Why I Hate Driving
I am a fairly calm person. I love to get in the car, go for a drive in the sun, listen to music, see the world. And yet, almost every time I get behind the wheel I start ranting and raving in frustration. Driving is great, but other drivers ruin the experience.
And I’m not talking about traffic here. Yes, heavy traffic sucks, and yes, I honestly believe that there is little reason for it. Living closer to where you work should be affordable so people don’t have to commute as far, civil engineers should be better at their jobs to direct traffic flow, there should be more options for roads so when there is an accident the city doesn’t grind to a halt, and rush hour shouldn’t be a thing. But that’s not what we’re talking about today.
The number of times I have seen a driver cut across three lanes to make an illegal left turn is staggering. Drivers who don’t know what happens when the power is out at an intersection. People who change lanes in the middle of an intersection. Drivers who go the wrong way down a one-way street. These are the real problems.
And I see them every day. They are driving dangerously, illegally, recklessly, and they get away with it. And police officers are out there giving pointless parking tickets, and speeding tickets, while the actual dangerous drivers aren’t being taken care of. Now, I’m not saying all speeding tickets are bogus, but when it’s a bright sunny day, you’re on the highway going completely straight, there are no other cars in sight for miles, and there are some officers setting up a speed trap to catch everyone going ten over the limit? That isn’t keeping anyone safe.
My solution? Get rid of traffic police. Entirely. Keep them doing actual work, keeping people safe. Then, give everybody dash cameras on their cars. When you see someone doing something obviously illegal and dangerous, you upload the footage to a police website, and the offender gets a ticket. When they get enough, they lose their license, and they’re off the road.
I think that would be a great solution. You’d catch way more people, and you can ignore the little bit of speeding here and there, and focus on the actually dangerous ones. After a very short while they would be off the road permanently, and society as a whole would get better.
I would even take this one step further, and give people a commission on tickets they cause others to get. You catch someone running a red light almost hitting people in the process? They get a ticket, for $100, and you get to keep $10 of that. I would quit my job and just patrol the streets every day, dishing out justice to the worst people in the world. Think of it as a citizen’s volunteer police force, with incentives.
Quite a lot of people dislike seeing police in their everyday lives, even if they know they haven’t done anything wrong. In cars it is way worse. People see cops, and they slow right down, pretending they’re perfect angels. We all know (even the police) that you’re putting on a show. But the problem isn’t that people don’t trust the police, it’s that people are afraid of getting a ticket for something everyone does. If the limit is 50, people generally drive 70 or 80. Because 50 is stupidly slow. Even the police break that law. And at any point, any police officer can pull over any car, and “legitimately” give them a ticket for breaking it.
It isn’t the fault of the police, it’s a fault of bad laws. But if we make it a thing that the police will only act on dangerous driving (like, for example, going 120 in a school zone while it’s raining), and normal speeding, in general, is never ticketed? I think we’d all get along better.