It is not all clear why our president and the interior minister believe that a steep rise in fines will solve traffic safety problems. This is clearly a primitive approach to tackling this kind of problem.
A number of questions arise: where is the scientific approach? Where are the interior ministry’s research institutions with their doctors and post-doctoral fellows? Where is the analysis of infraction statistics, and psychological and social analyses? Who violates the rules more and who less, and what are the consequences?
The automobile tax and insurance are applied differentially to motorists, taking into account their social status, engine capacity, driving experience, etc. There is some logic in this. For example, large-engine vehicles are heavier than ones with smaller motors, so they do more harm to roads, pollute the air more with exhaust gas, etc. Naturally, they are subject to a higher tax.
What does a driver pay a fine for? For the damage that an accident could have caused if s/he had not been apprehended in time — but not after the accident. After an accident that leads to grievous consequences, the culprit is usually taken to court. On what do the consequences of an accident depend? They depend on the nature of a driver’s infraction and his connections. That is why the consequences are different. But everybody pays the same amount. Is this fair?
Anyone who attended high school should be familiar with Newton’s laws. For example, the impact force during a collision (with a vehicle, a pedestrian, or any other obstacle) depends on the potential energy, which is the function of the automobile’s mass and its speed — to be more exact, the speed squared.
A Zaporozhets weighs about 0.7 tons, while a four-wheel-drive foreign-made car weighs 3 tons. The maximum speed is 120 km/h for the former and over 200 km/h for the latter.
If you square the speed, multiply it by the weight (of the Zaporozhets or the foreign model), you will get a difference — 12-times! At an identical higher speed, the potential energy of a Zaporozhets during a collision will be enough to slightly damage a Land Cruiser’s bumper, while a Land Cruiser will be able to crush two Zaporozhets cars along with their passengers and knock over a couple of concrete lamp posts. But the fine is the same. Just look at the pictures that are shown on the TV program Magnolia. After being hit by a Jeep, Slavutas and Tavrias resemble roller-compacted asphalt.
This means there should be a differential approach, as in the case of road tax and insurance, which indirectly take into account the difference in the “destructive” capacity of a Zaporozhets and a Land Cruiser, as well as the probability of a driver’s infraction and the likely consequences.
The problem of fines also has another dimension, a socio-psychological one. The interior ministry seems to have problems with these kinds of experts, too. The purpose of a fine is to make a driver think twice before breaking traffic rules again.
A fine of 100 hryvnias is a tragedy for a Zaporozhets owner, perhaps a pensioner, because it is about 15-20 percent of his pension. After paying such a fine, he may very likely lock his car up in the garage until he receives his next pension (gasoline is expensive). This produces an effect: he may never break any more traffic rules.
Meanwhile, the owner of a foreign-made car worth about 100,000 dollars will pay the same 100 hryvnias for the same infraction. Do you think this will be a great loss for him? Will he be remorseful and stop breaking the rules? I don’t think so.
Now the sociological dimension: in all probability, there are no research institutes of this kind under the interior ministry’s auspices, or they have been forgotten. What kind of people most often break traffic rules and cause serious damage? They are usually owners of foreign-made cars, under the age of 30. These cars are also very well “protected.”
As a result of the fine increase, drivers who prefer national cars for financial considerations will be even more disciplined, while the most “well-protected ones” may not even notice the increase. The proportional increase of fines for traffic infractions is ineffective — the interior ministry is just shooting blanks.
The solution is simple. Finland has a system of similar fines. Like Ukrainians, Finns fill out income declarations. We have a computerized system that keeps track of every citizen’s income. Everybody has an identification code. There is a clear relationship between the incomes of individuals and the cost of their vehicles, so if a policeman issues a fine to an offender in terms of a percentage of his annual income, i.e., the same fine for everyone (social justice!) for the same infraction and records his identification code, a pensioner will pay about 2 percent (100 hryvnias or so) and a motorist with an annual income of 100,000 hryvnias will pay 2,000. This shows that a 2-percent fine can be imposed for a grave infraction, while a 0.5- percent fine is quite a reasonable one. The 0.5-percent one will be 24 and 500 hryvnias, respectively.
But there are millionaires and even billionaires in our country. If these fines are to be imposed on them, they will be the most disciplined drivers, leaving the traffic police without a job. But this is unacceptable. There are already many unemployed people here, so it would be better to set up a scale of fines like the road tax — depending on the engine size, i.e., approximately as follows:
Up to UAH 100,000 of annual income — 0.5 percent;
Up to UAH 500,000 of annual income — 0.2 percent;
Up to 1,000.000 of annual income — 0.1 percent; and so on.
In my view, the proposed algorithm of increasing fines for traffic infractions could, after some additional drafting, lay the groundwork for drawing up a relevant law. A primitive approach (a simple increase in fines) to tackling serious problems will produce an equally primitive effect. Only a scientific approach and public involvement in the drafting of such a law can produce the desired result. We do not doubt that the interior ministry knows the multiplication table on the basis of which they resort to an upward revision of the scale of fines. But we should not forget that the minister of internal affairs is an engineer by training and is therefore supposed to know about differential integration and the laws of mechanics.
Anatolii PAVLENKO is an independent expert in Kyiv
