws (an outsized number of encounters that end in police violence started with a traffic stop, traffic stops are disproportionately made against people of color, tickets are regressively priced, etc etc). However the case study of this little town reveals a big truth: lawbreaking while driving is widespread on American streets to a level so extreme that nearly all drivers on the road will break the law (however minutely) every time they get behind the wheel. What kind of a broken system is that?
Especially re: road safety, this is the American approach. Build with unsafe designs according to decades out-of-date engineering practice and design philosophy. Blame enforcement when things inevitably go wrong (which they are doing -- most American towns are heading towards financial insolvency because of their idiotic design and planning patterns and American roads are among if not the least safe ones in the developed world).
In threads about roads, people will inevitably bring up two pieces of perfectly-harmonized bullshit. First, that the drivers are just particularly bad in their context. Second, that there is way too little enforcement. Both are total bullshit. Drivers are basically the same everywhere. It is literally not possible for the police to enforce enough to make a dent on road safety.
When some municipality decides they want to get serious about safe roads, they do so primarily through better engineering of the roads. It's proven effective. And bonus points: the same design practices that make roads safer encourage better development patterns creating safer and more pleasant streets for EVERYONE. Especially people outside of cars. Which creates a virtuous cycle of multi-modal development patterns. Safer streets mean more people are on them, and not just in cars. This leads to lower crime, more productive neighborhood businesses, more aesthetic neighborhoods (since people are actually there to look at them, they care how they look now). Everything just gets better when you use better road engineering.
But no, we still rely on AASHTO standards and their ilk which rate roads according to "level of service". They literally put everything, including safety, as secondary to how many cars the road can move.
And that's not even jumping down the rabbit hole of what it means for my country to be a police state. How insane it is that we have laws that criminalize completely mundane, normal, predictable behavior that can be selectively-enforced or used as pretexts for unnecessary violence.
What kind of a broken system is that?
Just to be clear, you mean that people ignoring the laws is what makes it broken, right? Not the laws themselves?
Cause your last sentence threw me off for a second.
If so, I totally agree with you.
I'm not from the US, but are people really streaming while driving? Cause that's just ridiculously stupid.
I know people are driving much longer distances in the US than here, but at least put on some podcast or music to entertain you. Nothing that keeps your eyes off the road.
But speeding tickets are the most common type of infraction, and I think that's probably a good example of a systematic issue.
There are areas in this country where the speed limit is set artificially low, just to always allow for police to issue tickets capriciously.
The Atlanta beltway for example would literally grind the city to a halt if everyone adhered to the speed limit signs, and it's actively dangerous to attempt to do so as an individual.
That's not a people issue, it's a systems issue.
Nearly all drivers on the road will break the law (however minutely) every time they get behind the wheel. What kind of a broken system is that?
All of this is intentional. Think about the phrase "I have nothing to hide" when you see flagrant privacy violations. Yes.. Yes you do
Honestly, just put up cameras at points where following the law is the most critical for road safety, place notices something like a mile before it on the road, and if anyone's still breaking the law after seeing the warning, just send the ticket to the home address the car is registered to with a picture that captures the driver.
Voilà, road safety AND reduction of unnecessary cop civilian conflicts.
Still send out patrol vehicles but for like, actual dangerous situations that need an immediate responder, because the patrol effect is a real and observed phenomenon (literally even just having a dude in uniform sitting on a horse in the area reduces crime), something that would actually be improved on by having cops spending less time babysitting highways and more time being visible in high crime areas to deter petty criminal behaviour.
This is how it's done in Korea, cameras everywhere and signs telling you where they are. The built-in gps systems in newer cars also have all the camera locations within their maps. It'll warn you by dinging if you're speeding ahead of a camera and give you a happy ding-ding if you pass the camera while driving under the limit. Seems to work fairly well, although it's kind of annoying on their highways as everyone seemingly races to the next camera where they then rapidly slow down, then speed up, again and again and again.
Oh and cops don't pull people over. I never saw it and drove many miles over several different visits.
lawbreaking while driving is widespread on American streets to a level so extreme…
Is this not the case everywhere? If anything, speeding, distracted driving, and running stop signs / ignoring traffic signals is much more common in other parts of the world.