Quote:
Originally Posted by GGG
The government should be interested in traffic safety not revenue. If the whole concept of fines improve driving performance works then reducing demerits is not in the interests of government.
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Should be, but they aren’t.
That’s why photo enforcement (which carries no demerit penalty) is so much more popular. I haven’t seen a manned police speed trap in nearly three months in any of the hot-spots, it’s all photo enforcement. The fact that photo enforcement programs are not a bonus but
money that cities are actually relying on for their budgets should tell anyone their actual purpose. A successful photo enforcement program would be an ever-receding revenue generator as it successfully reduces speeding and makes roads safer; in other words, it should get closer to being a cost center over time if it really works. Instead, it is designed to be as predatory as possible to be as profitable as possible. Only reason Edmonton is facing a shortfall from photo enforcement is because the province decided to take a much larger slice of the pie with the new photo enforcement legislation. The City of Speed Traps wasn’t prepared for that.
So yeah, the government should be interested in traffic safety, but they pretty clearly aren’t, at least certainly not as their primary motivator for traffic enforcement programs. They just want your money and will try to make it as appealing as possible for you to quietly pay them and go away, instead of reducing their profit margins by contesting the ticket through the courts.