New intern! Whoo-hoo!

If you get pulled over driving on a suspended license, you should be put in jail for a few days and fined, second offense, a few months and a fine, third a few years. And if you kill someone while driving on a suspended license, at least 5 years. That might make the violators think twice.

Unfortunately, suspended licenses usually disproportionately effect poor folks. A whole lot of people are suspended because they can't afford the DMV fees stacked up against them, not because they are really bad drivers. In a culture built around the car, to restrict access on a class scale is unsettling at least. To call it homicide because of poverty is a crime itself. Let's think twice about this before the prisons get even bigger.

I would be in favor of stricter enforcement of bicycle safety laws - seeing bikers pulled over for traffic violations, especially people who bomb down hills or do not have lights on at night.

This is absurd. No proof of insurance changes the crime into a homicide? It must take a willful stretch of the imagination to pull out a correlation between these two things. I feel for the victim's family, but their efforts to save lives would be much better spent on prevention, rather than punitive actions. I don't think there's many people around thinking "Well, I was thinking about plowing my car into some cyclists today, but with that new law, gosh, maybe I'll just stay home and watch Top Chef."

Not only the poor will be disproportionatly affected, but immigrants (illegal and otherwise). There needs to be punative punishments levied for driving without insurance that are meaningful, but this legistlation seems to be beyond what is reasonable.

This is more or less the best blog entry I've ever read. Insightful, edgy, etc. I have high hopes for whoever wrote this.

This is more or less the best blog entry I've ever read. Insightful, edgy, etc. I have high hopes for whoever wrote this.

I think you have the answer to your question: “We need a law that takes these drivers off the road… they need to be taken out of society.” They don't want to put them into a McDonalds, or a Gymnasium somewhere. They want them put in prison. The problem isn't that there isn't a law against this sort of thing: Its ALREADY against the law to drive with a suspended licence. The problem isn't that the Police aren't enforcing that law--they are, and the do...its that the law doesn't have any teeth. I don't think the answer is a NEW law, but rather, a revamp of the existing law. Change it to allow for serious jail time for infractions. I laud the bill's proponents for their spirit, but they get a zero for execution. Further: I see the dilemma regarding the class issues, but this law isn't the proper place to address those issues. Heck, LEGISLATION isn't even the place to address those issues. Those fees and fines take place in a lala land all it's own at the state organizational level, called "Administrative Rules." IIRC, those are reviewed every 4 years. good luck getting them changed however. Now, before people start shitting on me from atop an oh-so-lofty perch, please keep in mind that I rode my bike 4x the miles I drove my car last week. Indeed, I hung out with Scott and Amy last friday night...downtown...where I went by bicycle.

tab writes: "Unfortunately, suspended licenses usually disproportionately effect poor folks. " So do traffic tickets, arrests for drunk driving, and smog checks. The problem isn't that we're too hard on poor drivers. It's that poor folks are disproportionately affected by a lack of transportation options besides driving. THAT is the problem. The solution to that problem, the big problem, is not to ask those people to be less careful or responsible on the roads. It is to provide them with transportation options. One of those is bicycling but poor folks don't like bicycling under deadly conditions either.