Opinion: Should speeding ticket fines be based on income?

Surrey RCMP

Written for Daily Hive Urbanized by North Vancouver resident Johnathan French.

Imagine someone who takes a gun with one bullet in the chamber, aims at a busy crowd of people, and pulls the trigger. I’m sure everyone would agree that playing Russian roulette like this is psychotic. I’m sure everyone would agree that the penalty should be high.

This is fundamentally the same idea when it comes to excessive speeding. Sure, it’s one thing to drive maybe five to 10 km/hour over the speed limit, but what about rich kids in BMWs who are regularly caught going twice the speed limit?

This isn’t just reckless behaviour. These are people who deliberately endanger the lives of others and often kill innocent people as a result. This, too, is psychotic behaviour.

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They’re usually fined a few hundred dollars, and their fancy car is temporarily impounded. This doesn’t seem like an adequate punishment for playing Russian roulette with people’s lives.

It’s also unequal; rich people are more incentivized to speed than poor people. For someone earning $40,000 per year, a $200 fine can feel devastating, but for someone earning $400,000 per year, it’s nothing.

There’s a very simple solution: we need higher and more equitable fines for speeding.

Speeding tickets should be tied to income. This wouldn’t significantly affect the average person, but if you earn six figures, get ready to pay thousands of dollars for going over the speed limit. If you’re really rich, you could end up like this Finnish businessman with a €121,000 speeding fine.

We can go a step further, though. In Denmark, if you’re caught going more than double the speed limit, they take away your car and you never get it back. With very few exceptions, it doesn’t matter whose car you’re using; if you drive your parents’ BMW and go double the speed limit, it’s gone, sold, with the money helping to balance the provincial budget.

Sure, there would obviously be exceptions for cases involving stolen cars and the like, but this would address the loophole where rich teens race each other with their parents’ BMWs.

I see no downsides here. If you’re middle or lower-income, this won’t affect you, as long as you don’t go double the speed limit like some kind of psycho. If you’re rich and you want to keep speeding, you would be penalized accordingly.

Income-based fines, along with vehicle seizures for excessive speeding, would serve as a deterrent, significantly lowering the number of traffic deaths. It would also help lower ICBC premiums for everyone, both because of fewer accidents and because of heavier fines collected to help balance the books.

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