It would indeed be nice if billionaires had to follow the same rules as the rest of us, or at least had to dread the financial repercussions of a traffic ticket. But if a traffic penalty transferred 1% of a billionaire’s annual income to the state via the police department, that would incentivize cops to lie in wait around every corner, trying to catch Mr. Moneybags driving 1 MPH over the speed limit. The super-wealthy would retaliate by moving away & bringing their tax bases with them, or by simply hiring chauffeurs. And by stashing even more of their money in offshore tax havens.
Poor people (generally blacks & browns) are by far the worst, most dangerously psychopathic drivers in any area. You want to ticket them even less? Here in the New Orleans area (N.O. is 60% black; metro area is probably 50% black), based on my 31 years of driving & observing, black drivers use turn signals about 25% of the time, speed & tailgate by far the most, kill the most pedestrians & cyclists per year, love to drive with their seats leaning way back to look cool (preventing them from using their mirrors properly), have marijuana emanating from their cars by far the most (and the weed is so powerful these days that the inside of your car will suddenly smell like a Soundgarden or Snoop Dogg concert, even if your windows were closed), and simply drive through stop signs by far the most often. Not to mention they have expired brake tags by far the most, drive without license plates the most, etc. NOPD has simply stopped all enforcement of road rules since George Floyd, not that they enforced them very much before that. This includes window tinting. 100% blacked-out windows, something the auto shops should be afraid to do for fear of being fined or shut down, are practically de rigeur for black drivers here, especially in the crime hellscape areas called Central City & New Orleans East. Any time a cop sees this, it should be an instant pullover & an instant ticket, but we can tell this is not happening by the ever-growing amount of blacks who do it. Ultra-dark windows are very helpful in the commission of crimes. Even though it’d be an easy ticket, cops don’t pull these cars over because they know it’ll be a black engagement, a thing that can be very detrimental to a cop’s lifespan.
A typical black would pay thousands of $ in traffic fines per DAY if all his violations were fairly & accurately tallied via videocamera. Multiply that by about 300 days of driving per year and he’d owe many hundreds of thousands, if not closer to a million, dollars a year. So I hardly pity them for paying a handful of tickets per year. (For example, a typical black, especially poor black, way of driving entails aggressively tailgating while waiting for an adjacent lane to open, jumping into that lane w/ no turn signal, speeding forward, then jumping back into the original lane w/ no turn signal. That’s four individual, ticketable violations in a 10-second span.)
So in getting away with every manner of road crime possible, blacks (poors) see how feeble the police have become and are thus emboldened to commit more serious crimes. Hence your idea of being even weaker at law enforcement of po’folks is flawed in even more ways than apparent at first glance, and its ripple effects would lead to even more violent crime in melanated areas. People are usually poor because they’re stupid, violent, or lazy, three traits that directly correlate with I.Q., and I.Q. directly correlates with melanin everywhere on earth. I don’t think I need to post a link to a world I.Q. map here. And observing any poor white guy in a pickup truck will reveal around five road violations per minute, because people all around this country have come to realize cops are terrified to pull over pickups, so I have little sympathy for poor white pickup drivers. They are my absolute nemeses in the rural areas, & nearly kill me multiple times a day. (No exaggeration.) But overall, the #1 best way to improve road safety would be to make it much harder for poor blacks to even get a driver’s license, and to make their tickets proportionally higher, not lower.
I realize you were probably referring to poor drivers in, say, Appalachian or upper Midwest areas, where the poor people are actually fairly intelligent, decent folk, so I somewhat apologize for my screed against their polar opposites, our nation’s poor, criminal, chaos-spreading blacks. But this article is about disparate impact, and blacks & browns cause much more negative disparate impact on a Western-style society than they have meted out upon them by the system.
Oh yeah, before posting this, I realized I must call out taxi drivers. As horrific as blacks are on the road, we’ve all observed that Taxi Americans are even worse, using turn signals maybe 10% of the time at most, speeding at even more blatant rates, etc. And we all know what their ethnicity tends to be. They clearly have some sort of shadow union or other cabal that pays off the police to not ticket them, since cops are even more afraid to pull them over than they are to pull over blacks. Another reason why we need stricter, more financially persuasive (to the driver) road rule enforcement, as opposed to your position.
An overall point that bears mentioning is that when relatively low-crime whites live around blacks & browns, the conscious or subconscious observation of the b&b’s bad daily behavior, especially behind the wheel, infiltrates the white observers’ minds & leads them to tolerate, then accept, then commit bad behavior. Also, living around them causes many whites to buy guns when they normally would not. So now an area’s white population is on edge, is tolerant of petty crime, and owns more guns with little training. (I’m very pro-gun, but not in favor of permitless concealed carry in dark, lawless places like New Orleans, which would quickly see massive homicide spikes. No one would ever even go to a gas station after dark in any big city in America.) A recipe for slow civilizational decline & collapse into an amoral morass. Which is likely the intention.