Comment Re:well.. (Score 1) 760
If the goal is to encourage safe driving then the fine must have some effect on the person being fined. If it is too low they won't care.
I have said before that fines are effective on the poor, and jail time on the rich. I've said a lot about punishment, but nobody listens. The punishment has to be both more likely than alternative outcomes--especially bad outcomes--and severe enough to matter. A fine of $20 to a millionaire is nothing, but it's hell to a poor man; three days in jail to a poor dude is life-destroying for a poor man, but so is a $90 fine, and a rich man... cannot money his way out of prison. The death penalty only works in low-crime neighborhoods where people fear the law and capital punishment; in ghettos, gang members are 100 times more likely to be killed by other gang members than even arrested by the state, and so capital punishment has no deterrent effect. All of these things involve complex conscious and subconscious impressions of risk.
I've taken parking fines, and I've loaned less than the fine to neighbors so they could continue to drive to work and not starve. The fines are much worse for them than they are for me; so much so that I testified in front of the state to explain why the fine shouldn't exist (it was for parking on the left side of a one-lane, two-way, residential side street--there is no safety hazard in that particular configuration, and yet there is a fine that is wholly inappropriate in a neighborhood riddled with crushing poverty).