For quite a while, I've been thinking that incentives for road users to show consideration for more vulnerable road users are lacking. I've been thinking about how we could remedy that situation... and it might also be something that could be linked to environmental impact and road-user-charges:
Make driver infraction penalties proportional to vehicle mass.
The idea is that every vehicle fits into a "class" of vehicles, in order of size:
- pedestrian
- unicycle (including this because a colleague unicycles to work...)
- bicycle
- mobility scooter, moped, etc.
- motorcycle
- compact car
- small car
- midsize car
- SUV, ute
- light truck
- through to multi-carriage hauling vehicle
you get the picture.
My goal is to get people to take more responsibility for their road use... and to create incentives for people to get smaller vehicles and to bear the true cost of their road use (e.g. a bicycle has much less impact on road maintenance than an 18 wheeler).
I believe that the more mass (or weight) a person controls, the more other road users' safety depends on their good practice. As a result, I think that road users demonstrating negligence in an SUV should be penalised more heavily than, for example, someone driving a Honda scooter.
What do you think? Is this workable? Is it a valid concept - can people identify obvious flaws or ways in which this does not create the right incentives for road users?