Swiss BMW Driver Slammed with $116,000 Tailgating Fine Because He's Rich

https://www.thedrive.com/news/swiss-bmw-driver-slammed-with-116000-tailgating-fine-because-hes-rich

by ivewonyoung • 2 years ago

41 98 2 years ago

How much would Bezos or Musk be charged for a similar traffic ticket

Article says that there is a cap of CHF3,000 for the daily rate and that the fine imposed in this case was 50 daily rates. So the maximum fine is CHF150k or about $175k.

IncreasePosts2• 2 years ago

Can they just apply as many daily rates as they want? Where does the 50 come from?

_the_inflator• 2 years ago

Rule number 1 when you go to Switzerland: it is the most anti-car country there is.

There are so many possibilities to make costly "lessons" if you do not prepare in advance. I lived in Zurich - lovely country, but what in other countries is more or less tolerated or fined with a price tag of two McDonalds menus, can hit you very hard.

A parking violation and driving a bit too fast downhill (it's a hilly region, isn't it?) because you overlooked a sign, and not only ordinary people will wish they were billionaires.

klingoff2• 2 years ago

Switzerland is a car country that would make AAA drool. But it doesn't have the same approach to laws and flexibility of the system as the US because it didn't need to encode different outcomes for different people in authority discretion like the US did.

seanmcdirmid• 2 years ago

Rule number 1 when you go to Switzerland: it is the most anti-car country there is.

Not even close, even for the more general superalative meaning of most.

Lots of Swiss drive, car and gas prices are more affordable than the rest of Europe, many Swiss live outside of big cities where parking is harder/expensive. I even saw a drive thru at a McDonalds in Renens (suburb near Lausanne), which...I've never seen a drive thru at McDonalds anywhere else in Europe (although I only lived in Switzerland).

Yes, Switzerland is very law and order, you follow the rules (like in Germany). But it is definitely a place where you can drive if you want, and many people do.

looofooo0• 2 years ago

No, Swiss love their cars, but in an orderly fashion. Most relaxed driving in Europe.

pjmlp2• 2 years ago

I also lived in Switzerland for a couple of years, learn to abide by the rules, no problem.

bko6• 2 years ago

I think the law should apply equally to all. That means you don't give special breaks or come down especially hard on someone just because of their economic circumstances.

The funny thing about this opinion is that it is both extremely widely shared and extremely unpopular, depending on the context. Just seems invasive to me for a court to demand your personal monetary situation when determining how much to punish you.

The flip side to this is no-cash bail and people being allowed back on the streets after committing awful anti-social crimes. In NYC some people get released on no cash bail for 2nd degree manslaughter. But you know, economic circumstances

https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/all-crimes-new-york-bai...

jgeada• 2 years ago

The law should have the same consequences for everyone. $1M fine for you is likely making you bankrupt, but is a rounding error for Elon. Is that the same consequence?

If fines don't scale with wealth, they mean the activity is only illegal for the poor & middle class.

bko6• 2 years ago

So in principle, different rules for different people? If you have no money you should be able to break the law more cheaply?

Principles are principles for a reason. You don't hold equal treatment / punishment under the law as a principle. Equal does not mean relative to something.

8organicbits• 2 years ago

Courts can imprison you, take your assets, and much more. Asking your income is pretty mild.

Analemma_3• 2 years ago

The word "equality" is underdetermined here. To me, it is obvious that scaling fines with income (so everyone gets 1/500th of their annual wage for a speeding ticket, e.g.) is equality and that flat fine amounts, being a larger burden on the poor, are unequal. Apparently you don't agree, but that means we need to sit down and hash out an agreed-on definition of equality first, not go slinging around emotive rhetoric.

bko6• 2 years ago

Imagine speeding and then having to disclose your income to the court. Seems very invasive and dystopian.

michaelt• 2 years ago

Just seems invasive to me for a court to demand your personal monetary situation when determining how much to punish you.

