Time to teach deadbeat drivers a lesson

The headline in Thursday’s Telegram put it this way, “Deadbeat drivers owe millions in fines”.

Turns out that close to $30MILLION is owed by Newfoundland drivers, some of whom owe tens of thousands of dollars in fines with the current record holder owing nearly $50 thousand in fines.

It appears that the people who owe those huge amounts of money have as much regard for the system of fines and penalties as the apparent majority of drivers in St. Johns have for traffic regulations. I’ve written about it before but I routinely see drivers speeding through residential streets, completely ignoring stop signs and other highway signage, making illegal turns, not using signal lights, cutting-off other drivers, etc, etc.

Surely, in this day and age of such sophisticated computer technology, we should be able to nab the people who owe this money. There may be a few poor folk among them but the vast majority could afford to pay the fines; they simply choose not to. I used to work with a woman who was quite proud of the number of parking tickets she had thrown into her back seat. She never cared where she parked, often taking spaces reserved for disabled drivers. My rather simplistic solution for that would be to seize the car, auction it off and use the funds raised to help pay the fines.  The driver still would be responsible for any unpaid balance.