The National Post‘s Chris Selley tells the story of a woman in Toronto who by mistake drove a Mercedes SUV into a booth at Toronto’s City Place Urban Market, killing one of two sisters in the booth. For this crime, the driver was given a $1,000 fine and a six month driving ban, but could still use the car for work and medical appointments.In another example, a driver who hit and killed a six-year-old child legally walking in a marked crosswalk. The penalty? A two-year driving prohibition and a $2,000 fine.
A driver talking on a cellphone received only 20 days in jail and a two-year driving ban for killing a senior crossing a street on a green light. Why? Because under the Criminal Code “generally speaking, we shouldn’t be throwing people in jail for making careless mistakes, as opposed to for gross negligence or genuine intent to cause harm.”
The consequences resulting from killing by careless driving are still early twentieth century. You were inattentive, you didn’t really mean to kill the person. But in ” Ontario, the Burlington MPP and cabinet minister Eleanor McMahon tabled a private member’s bill last year that would create a new offence: “careless driving causing death or bodily harm.”McMahon’s late husband, OPP officer Greg Stobbart, died in 2006 after a driver struck him while he was cycling. The driver, Michael Duggan, had five convictions for driving with a suspended licence, four for driving uninsured, and a criminal record to boot. He had only just gotten his licence back — and only lost it again for a year.”
“People rarely feel gratified by someone who kills their loved one and walks away with a $500 fine,” says McMahon. “I want to recognize and honour that feeling of egregious resentment that people feel, that the law really … isn’t reflecting their sentiments.”
Is it time for the updating of Provincial highway and traffic acts to reflect the true impacts of killing pedestrians and cyclists on the street? How did it happen that the maiming and murdering of innocent street users are still not reflected in the consequences? How did driving become a right?
I personally don’t believe that harsh penalties will be very effective in curbing road casualties. (Based on evidence from other areas of life.) We already know that texting and driving is deadly; if that’s not enough of a deterrent when our phones ring, the threat of a long jail sentence won’t do much.
On the legal side of driving, I think we should focus much more on licensing. Driving is, by far, the most dangerous thing most adults do on a regular basis. And yet, we undergo testing once, usually as teenagers, and never again. A man in his 70s can still be licensed to drive based on a test he took more than 50 years ago. This is preposterous.
At work, people have to get re-certified on a regular basis to do all kinds of activities, from operating a forklift to climbing cellular towers. Why not for driving?
It’s time to bring in regular driving tests for everyone. I’m not sure what the interval should be (5 years, perhaps?) but we should need to re-certify throughout our lives. And, of course, if we don’t pass, we don’t drive.
I would not put my faith in testing or training. Following a previous discussion here, I found this paper:
“Conventional driver training programs in the U.S. (30 h classroom and 6 h on-the-road) probably reduce per licensed driver crash rates by as little as 5% over the first 6–12 months of driving. The possibility of an effect closer to 0 cannot be dismissed.”
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0386111211000021
I agree about retesting. New signs and rules come along and people should know about them. The world of traffic is a completely different place than it was forty years ago. You can’t just drive along acting like it’s still like what they told you back then.
Based on other countries’ experience harsh penalties can help. It should be pretty easy to find evidence what works and what doesn’t.
Hey Antje, I’d be interested in seeing some examples if you have any
Many research papers, for example: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1369847815001242
Also check number of incidences in a jurisdiction after penalties were increased. For example drunk driving in BC or red light running in Germany.
No amount of re-testing and licensing will stop the casual indifference to life on our roads. The issue here is that automobiles shield people from even thinking about real-life consequences such as causing another’s death. From giganticized SUV’s to small compacts, cars provide a special type of alienation from the world around us: we are protected from weather, sound, surveillance and, most importantly, any consideration for others. (And this is why they are THE consumer product par excellence). With those steel and plastic skins wrapped around us, we can do what we like, when we like and to whomever we like. In this regards, we need a reminder of what our actions could possibly entail. Criminalizing death by automobile is an important step towards this goal. It worked for drinking and driving.
“Criminalizing death by automobile is an important step towards this goal. It worked for drinking and driving.”
Yes, I think the campaign against drinking and driving is a useful model. It has made drinking and driving socially unacceptable.
However, I also suspect that the drinking and driving efforts have contributed to the problem. By treating inebriation as a special case, they make it clear that we as a society are willing to accept other instances of reckless driving as a matter of course. Reckless driving is heavily punished while under the influence: but equally reckless driving is often given a slap on the wrist when alcohol is not involved. How can it possibly make sense to punish someone less for bad behaviour when they are in their right mind than when they are not?
My feeling is that there is no need for special cases for alcohol: apply existing drinking and driving penalties across the board whenever driving can be shown to be reckless. Simplify the law. Do not treat alcohol as an aggravating factor. Instead, it take it as proof of wilful intent to drive recklessly.
But as Agustin says we can punish people as hard as we like; without cultural change, the law has little impact. Right now, reckless driving is accepted as normal. Just the other day, a friend complained that Vancouver drivers are terrible due to lack of enforcement. Shortly afterward, she was doing 62 in a 50 zone. She is a skilled driver, but if someone runs out into the street her skill will not exempt her from the laws of physics. That kind of behaviour should be as socially unacceptable as sipping beer while you steer. As it stands, it is criticism of such actions that is not socially acceptable.
I suspect that if BC were to revoke the licenses of the bottom quintile of drivers on the road, that road violence would be be reduced considerably.
Even taking the lowest 5% off the raoads would make a huge difference. I can’t find the numbers, but in his book “No Accident” Neil Arason showed that the bottom 5% cause way more than 5% of the crashes.
As a result of a century of building our cities as slaves to the car, society has now come to believe that it’s too difficult for too many people to function without one. THAT’s how driving became a right.
That observation becomes profound when one attempts to quantify the cost of “building our cities as slaves to the car.” Human attrition through death and injury is of course the most appalling element.
I’d say land use is pretty high up on the list too. A 110 m segment of residential road allowance occupies the equivalent area as six standard Vancouver lots. If roads were valuated at the same level as detached home residential, that segment would be worth $12 million in land alone even without any structures or services. One dead storage space for a car would be worth $25,000.
This brain game illustrates how the public infrastructure required to underpin such extreme levels of car dependency has become one of the most dominant difficulties of public finance when there is a gross land shortage for better uses.
Whatever penalty that applies to someone if they dropped a can of paint onto someone’s head from a ladder and killed them should apply. There is no need for a special law for vehicles.
Your argument breaks down when you compare the annual death and injury stats between car accidents and death by falling paint cans. You’re equating Siwash Rock to Mt. Robson.
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