What if the default punishment was instead a nice, equitable 21 days in jail for rich and poor alike, with the option to instead pay a fine of 21 days income, if you were willing to disclose your income?

fmobus• 2 years ago

would still be worse for the poor. 21 days without being able to work is life-crashing when you are living paycheck to paycheck.

IncreasePosts2• 2 years ago

The law does apply equally.

The law is: your fine amount is based on your daily income.

This law is applied equally.

itsdrewmiller2• 2 years ago

Fining 1% of income is no less principled than fining a flat $1000.

archagon• 2 years ago

“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.”

dzhiurgis5• 2 years ago

IDK everyone seems to be happy with taxes taking a fixed % and most countries even higher % if you work your ass off.

fragmede2• 2 years ago

The equality is that the fine is for hours of your life it takes to pay that fine. If you make $20/hr and the fine is $100, that's 5 hours of work that you could use to pay for whatever, that you have to use to pay the ticket. If you make $200/hr, then the fine is $1,000, also 5 hours of your life. That's where the equality is. No matter who you are, violating this thing costs, in this example, 5 hours of work.

hi-v-rocknroll• 2 years ago

Compared to the person making minimum wage (say $11/hr) receiving a $450 fine paid on an installment plan, I think this sends the right message.

Income proportional fines should also have an alternative minimum fine that weighs their entire liquid balance sheet value because it's entirely possible decamillionaires to billionaires keep their live expenses allowances low compared to vast assets they control.

stevekemp• 2 years ago

The day-fine system is kinda interesting, because it recognizes that the impact of paying a $500 fine is very different based on your income.

I was surprised to learn that the UK experimented with it, briefly, but it's something that exists in several other countries for example Finland has had the system since 1921.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day-fine

Daviey• 2 years ago

For speeding, we do have a fine based on your weekly income. It can be up to 175% of your weekly income (capped to £2,500), if doing >100 MPH on a motorway (or >76 MPH if speed restricted to 50 MPH).

jrm42• 2 years ago

Good. We should do more to tailor fines to income to the extent feasible. Otherwise it's just a hardship for the poor and an inconvenience fee for the rich.

_bin_• 2 years ago

No, not good. $116k is a ridiculous fine for tailgating. Fines should be at least partially related to the damage or potential damage inflicted on the public. I'd be fine with sublinear scaling but straightline increasing a fine ad infinitum is ridiculous. And/or the fine should be cut for the poor.

I think there's a big difference between what people say (the poor shouldn't be massively overburdened by a traffic fine, which most people would support), and what many advocates of these policies are actually motivated by (make the rich pay reeeee), which is silly schadenfreude I won't support.

indoordin0saur3• 2 years ago

I'll add that it could create some really perverse incentives. Small town cops encouraged to pull over any newer or more expensive car and ignoring ones that look janky.

fwip2• 2 years ago

$116K is far less than the potential damage to life and property that can be caused by a car crash.

mlyle• 2 years ago

I think there's a crucial difference here.

If we want to prohibit an activity, having a fine that's the same in dollars is not great because of the whole inconvenience-fee thing. If the purpose of the fine is punishment and deterrence it is ineffective.

If we want to have less of an activity but reach a quantity where there's a equilibrium between the social costs and social benefits for the activity, then that's really a tax. And it should be uniform and not vary based on income.

Which is tailgating?

kergonath3• 2 years ago

I'd be fine with sublinear scaling but straightline increasing a fine ad infinitum is ridiculous.

What is actually properly ridiculous is that some people get enough money that a linear fine seems ridiculous. Income distribution is completely out of whack.

JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B2• 2 years ago

Tailgating is ridiculous and can kill people. I experience that every day where I live and it’s a psychological nightmare. I say we should fine them and remove their license, it’s the only thing those morons understand.

topspin• 2 years ago

Aren't "many advocates" only seeking to make penalties for unsafe behavior felt? Wealthy people can and do routinely scoff at -- for them -- trivial costs, abusing their wealth until someone ends up injured or killed, and then employ a team of lawyers to skate on that as well.

