alt Hacker NewsThe solution is surprisingly simple. You just need moderate enforcement of fines that are scaled to the offenders income and that escalate exponentially with reoffense in a reasonable time period.
Fines should be designed to make it uneconomical to continue to reoffend.
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The fines are already plenty high, it's just that they are essentially not enforced at all. You could definitely illegally commute everyday in a carpool lane, and expect to maybe get a $409 ticket between 0 and 1 times every 5 years or so.
A $490 ticket every 5 years works out to only $1.88 per week- effectively free for anyone that makes enough money to commute in a car in the first place.
That sort of stuff makes for great fantasy for people who fancy themselves central planners but back in the real world it flied in the face of the principals of a) punishment fitting the crime b) justice being blind-ish, which "real society" values far more than internet comment sections would have you believe.
That should only be the case if the fine was actually prosecuted in court.
Plenty of people pay the fine and admit to guilt to avoid being further penalized with court fees, etc. In other words, many people just pay a injustice fine to avoid more trouble. This would punish those type of people even more.
> Fines should be designed to make it uneconomical to continue to reoffend.
Great. Fine me $1 million, and I will fight the case with lawyers, thus slowing down the public legal system for thousands of other legal cases, whether traffic related or otherwise.
> The solution is surprisingly simple
Has this been tested and shown to be successful or is your confidence based on feels?
You're being downvoted by people for whom this would be incredibly inconvenient.
More than that, you need to enforce the existing laws. Raising the fines but continuing zero enforcement will do nothing.