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Comment by Baltasaur | Hacker News Reader

This is such a colossally bad take. Tickets have the distinct purpose of disincentivizing dangerous driving. They don't do that if it's a flat fare and the person breaking the speed limit is sufficiently wealthy. Thus, if you want speeding tickets to affect everyone equally, you make them proportional.

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The fee is only one aspect of the ticket. The other aspect is demerits on your license which go toward revoking it. Dangerous driving is discouraged by the threat of getting your license revoked, not by getting a fine. Speeding tickets do affect everyone equally, by applying the same number of demerits toward revocation of the license. Hence why rich people don't drive like maniacs even though they can "afford" to from a purely monetary standpoint.

>> Dangerous driving is discouraged by the threat of getting your license revoked, not by getting a fine.

If so, then why not use that exclusively and get rid of speeding tickets?

Despite this, it’s (judging by cars) lower income people who tend to be the idiots driving recklessly on the streets. Being passed by a shitty Honda doing 120mph is common, being passed by a new luxury car doing the same is much rarer.

Why? Probably because rich people statistically tend to have better long term thinking and lower impulsivity, which is why they’re rich in the first place.

That may be true, but only for people who made their fortunes themselves - and even then you have some amount of luck involved. It doesn't work for those who inherited their fortunes, or simply won $100M in a lottery.

income is distributed exponentially. it's a very small slice of society that can get a $500 ticket and not care. I'm sure it makes the constituents happy to jack up the fines for rich people, but there are too few of them for it to meaningfully impact road safety.

Speeding tickets do not cost $500. Most are <$100.

>his is such a colossally bad take. Tickets have the distinct purpose of disincentivizing dangerous driving.

Tickets are never treated as a revenue stream by state and local governments. /s

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