[British-cars] Recalls & Smart Laws

[Simon Matthews]

On Thu, 28 Jun 2007, pethier at comcast.net wrote:

> From: "FRED E THOMAS" <frede.thomas2 at verizon.net>
>> New Virginia law effective on Monday July 2, 2007,
>> failure to give hand signal or turn signal regular cost of court plus fine,
>> then DMV will charge a "FEE" from $1050.00 for 1st offense
>

Would this not be unconstitutional? It is obviously not a fee, since the 
amount is unrelated to the cost, and thus, it would be an extra-judicial 
punishment. 
> Not exactly "first offense".
>
> Read
> http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/26/AR2007062601970_2.html
> and you will see you need 8 points on your record to be hit with these fees.
>
> Interesting part is that if you are from Maryland (or Minnesota) they can't charge the fees.  Flip-flop on the usual "soak-the-out-of-staters' philosophy.
>
> Some European systems are interesting.  In some countries you pay fines proportional to your income.  Some guy in Scandianvia got a fine for speeding or the like in his Lambo(?) and it was many thousands of dollars.  Anybody have a pointer to this story to fill in the blanks of my Swiss-cheese memory?

They tried that in the UK. What happened was that the baseline was set 
assuming the current levels of fines were appropriate for someone at or 
below poverty and hence it led to outlandishly high fines for people on 
middle earnings levels (since it did not take account of fixed 
outgoings or real disposable income).  I doubt many people would object to 
someone in a Lambo being fined thousands of dollars, but when similar 
fines are levied against someone in a very ordinary car, (and for parking) 
the population tends to get uneasy.