Fines for Failing to Recycle

[SaggyBalls]

I'd seen the numbers released several days ago, AD.

[AD]

So there were 140,000 cars checked across the province?

[AD]

Getting 1 drunk driver off the road is effective. Period.

[SaggyBalls]

Say you're driving along and somebody blatantly cuts you off. There's a chance you'll honk your horn, or maybe give the guy a little yell? Now say the guy that cut you off is driving a Harley and sporting a Hells Angels vest. You gonna honk now? Maybe years of harsh punishment (or at least the anecdotal rumours of) will affect your behavior in this situation?

Ah, probably not. What am I saying?

Years of harsh punishment for what? Running him over for getting off his bike to threaten me for yelling at him for cutting me off? I'd probably do it a second time if it meant the guy couldn't walk or ride his bike anymore, prison turning me into a criminal.

Studies show again and again that people don't respond as well to fines and punishment as they do to believing they'll get caught and inconvenienced.

Canada has the second highest rates of incarceration of any industrialized democratic nation and there's been no benefit to our society. It costs too much, doesn't rehabilitate offenders, and does nothing to lower our crime rate year after year. While it's near its lowest point in 30 years, that fact can't be attributed to our incarceration rates. We keep getting 'tough on crime' in response to a safer and safer society. Being tougher on crime actually makes crime more profitable in the long run.

Instead of a fine for recycling just leave their garbage until it's put out properly. Fines should be for leaving trash by the curb for more than 2 days if anything.

The inconvenience of having to go through weeks of rotten or mixed garbage would be far more effective than fines ever will.

Imagine if we spent a solid fraction of what's spent on RIDE programs on extending public transit past 3 AM and making taxi service more affordable and opening the market up to more companies: Fewer people would be impaired on the roads to begin with. Much better than having to 'police' people and the remaining police could actually protect and serve.

I wonder what the Recycling cops are going to cost Gatineau.

[SaggyBalls]

RIDE Campaign Continues

Josh Pringle

Thursday, December 30, 2010

The annual OPP Festive RIDE campaign is heading into the final weekend.

A total of 35 motorists have been charged with Impaired Driving at RIDE checkpoints across eastern Ontario since the campaign began at the end of November, including six over the Christmas weekend.

A total of 146-thousand motorists have been stopped at RIDE checkpoints across Eastern Ontario.

The OPP has issued 69 warnings to motorists, 28 90-day suspensions and 979 other criminal charges.

Across Ontario, the OPP has charged 256 motorists with Impaired Driving at RIDE checkpoints, and issued 218 90-day suspensions.

Actually, AD there were over a million across the province

Ontario police wrap up R.I.D.E. campaign

Orillia, Ontario – The Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) have wrapped up the annual Festive R.I.D.E. (Reduce Impaired Driving Everywhere) initiative, checking over 1,099,021 vehicles on OPP-patrolled roadways from November 26 to January 2.

The police charged 294 people with impaired driving, over .08 blood alcohol concentration (BAC), or for refusal to comply with a demand to provide a breath sample. An additional 5,011 charges were laid for other offences under the Criminal Code, Highway Traffic Act or Liquor Licence Act.

Officers also issued 256 administrative driver’s licence suspensions for criminal code-related drinking and driving offences, and 605 suspensions for BAC in the “warn range.â€

In 2009, the R.I.D.E. initiative checked 1,199,280 vehicles, resulting in 299 persons charged with criminal code alcohol-related offences, along with 5,195 charges for other Criminal Code, Highway Traffic Act or Liquor Licence Act offences, and 746 warn range suspensions.

Preliminary statistics indicate that during 2010, a total of 330 people were killed on roads patrolled by the OPP, with 68 of them alcohol-related, an increase of 17 alcohol-related deaths from 2009.

less than a half of one percent effective for all charges

And about an eighteenth of that for alcohol-related offences, including refusing to blow.

