51 Offences in 45 Minutes

Shades wrote:

CXR94Di2 wrote:

All the police need to do is mount a camera on the side of a road going into city/town and record people using phones, record no Insurance,  vehicle tax,mot etc.  Stop them a few hundred yards down the road and issue points and fines.

 

I see loads of folk who should be caught.

What happened to good old fashioned random police checks?  I got pulled over in the US for being slightly over the speed limit; I wasn’t going to complain with 2 armed Georgia cops walking towards me.  Scrutinised my Brit licence and told me my speeding points had expired (which was correct) and that I needed to get my licence updated.  I’d have passed out if a UK cop had gone to that level of detail.  Mind you, I did some time in Zimbabwe; you grin like a Cheshire cat when a bloke with an AK47 peers through your window!

Good old UK; don’t upset the motorists.

What happened to good old fashioned random checks?  I think they went out the window when the government realised replacing coppers in cars with speed camers saved them loads of money on wages and petrol and buying cars, and brought in loads of money on fines.  Because speed cameras save lives, right? 

And WMP admit they missed

And WMP admit they missed some offences!

Yorkshire wallet wrote:

So ban driving then? or double or triple fuel tax and see what great things happen. Stuff like RTAs, health problems and policing are not directly noticeable in people’s pockets. £20 on petrol this week is £20 not on something else in the retail sector.

So £20 into government coffers, VS

£20 into retail, where we can rely on them paying a fair wage and all due taxes and that £20 making its way round the community and feeding people. Except it doesn’t work – trickle down economics has been discredited consistently since it was first termed, and yet people who think they somehow benefit from it insist on believing it, despite the actual existence of Panama Papers and HSBC leaks and offshore trusts and village-size yachts. If you want to inject £20 into the community you’re much better off paying £20 more in benefits – that cash DOES stay in the community. 

Or, the short answer – Amazon.

So ban driving then? or

So ban driving then? or double or triple fuel tax and see what great things happen. Stuff like RTAs, health problems and policing are not directly noticeable in people’s pockets. £20 on petrol this week is £20 not on something else in the retail sector. I’m not looking at long term health and neither are most of the population who may be living week to week, not decades down the line. It’s like smoking, people chose to do it regardless of how much you tell them it’s bad.

Yorkshire wallet wrote:

Look at it another way Davel, we aren’t living in times where anyone is saving anything so all the extra money people would spend on petrol is money that they don’t spend elsewhere and people lose their jobs and go on benefits. Round and round it goes. If you get hit in the pocket you stop spending on something.

 

I think that’s a fallacy.  It’s based on the idea that if you don’t account for a cost, it magically dissappears.  Or it’s akin to the idea you could help the economy by encouraging more crime (smashing windows creates jobs for glaziers!).

Motoring has costs, whether it’s accounted for in the tax system or not.   At the moment most of those costs are just hidden under other categories without being specifically paid by motorists or put in the ‘motoring’ column when it comes to adding up the figures.

  The ideal would be by increasing taxes on it you oblige those choosing to drive to factor in the real cost of the behaviour when making the choice to engage in it, causing them to do it less and find alternatives.  Thus reducing the costs imposed on everyone in the form of externalities like pollution and health problems and RTAs and policing…etc.  Thus making everyone better off.

Obviously, though the huge problem is making it work out in that ‘ideal’ way.  Which almost certainly requires not just increasing taxes but also making alternatives more viable.

hawkinspeter wrote:

Why can’t other forces just copy the West Midlands Police? Is it just that they’re super-human or is it that other forces just don’t care?

Both innit. 

It’s politically unfavourable to join in The War On Motorists – another headline today reports that scrapping the freeze on petrol duty would net the treasury £30bn+. Or, look at that another way – the freeze COSTS £30bn+. And sustainable transport has to fight for the pennies…

So it takes a heroic kind of DGAF sprinkled with The Right Thing and evidence-based policy (remember that?) to do what WMP are doing. 

A truly impressive haul.
A truly impressive haul.

One guy was driving the kids to school with no insurance from all of 500 metres away. Muppet.