First, fines don't go to the local police departments, and local municipalities don't get any financial incentive from issuing more fines. Everything goes to the state, and amount of collected fines is not related to the budgets of the police departments. This means that there are no interests for collecting more fines from any specific demographic.
Second, there are actually two levels of fines. For minor offences (like minor speeding, jaywalking, running a traffic light slightly late) you only get fixed fine. If the offence is serious enough to go to the court, then you may get day fines that are based on the income.
Also, the most extreme fines reported from Finland usually result from cases where someone has cashed nicely from selling a company or something, and because the initial amount of the fine is just based on tax information of the previous year, this may be a very high amount. In reality these fines always become lower in the court. The fines should be based on the current income by the law, and if the defendant can prove that the previous year was just an anomaly and the current income is actually lower, the amount of the fine will be reduced.
I know some wealthy people with very nice cars. They are extra careful to never speed beyond the "safe limit" because it would hurt too much if they got a fine, and instead take their cars to closed race tracks if they want to drive fast. Most people who I see speeding on the roads drive some lower-end cars like BMWs or Audis. I take their speeding as a sign that they probably have barely enough income to afford a car like that and want to show off, because if their income was actually high, they'd be more wary of the financial consequences.
Speeding is a crime because you're risking the safety of other people. There's only "zero damage" if you're lucky. There's potential for a lot of damage. Considering the defined punishment is supposed to act as a deterrent I would argue $67k was actually too low.
Ergo, speeding is not a crime, it is an easy revenue target for greedy municipalities with overpaid cops.
The problem really isn't that you haven't caused damage, rather that you ignored the legal safety limits of the road just to get home a bit earlier while completely ignoring or dismissing that in case of bad luck you could have caused immense damage. Reckless behavior like that, where innocent third parties can be immensely hurt or killed, should be punished.
In Germany, we have strict laws all about this. If you endanger the traffic or any of the (potential) participants of the traffic, you get fined. It doesn't matter if you say "but officer the road was completely empty", the driver is rarely omnipresent to know everything happening on the next kilometer of road.
Accidents aren't predictable but preventable.
To be fair, road usage does matter.
If there is construction you will be fined more. If students traveling to school, the speed limit is lowered.
Point being that not all "speeding" is the same.
Just because you can break a law and it usually works out, doesn't mean that what you're doing isn't a crime.
Actually that is one of the reasons for the speed limit being what it is. Part of the speed limit is determined by the reaction time and stopping distance of a typical driver. That's not you per se, but it has to work for everyone. While a fit young person driving a 2017 Mercedes might feel they can safely drive much faster with all the modern safety features of their car like ABS, traction control, ESP, etc, the speed limit has to also work for an 85 year old in a 1981 Toyoto Corolla that has no safety features, tyres 0.1mm above the legal minimum, and the reaction times of an asthmatic snail.
https://priceonomics.com/is-every-speed-limit-too-low/
> Traffic engineers believe that the 85th percentile speed is the ideal speed limit because it leads to the least variability between driving speeds and therefore safer roads. When the speed limit is correctly set at the 85th percentile speed, the minority of drivers that do conscientiously follow speed limits are no longer driving much slower than the speed of traffic. The choice of the 85th percentile speed is a data-driven conclusion -- as noted Lt. Megge and speed limit resources like the Michigan State Police’s guide -- that has been established by the consistent findings of years of traffic studies.
If I choose to drive wearing a blindfold that wouldn't necessarily mean there's any damage but it should definitely be a crime.
Yes and no.
Those people usually have no role in applying the speed limits.
The max speed limits for a given type of road are given by some non-technical norms, i.e. - as an example - the Law may say that for a highway the max legal limit is 130 km/h, for a state route 90 km/h, etc.
People designing the road need to conform to those Law requirements, and - as a matter of fact - those requirements are normally exceeded (i.e. roads are usually designed in such a way that they could have from a purely technical standpoint higher speed limits).
The issue is particularly relevant where in single stretches of road there is something (a series of curves, a depression, etc.) that imposes (technically) a lower than Law mandated maximum speed for the type of road.
In these cases, if (technically) the max speed is - say - 120 Km/h (instead of 130 km/h) other factors (outside the powers or influence of the designer) will result in a much lower speed limit posted, let's say 90 Km/h.
This is done - usually - in good faith and to enhance security, but often - later - that specific stretch of road becomes a good way to make cash, as noone will suddenly reduce speed from the (allowed and legal till then) 130 km/h to 90 km/h and will go through the curves at 100-120 km/h (still within the technical limits, i.e. "safe enough" but far above the posted limit) thus being subject to fines.
You would of course be liable for any damages actually caused.
Right, that's the whole point of the income-proportional fines: to ensure that the same degree of punishment is given out to the billionaire and junior speeder.
That's actually a very good point, as the "backseat speeder" would likely secretly reimburse the driver if the speeding was done to order. It would make intentional speeding surprisingly cheap for a small group.
(Disagree with everything else you wrote though)
This isn’t about compensating the public (is the criminal justice system ever?)
AFAIK, there traditionally are three arguments for punishment: revenge, prevention of repetition, and punishment. This, I think is about the latter two.
I think the US criminal justice system frequently does make an effort to compensate victims where doing so is straightforward and a necessary part of "unwinding" the crime. For example, someone convicted of wire fraud typically forfeits their ill-gotten gains and where possible, those funds typically go to the victims.
There is a broader concept of criminal restitution, though you're right, more frequently, making amends to victims happens on the civil side.
Civil law is focused on restitution.
IDK if I'd have framed it like dibbsonline did though.
Speeding is a weird example though. If I'm driving I pay based on my income, but if my driver is driving he pays based on his?
> In 2015, it handed a businessman a $67,000 speeding ticket for going 14 miles per hour above the limit.
I just don't see how going 14 mph with zero other damage is equivalent to compensating the public $67k.
"Justice" is about balancing the action with its punishment, not gimmicks like this (that inevitably wind up with a super-complex system of loopholes, deductions, inefficiencies, etc.)