RIDE programs are all about metrics - how many people are visibly drunk/impaired? How many have broken headlights or taillights, how many need an e-test, who's blatantly smoking weed or acting strangely...when less than half of one percent of people stopped are going to be charged for anything at all it tells me that the roads are certainly safe.

I wonder how many people think about the less than 300 drunk drivers stopped at RIDE programs as a high number.

We're never going to stop people dying on the roads until we outlaw driving and leave it to computers to manage traffic flow.

Edited January 5, 2011 by Guest

[AD]

Perhaps getting drunks out from behind the wheel is a bit more meaningful than stats and rates and percentages, surely nobody can argue with that.

I'm impressed that police checked so many cars.

[bouche]

Studies show again and again that people don't respond as well to fines and punishment as they do to believing they'll get caught and inconvenienced.

Dismissed. FYI, this didn't help your 'argument' in a positive way.

[ollie]

This veer into drunk driving reminds me of an article I read recently:

Abolish Drunk Driving Laws

Poignant excerpt:

Critics of the 0.08 standard predicted this would happen. The problem is that most people with a BAC between 0.08 and 0.10 don’t drive erratically enough to be noticed by police officers in patrol cars. So police began setting up roadblocks to catch them. But every cop manning a sobriety checkpoint aimed at catching motorists violating the new law is a cop not on the highways looking for more seriously impaired motorists. By 2004 alcohol-related fatalities went down again, but only because the decrease in states that don’t use roadblocks compensated for a slight but continuing increase in the states that use them.

These constitutionally dubious checkpoints have become little more than revenue generators for local governments. When local newspapers inquire about specific roadblocks after the fact, they inevitably find lots of fines for minor infractions but few drunk drivers. In 2009, according to a story at the investigative journalism site California Watch and data from the University of California at Berkeley, 1,600 sobriety checkpoints in California generated $40 million in fines, $30 million in overtime pay for cops, 24,000 vehicle confiscations, and just 3,200 arrests for drunk driving. A typical nightly checkpoint would divert 20 or more cops from other tasks while yielding a dozen or more vehicle confiscations but only about three drunk driving arrests.

As you can see the issue isn't as simple as the "if having checkpoints gets just 1 drunk driver off the street then it's a justified method" argument.

[SaggyBalls]

What else have they to do?

Crime rates are at a near 30 year low.

It's part of their job.

People die in car crashes every day and if one person is within impaired limits Alcohol is always blamed. End of story, lady over there was drunk it must have been her fault - not the asshole that is going to work who has the flu or is trying to get over a cold or underslept.

It's important to have your wits about you while driving I wholly agree, but there are a lot of awful sober drivers on the road too.

Perhaps more people should look at the stats and realize there's a bigger picture than drunk drivers & speeding and look at congestion and mass transit concerns as the big ones to bring more focus to to keep the streets flowing and the roads safer.

With all the drinking over the holidays shouldn't they have found far more people driving drunk?

It's not the fine it's getting caught with some kind of consequence and inconvenience attached. Losing your license temporarily when you'd have to drive to work or get your kids to school perhaps? The increased fines over the years have only served to bring more media attention and notoriety to the fact that people are getting caught. And there is, of course, the increased revenue from those fines.

Now...what if you didn't recycle one week and didn't use your green bin properly and every week your garbage piled up.

Unless you found a dumpster somewhere you could use you'd have to go through that garbage sometime. Wouldn't do it more than twice I'm sure.

This veer into drunk driving reminds me of an article I read recently:

Abolish Drunk Driving Laws

Thanks for the read. I'm tired of the drunk driver example being brought up as a sort of moral high ground in discussions like these and am glad I'm not the only one that doesn't entirely buy it.

[AD]

Can I fine you for recycling a naive argument?

[SaggyBalls]

Only if you could first define it as such and justfy that.

I'm not without critical judgement on this issue and have looked at it from a number of angles before settling on this one for now.

Certainly not naive.

