Originally Posted by
B. Carfree
I agree. I also think the quickest and most effective way to change the culture is to get local police departments to get serious about traffic law enforcement. This has some added benefits. First of all, folks who are not criminally inclined will fairly quickly comply with the law when faced with real enforcement, which means the criminals will be easy to find. When I lived where traffic laws were seriously enforced most of the burglaries were solved through traffic stops. Second of all, if the fines are set high enough it is a program that can pay for itself.
Conversely, I think that local police departments failing to take traffic law enforcement seriously has been one of the major contributing factors behind the development of what I think can fairly be described as a culture of lawlessness among motorists in many parts of the U.S. "Everyone" speeds, rolls stop signs, rolls through right turns on red, etc, because "everyone" knows that the chance of there being a penalty for doing so is virtually zero. Police budgets have either been cut, or failed to keep up with needs, or been diverted to buying expensive toys for SWAT teams, instead of going to basic traffic law enforcement. The result, predictably, has been an erosion in law-abiding behavior among motorists. And that drives social norms in the wrong direction.
The power of the police isn't just that they're going to pull over the dangerous drivers and stop them from driving dangerously. It's also that they help to shape people's ideas about what is and isn't acceptable behavior. People obey the laws more when they know that society disapproves of what they are doing. The police are a visible way of showing that disapproval.