I bet the f*cker stops now.

yohannparis• 2 years ago

Instead of income, it should be something else, because a lot of wealthy people do not have incomes.

dzhiurgis5• 2 years ago

Good point. You still want to punish, despite not having income.

Perhaps a % of their assets should be put into government trust which is realised when they liquidate?

aeturnum4• 2 years ago

I think fines that are proportional to your income or wealth are clearly a better approach than fixed fines. In practice, that kind of stuff can be really hard to figure out, but overall it seems sensible? There are lots of downsides to a highly connected financial system for poor people, but hopefully we can move towards scaled fines as something of a consolation for all of the downsides the poor endure.

rvnx• 2 years ago

Along with the wealth tax, these revenue-based fines also pushes you to minimize the revenues that you declare to the state, ending with overall losses in collected taxes.

For example, many crypto-bros are insanely poor on paper.

Companies can spend on behalf of a person, etc.

A more fair system is to be able to pick between jail or community service.

Time is equally precious to all humans and giving some of your time to repair your mistakes is the best you can do.

xico• 2 years ago

A poor person cannot afford to miss a day at the job, or not care for their children, when it would just be another day not working for a rich one. Not to mention the difference in life expectancy between the richest and poorest populations are 10-15 years. If anything jail sentences should be longer for wealthy people!

Teever3• 2 years ago

I'd like to see progressive fines implemented as well.

I'm not sure what factor we should use but I think that it should quickly become economically infeasible for anyone to keep reoffending because the cost of separate instances of doing so quickly escalates. Maybe exponentially?

aeturnum4• 2 years ago

The idea of having the fine scale based on how quickly people re-offend is also really interesting! I feel like I worry about...situations where people are pressed into breaking that law out of circumstances and then are extra-harshly punished by the mounting fines? Maybe you combine it with some kind of income-based ceiling or a loss in driving privileges (has its own problems ofc but it is a public danger for someone to always be breaking the law - even if they feel they have no choice).

me_me_me• 2 years ago

remember when JP Morgan was caught manipulating price of silver making billions off it. They were 'fined' 100m or something.

Its like robbing a bank and when caught you need to give 10% back. And also you will be given stern warning to not do it again.

Analemma_3• 2 years ago

I don't even think it needs to be hard to figure out. Fines could, and should, be set to something like "basis points [hundredths of one percent] of your gross income on last year's tax return", which the government already knows. A speeding ticket could then be set to e.g. 20 bp = [last year's gross income] * .002.

aeturnum4• 2 years ago

Yah - income is clearly the first way to do this, but you'd want to integrate assets at some point (many wealthy people do not have traditionally high incomes). That's the tricky part.

randomdata2• 2 years ago

I know, if you can't pay the fine don't do the crime, but realistically income is not a constant and is much too temporal to be useful here. A decent income year last year, and little income this year, means you might have no hope of paying the fine.

Why not a fraction of the current value of gross assets at the time of investigation? This a much better reflection of someone's financial standing, is a greater deterrent, ensures that the fine is actually payable, and deals with the issue of the rich not having much in the way of income.

beaglesss• 2 years ago

I would argue if the goal is justice then the fine is basically a tort on the externality imposed. At some point society imposes an injustice if the fine exceeds the externality imposed by tailgating, even if it's a pittance to the rich person.

That is, for justice rather than just retribution, I think the real nominal cost of tailgating is probably not closely linked to wealth or income of the offender

aeturnum4• 2 years ago

It's fair to say and, on some level, I like the idea of scaling fines to lower income more than scaling them to higher incomes. The marginal utility of wealth goes down as you get more anyway.

I also think that, if you wanna critique the efficacy of fines in metting out justice, you need to go further than you do here. Scaling the fine tries, imperfectly, to match the punishment to the circumstances of the offender. We could imagine an even better system that more perfectly reacts to misbehavior, but exactly what that would be seems hard and this is a sensible adjustment to an existing system.

_benedict• 2 years ago

But the point of the fine in this case is clearly not restitution, but disincentive. Justice in this case is ensuring everyone is equally incentivised to follow a law that society thinks everyone should follow.

