It’s infuriating to me how often you see car drivers ranting and complaining about things like speed traps, and how common apps and traffic radio report these.
Drivers are probably the only group of people on earth who not only routinely whine about the consequences of their illegal actions, and attempts to enforce those consequences, without any broad pushback, but in fact get broad systematic support specifically designed to help them avoid these consequences.
Imagine if restaurant owners routinely complained about how “predatory” and “unfair” random health inspections, and fines for non-compliance are. Imagine if someone made an app that warned restauronteurs a day or two ahead of every health inspection, so they don’t have to bother keeping their kitchen code compliant any other time. People would be outraged. But when drivers make those same complaints about speed cameras or traffic enforcement in general, and get those same systems to avoid them, everyone just accepts it as a completely normal thing.
Similar thoughts definitely exist for other things that are not regularly enforced. There is a well known Facebook group in my city that tracks the location of ticket inspectors in public transport so you can avoid them. And bar owners in neighborhoods warn each other whenever there are checks for underage drinking or smoking inside because these laws are also rarely followed.
But I agree that if someone said similar things about health inspections it wouldn’t sit well with people. And it’s weird that something as dangerous as speeding or running red lights is not considered as important but rather as a minor thing.
Fare evasion doesn’t actively endager others, like speeding, so that’s not a valid comparison. Some people also literally can not afford a fare, but still need transport. Simply not speeding is basically ALWAYS an option for every driver. As for underage drinking, teenagers are immature idiots, that’s well known, I wouldn’t exactly consider “teenager do it too” a valid defense for negative behaviour of supposedly mature adutls. And underage drinking is a personal decision, that also doesn’t endanger anyone uninvolved in the activity.
Perhaps I should have been more explicit, and said “illegal things that endanger innocent third parties”, instead of just illegal, that was a indeed a bit too broad, I just felt it flowed better.
Yeah I wasn’t talking about the teenagers but about the bars themselves. The point is, it doesn’t matter if it’s illegal, plenty of illegal things are treated the same way. It matters that it’s not taken seriously while it should.
I’m sure bars would love to sell to underage people if it was legal, and I’m sure they occasionally turn a blind eye in the name of the profit, but I’ve literally never once in my entire life heard someone who sells alcohol openly complain about enforcement, or talk about how “unfair” it is that enforcer try to “entrap” them.
Yeah, sure there’s far far fewer bar owners than car drivers, but I personally hear drivers complain about speed enforcement like every other day. Avoiding speed enforcement is a massive institutionalised industry, like I said, there’s apps, traffic radio, most sat navs show stationary speed cameras. That is not even remotely close to the odd bar owner saying they’d like to sell to younger people. Also, whilst it’s absolutely harmful to teenagers to drink alcohol, it at least doesn’t directly endanger uninvolved people. The people who are being endangered, the teens, need to actively choose to participate in the illegal activity. Drivers, cyclist or pedestrians following every speed limit and traffic regulation, are still endangered by speeding drivers, and there’s nothing they can do personally to avoid that risk. So that’s still not an entirely valid comparison.
In my experience, there is literally no other illegal activity that endangers uninvolved third parties which is so widely accepted as normal by the public, that there is literally a major institutionalised industry specifically around enabling people to do that activity without consequences, and I’d be surprised if you can name one.
I’m not talking about just people broadly doing illegal things that endanger others, or even occasionally complaining about them getting caught, my point is just how ridiculously accepted and systemised it is specifically for speed enforcement.