Traffic violations is an almost perfect example of a place where people pin all the biggest problems on poor exercises of individual responsibility when really it’s almost entirely and issue of road engineering and urban design.

We build streets that encourage bad behavior and then get mad when the bad behavior happens.

Even behaviors people consider quite aberrant like street racing can only happen because we build race tracks in cities and then try to pretend they’re something else.

Or take drunk driving. Of course people are going to drive drunk when your entire society is structured around driving being the only way a reasonable person gets from point a to point b… This doesn’t forgive the bad behavior, but taking a firm moral position here instead of listening to the explanation and making a change is not going to protect any lives.

In the first place, you can’t fix bad driving with enforcement. You can only punish it after it already happened. Pretty much no one is going to stop driving badly because pretty much nobody intended to drive badly.

You do not fix road safety with an enforcement-based solution. All the money sent to police to try to keep the roads safe is money that could have actually been spent on engineering solutions to keep the road safe and instead is now pissed away into the wind.