Today's radio reports that every three minutes a car was pulled over during the holiday weekend for some highway traffic offence and over 140 cars were impounded for street racing.
Now, I agree that cars driving way too fast should be taken off the road but I doubt that there were even 10 cases of actual street racing.
What the radio calls street racing is in fact a car going 50km/hr or more over the speed limit.
That's a pretty awful thing and very dangerous, but street racing it's not. What we have here is a classic example of mission creep. Legislation designed for one thing -- street racing -- is being used for another -- absurdly high speed driving.
I suppose it doesn't really matter -- too fast is too fast -- but let's keep our definitions clear.
2 comments:
What we have here is a classic example of mission creep. Legislation designed for one thing -- street racing -- is being used for another -- absurdly high speed driving.
I agree that we should keep our definitions - without context laws become even more arbitrary..
If the legislation is called "street racing" or includes those words and there is no other car involved, how can it be "racing"? And would this not be a defence?
Post a Comment