Victimless Crimes?

Posted on February 9, 2007 by Dave Pollard

dangerous drivingWhat do you do when you witness a near-accident, something that might well have caused an accident but didn’t, yet?

You probably conclude that there’s nothing you can do. We face this every day when we get behind the wheel and witness close calls and hazards that are almost always gone before we can react. Too often, when an accident occurs, it might have been averted if the dangerous, careless or illegal behaviour that caused it had been reported earlier.

On a not atypical day this week, during one 45-minute early-rush-hour drive, I witnessed the following:

  • Two vehicles making lane-changes blind because they hadn’t bothered to scrape or defrost their windows. 
  • A guy (all alone) in his SUV watching a movie on his DVD player while he was driving (I am not making this up!)
  • A cement mixer and a semi-trailer from two of our community’s biggest employers driving on no-truck routes, slowing traffic, gouging up the roads and prompting death-defying passing maneuvers on curves from cars trying to get by. 
  • A truck from one of Canada’s “most admired companies” pulling onto the expressway with huge sheets of ice flying off its roof, causing cars behind it to veer off in all directions and nearly causing two accidents.
  • A tailgater in the left lane of the expressway traveling at least 140 km and flashing his lights at cars ahead. 
  • A hugely overloaded and unstable truck two lanes over, incapable of going more than half the expressway speed limit, weaving, its licence plate obscured with mud and wear, piled high with wooden pallets and other wood sticking dangerously out the rear, unflagged.

None of these actually caused an accident, at least not that I saw. So what to do? The traffic news radio stations don’t want to hear it. It’s not enough to warrant a 911 call.

I asked a couple of people I knew what they would do. They told me that they had been told:

  1. The problem must be reported to the authority responsible for the particular road — but who knows who that is and what their phone number is (and what their non-emergency office hours are, which is of course never when these incidents occur)?
  2. You are generally discouraged from phoning in such information to the police; you have to report it in person to prove you’re not a crank — but by the time you can deliver your report to a police station, it’s too late.
  3. You need a licence plate number and driver details, even for trucks with lots of signage, for your report to be accepted — but with all the salt, many licence plates are illegible, and trying to see who’s driving a big truck is often impossible or dangerous.

Our community has a unique program called RoadWatch that provides a citizen report form for dangerous, careless and aggressive driving, which requires you to hand-deliver or (once they get to know you) fax in the form to the local police, regardless of who has jurisdiction on the road. But I suspect they don’t want to see reports that occurred once you crossed the municipal border, and if anyone knows where the closest police station is to every point in their travels it’s time they got a life.

So this is better than nothing, and I plan to use it, but it’s a local solution and far from perfect. My guess is if I turned in five reports in one day like the day I described above, I’d quickly be blacklisted.

We need something better. How would you design it? It needs to be simple and quick (i.e. something like a four-digit cellphone speed dial number), and there needs to be a way to get it out to others in the area so they can avoid and/or confirm the hazard, potentially reducing accidents and giving the police multiple reports to get the offenders off the road. It needs a mechanism to avoid abuse. And it needs to work across jurisdictions. It doesn’t even necessarily have to involve the police directly (though they would probably benefit from monitoring it) — it could just as easily be a peer to peer solution.

Any imaginative ideas?

Category: Miscellany
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5 Responses to Victimless Crimes?

  1. Sonny says:
    February 10, 2007 at 05:14

    1. Yell at them. That’s what I do when I’m walking or biking and someone endangers my life with a car, if there’s a chance they can hear me. You may think it’s declasse, with your fancy cell phones and police, to use the bodily, direct means of communication, but it’s a natural, healthy human response.If your voice isn’t loud enough to get their attention, horns were added to cars for just that purpose.If you can afford it, get a bullhorn installed on top of your car and tell everyone around you how to drive. It sounds like you know bad driving when you see it, and others will think the word is coming from some authority and obey.2. Your own driving should be your first response to problem drivers, not trying to change them. Reconsider how you drive, and more importantly, why you’re driving there and whether it’s worth it.Don’t wait the rest of your life for changes in how many reckless drivers there are, how much law enforcement there is, or a technological fix, as if you or any other activists are going to change the world by changing others. Take the matter into your own hands by choosing to which risks to expose yourself. Those who build systems to change everyone else only get anywhere if it makes them a profit or a career. Those who learn to adjust not only solve their own problems, they provide a model for anyone else who wants the same to imitate.

  2. Janene says:
    February 10, 2007 at 08:01

    Hey Dave –In this particular case, I kinda agree with Sonny… especially at this stage in the game, appealing to authority, pushing for enforcement, and similar frames are completely unappealing to me.Act, react, respond personally to whatever experiences you directly have… and the rest, well, recognize that it is simply outside of your sphere of control. (However, if lots of yous and mes would react personally to these hazards, maybe THEN we would be on to something, eh?)Janene

  4. Tony says:
    February 12, 2007 at 18:44

    I agree with you that trying to contact the police with every problem driver will get you blacklisted. If the problem is with a commercial vehicle, I try to call the company in question with the vehicle’s number or license plate. This is easier if I am behind them and heading generally in the same direction, of course, and can relay the information real-time. Plus, whereas it will be too late for the policy to take any action, that driver will get a ear-ful from their boss, even it is hours after the incident.

  5. PeterC says:
    February 14, 2007 at 07:29

    Wow, their behaviors are wrong to the point of irresponsibility and you should change Dave. I think the problem comes down to the fact that all those metal boxes exisit outside our “Monkeysphere” of 150 people or so. The people in our life that are in our circle of knowns. If the problem was local, it could be handled personally as many of the previous posters comment. But really, if someone is watching a DVD and driving and you honk at him… you aren’t in his “Monkeysphere” and are just “an idiot” to him.Anyhow, I think that what we need is more traffic cops. People out there enforcing the laws and making people change their behaviours. Education hasn’t seemed to work. ‘Fer instance, every day I drive the 401 back and forth to work(in a less populated portion of the province) and notice at least 2 truely dangerous acts that didn’t result in an accident. There is also at least one speed trap on the road every other day. It’s simply not enough to catch even a small percentage of the speeders, and only the ones 30-40 over. How does this enforce any other traffic law? Is it really a law if it is never enforced? (Or, as is the case, only enforced when you’ve already smacked into someone.)http://www.pointlesswasteoftime.com/monkeysphere.html

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