[AD]

People die in car crashes every day and if one person is within impaired limits Alcohol is always blamed. End of story, lady over there was drunk it must have been her fault - not the asshole that is going to work who has the flu or is trying to get over a cold or underslept.

Why aren't you calling the woman who is DUI on public roads in an accident an asshole? She deserves it. Go for it...

[SaggyBalls]

In my example the asshole was the one that caused the crash and would have also been likely to infect his coworkers with a virus.

Just because I didn't label the lady an inconsiderate idiot that doesn't mean I want her to be my friend.

It's easy to stop investigating when there's something to blame.

Edited January 5, 2011 by Guest

[Kanada Kev]

I'd rather have all those cops at check-points asking for ID and nailing people for "insignificant" secondary bs, out on the roads PATROLLING and watching for erratic driving. Not only would they be able to catch inebriated drivers, but also those equally as dangerous texting their friends while driving.

Add to that, why is it that they think drunk drivers are out there more in December and not in April? Sure, xmas parties etc, but those who are chronic drunk drivers do so all year long.

Checkpoints success rates are not good enough. But are they truly a deterrent? Of those CHARGED, let's just see how many are CONVICTED. The numbers start to look more strange.

[Jaimoe]

Just to be safe, cops should just arrest anyone driving a BMW. Fucking pricks of the road.

[AD]

So many expert cops on the board!!

[Booche]

I wish I was a cop and could off judgemental pricks at my own discretion. AD&Velvet = safe.

[SaggyBalls]

Judgmental: Inclined to make judgments, especially moral or personal ones

So of the judgmental pricks that have posted here, AD and Velvet are the safe ones?

[hamilton]

Instead of a fine for recycling just leave their garbage until it's put out properly. Fines should be for leaving trash by the curb for more than 2 days if anything.

The inconvenience of having to go through weeks of rotten or mixed garbage would be far more effective than fines ever will.

Doing this would inconvenience more people than just the individual who put there garbage out incorrectly. It would also pose a health risk due to the vermin it would attract to the area.

[SaggyBalls]

And THAT would bring existing fines. Hefty ones.

We don't need new rules when we actually enforce the existing rules.

It's more efficient to actually use the system that's been created instead of presuming there aren't enough tools in the box to fix the problem.

[bouche]

Thanks for the read. I'm tired of the drunk driver example being brought up as a sort of moral high ground in discussions like these and am glad I'm not the only one that doesn't entirely buy it.

Hey OPP! This guy is swerving all over the place!

[hamilton]

And THAT would bring existing fines. Hefty ones.

We don't need new rules when we actually enforce the existing rules.

It's more efficient to actually use the system that's been created instead of presuming there aren't enough tools in the box to fix the problem.

But didn't you just say that

Studies show again and again that people don't respond as well to fines and punishment as they do to believing they'll get caught and inconvenienced.

So, we shouldn't fine people, we should inconvenience them... so that we create a health risk... so that we can fine them... even though you think that fining doesn't work?

[Velvet]

So anyway, my main point was that thirty years ago when the punishment for drunk driving was minor and RIDE programs did not exist, drunk driving was much more prevelant. So prevelant in fact that judges in Canada deemed it necessary to sanction the obvious infringement on the publics right to privacy by allowing the RIDE programs to come into being in the first place.

If we can agree that people used to be much more likely to drive after a few beers than they are now, then these stats showing such small numbers of people getting caught DUI this year suggests that harsher punishments can alter societal behavior.

[larry_llama]

YT you should come on over to the bike forums and join my rally against helmets :-)

[SaggyBalls]

I'm certainly not swerving.

Velvet, where you're right about behaviour changing not on its own, The DUI numbers suggest that GETTING CAUGHT AND INCONVENIENCED deters people. There is nothing about any data that proves that it's bigger fines. These bigger fines get media attention and talk around the water cooler.

From Bill C-36 to the smart meters from the power company, we're either having unnecessary rules or inconvenient and uncomfortable expenses imposed upon us disguised as necessary or important.

I hope that at least some of you can see this happening.