If the goal were only to ascribe economic harms to certain actions and reclaim those costs, it would be called a tax or a fee, not a fine.

thefz• 2 years ago

But without progressive fines, the rich can basically buy themselves out of the law, which is worse than having no proportionality to the offense.

bko6• 2 years ago

Should some people be able to drive recklessly just because they can't afford to pay speeding tickets? I don't see what problem this is trying to solve. Is there an epidemic of wealthy people speeding and running over school children? In America you get points for speeding and your insurance goes up (more expensive car, more expensive insurance) and after a number of points you lose your license.

Wealthy people don't break the law any more than less wealthy people even though the naive view of the economic costs of crime would have you think they would.

itsdrewmiller2• 2 years ago

Should some people be able to drive recklessly just because they can afford to pay speeding tickets?

dzhiurgis5• 2 years ago

To simplify admin cops could write you up a fixed fine then send your fine to IRS who will calculate your additional fine at the end of year...

Keeps your income private from cops + uses existing mechanism of determining your income.

M95D3• 2 years ago

I belive that's how they do it. The ticket specifies the fine in "day-units".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day-fine

richwater2• 2 years ago

I don't care how rich you are, a $100,000 fine for tailgating is absurd.

How much was the public hurt by his actions?

Carrok• 2 years ago

Do you think a fine of less than $100k would cause a billionaire to change their behavior in any way?

richwater2• 2 years ago

Is there any research that traffic fines change _anyone's_ behavior if they're a terrible driver, regardless of income?

ericfrenkiel• 2 years ago

The difference between equality under the law or equity under the law.

Equity is by definition relative. Equality is at least absolutely reasoned without the interference of relativity or subjectivity.

By what measure can a system of government be most fair and immune to corruption? The one where everyone has equal rights or the one one where some are “more equal” or “less equal” than others?

tqi2• 2 years ago

The court can impose a fine of daily rates between 30 and 3,000 francs, or roughly $35 to $3,500, in cases like these, but settled on fining the lawyer 50 daily rates of 1,970 CHF.

How is the number of days determined - is it fixed by type of offense?

KolmogorovComp• 2 years ago

It's easy, many lawyers are already charging by hour/day. Otherwise take annual income and divide by number of days worked.

tqi2• 2 years ago

My question wasn't about the day rate it was about the number of days, ie is it variable or fixed for each type of offense.

Maultasche• 2 years ago

That was one thing that the article didn't explain that I was curious about. What does days mean in this context and how does the court determine the number of them? Why days combined with a variable fee vs just a variable fee?

Ekaros3• 2 years ago

Very likely some table. Tail gating is one amount, running red light is an other, going over 20 km/h(Finland) is one and then you get more as the speed increases 40, 60, 80, 100 over limit...

pjmlp2• 2 years ago

Swiss has had fines directly proportional to the income for decades, and as someone that lived there, I fully agree with them.

Otherwise most rich people will only consider them a mere inconvenience, like in most countries.

drbig• 2 years ago

Precisely that. A fine is a simple non-violent way of enforcing consequences for actions we, as a society, want to discourage.

Here in Poland I have met too many corpo-achievers literally bragging that they just put all their speeding tickets on the corpo-card because it's _peanuts_, so they drive as fast and as loose as they feel...

And no, things are not simple, but fines being proportional to income is better than fixed fines.

dzhiurgis5• 2 years ago

Sounds like something that the entire EU should impose.

kergonath3• 2 years ago

I’d be happy if people would actually get fined for tailgating around here. Even €35 would do.

johnea• 2 years ago

Good...

penguin_booze• 2 years ago

Like taxes, I'm a fan of proportional fines, at least for major offenses. The purpose of fine is to deter the perpetrator. If you fine a (m|b)illionaire 20 quid like the rest of us, how much of a deterrence can that be? I'm also a fan of increasing the fine exponentially for frequent and/or repeated offenses.

Swiss BMW Driver Slammed with $116,000 Tailgating Fine Because He's Rich

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