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Old 10-05-10 | 11:27 AM
  #25  
mnemia
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Joined: Jan 2010
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Originally Posted by jester711
I agree with you, but the "$500-$1000" test wouldn't really help much. Think about the number of people with DUI's. A DUI generally comes with a suspended liscense. Some will use public transportation or start biking, but Many of those people still drive. Regulations like that only work if you get caught.
Yes, I agree that enforcement is going to be a problem if people are still tempted to drive. Nothing is going to stop some people from driving if the only deterrent is getting caught again. But again, in that area we could do a lot more that would be more effective. Technology is one possible answer: closer monitoring/surveillance of who is driving on public roads might be able to catch a lot of the hit and runs as well as people with no or suspended licenses. You could, for example, use facial recognition systems in the near future: have automated monitoring systems set up at random locations that take a picture of the drivers' face as cars drive by and feed that information to a facial recognition system that checks against a database of known suspended or drunk drivers. You could, at least at some point, have laws that result in seizure of vehicles and a ban on owning any other motor vehicle. If such a law applied to any vehicle driven by a suspended driver, whether owned by them or not, there would be a huge incentive against family members or friends loaning them vehicles to get around the enforcement. The proceeds from the seizures could be used to pay restitution to victims (as I mentioned, many drunks and such are losers who never pay their civil judgments). We could do much more to stop suspended drivers from driving, but we haven't.

I don't know how people would feel about all that surveillance, but at some point you have to wonder about which is more valuable to people: the illusion of "privacy" while driving on public roads (something that doesn't really exist anyway), or the tens of thousands of lives lost on our highways and roads every year. And of course, this is all the more reason to make it viable for people to use means of transportation other than driving: then it becomes more reasonable in the eyes of the public to strip bad drivers of their privileges. And it would be a beneficial cycle, as well: the more bad drivers are kicked off the road, the safer it will become to bike or use other alternatives to driving.
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