Maroc - NEWSDAY.CO.TT - A la Une - 21/Jan 10:15

Driving badly without consequence

FAZIR KHAN RECENT published letters are full of misunderstanding and illogic. Public safety policy must be judged first on its ability to save lives. In a country where road deaths and injuries remain stubbornly high, firm sanctions for dangerous driving are not “economic coercion;” they are overdue protection for every law‑abiding road user. The core misunderstanding in the criticisms of higher traffic fines is a refusal to distinguish between minor inconvenience and catastrophic harm. A driver who chooses to speed, run a red light, drink and drive, or operate an unroadworthy vehicle is not merely “breaking a rule;” that driver is gambling with the lives of passengers, pedestrians and other motorists. Around the world, societies that finally took this reality seriously did exactly what our government is now doing: they raised penalties sharply for the most dangerous offences and matched them with modern enforcement. Brazil’s experience is instructive. When that country overhauled its traffic code, introduced a strict demerit points system and substantially increased fines, emergency‑room admissions for road injuries fell by about one‑third and immediate road deaths dropped by roughly a quarter. Similar patterns were observed in European countries that toughened penalty-points regimes and fines, with documented reductions in crashes, injuries and fatalities. Canadian provinces that created special high‑fines for “excessive speeding” also reported fewer deaths and serious trauma. The lesson is consistent: when sanctions become meaningful, behaviour changes and fewer families bury loved ones. It is simply not true that “higher fines do not deter.” Deterrence is a function of both certainty and severity. TT already struggles with limited enforcement capacity. If the penalty for a life‑threatening act is a trivial sum that bears no relation to modern incomes or the cost of a funeral, then the expected cost of offending remains close to zero. Raising fines for high‑risk conduct restores proportionality between the offence and the harm, and it ensures that those who wilfully endanger others feel a real, not symbolic, consequence. Claims that tougher penalties are unfair to poorer citizens invert the reality of who suffers most from bad driving. It is working‑class pedestrians, schoolchildren, passengers in taxis and maxis, and families who rely on a single breadwinner who pay the highest price in blood and grief. A serious collision can push a household into permanent poverty. By contrast, a heavy fine is entirely avoidable: no driver is compelled to speed, drink and drive, or race on the nation’s roads. Justice requires that the burden falls on the person who chooses to create the risk, not on the innocent family that ends up in the mortuary or the ICU. Far from undermining democracy, updating traffic penalties is part of responsible governance. For years, technocrats and safety advocates have warned that our fines were outdated and that a modern demerit points system, automated enforcement and tougher sanctions were needed. The present reforms answer that call. Of course, implementation must be transparent, with safeguards such as judicial discretion, payment plans for genuinely indigent offenders, and public reporting on how fine revenues support road‑safety improvements. But those design questions do not erase the central ethical imperative: government has a duty to act when preventable deaths mount. If we are honest, the outcry against higher fines is less about constitutional principle and more about resistance to personal inconvenience. Yet the real “inconvenience” is suffered by those permanently disabled, by parents who must identify a child in the morgue, and by communities that lose productive citizens in avoidable crashes. A society that tolerates such loss while insisting that even the most reckless drivers face only token penalties is not defending liberty; it is abandoning responsibility. The choice is stark. Either TT continues to treat its roads as lawless spaces where risk‑taking is cheap and tragedy is common, or it accepts that meaningful sanctions, alongside better education and enforcement, are the price of safer streets. The government’s move to increase traffic fines, especially for the gravest offences, is not punishment masquerading as policy. It is a long‑delayed declaration that the right to reach home alive outweighs the privilege of driving badly without consequence. The post Driving badly without consequence appeared first on Trinidad and Tobago Newsday.