Bizcuits | Traffic fines: it’s you, not us

Leanda Lee

When there is an outrage over laws or when the general law-abiding community starts flouting the law, it is probably the law that is unfair or misdirected, not community behaviour that is at fault.

The suggestion by the government to change traffic laws to respond to “clear changes that occurred with the development of society and the new traffic conditions” has angered many.

Laws must reflect the environment, the values of the time and the needs to the community and meet the common good. Laws need to change as the situation, technologies and values change.

Laws, also, are not the only way to solve problems that a community has. Human behaviour, good and bad, is a complex mix of will, ability, opportunity and the local situation which means that environmental circumstances can be blamed for inappropriate behaviours even more than individuals can be blamed. In truth, it’s the interaction between the person and the environment that determines how we behave. Do we park our cars illegally? Yes, because legitimate car-parks are full, cost too much, are too far from where we want to go, there are not enough of them, taxi-drivers scare the bejeebers out of us, public transport is crowded and maybe because we are willing to bear the risk of a fine given all the above.

Just like the mediocre manager assesses a worker’s performance without regard for what part the organisation has played, the proposed ideas on the new traffic laws and latest decisions, from increased fines to the addition of penalty points, implicitly places the onus for road behaviour on individuals. Ignored is part the authorities may have played in the current congested state of affairs.

Like the child who drops and breaks a glass and cries that the “glass broke”, the government’s tortoise-speed reaction to a completely unsurprising “development of society” – the appallingly unmanaged road traffic congestion on 30.8 square kilometres with 656,700 in population and 113,972 automobiles and 123,930 motorbikes – does not engender sympathy.

The limited road resources were always limited and are to become more so. Doing little about a pending and developing issue that had been foreseen for a decade at least, is a management choice. Laissez-faire management, yes, but a choice nonetheless. It did not just happen, the glass didn’t break; the overcrowding of our streets is a choice, they broke the glass.

It was their choice not to invest in effective traffic control systems, not to make difficult decisions to stem the growth of the number of vehicles, not to impose structural and evidence-based disincentives to private road travel used to effect in Hong Kong or Singapore or the City of London, not to improve public transport ahead of and at a pace required of population growth. It was by design that it was just left to organic and emerging trends (aka the free market) to sort it out, until we reached a point of crisis.

There has been no comfortable point of equilibrium where we each decided give up our cars, because even with jarringly slow travel, crowded streets and the risk of parking fines, it is still better than any alternative.

Yet, nothing changes. Instead of fixing the causes of the problem – there’s a reason the large majority of the 860,000 fines handed out in 2017 were for illegal parking – Macau just plays around the edges with more penalties to fix the bad behaviour of road users.

The naughty road users will just be naughtier by degree with a doubling of fines and heavier penalties because it’s not about the user, it’s about the shoddy road system they use. Get the environment, the systems, the infrastructure and the incentives right in the first place, and there will be no reason to infringe.