Basically, a bloke got a speeding ticket and was fined £182,000 for doing 55mph in a 55mph zone.  It might seem a bit harsh, but the amount was decided based on the man’s ability to pay and not the scale of the offence.

Some might think this is a dangerously Marxist policy from those notorious revolutionary lefties in Switzerland, but I think it makes perfect practical sense for two quite connected reasons.

Firstly there is fairness.  I know that if I got a fixed penalty of, say, £100 for something I could shrug it off but I know plenty of people who would struggle to pay that, so if they committed the same offence the effect on us would not be equal at all – they would suffer real hardship and I would not.  Likewise I would feel the pain with a fine of £1000 but I know plenty of people who would have no trouble with that.

Is it fair that a punishment should be different for two individuals commiting the same offence?   Equal fines do not necessarily mean equal punishment if the ability to pay is not taken into account.   Somebody living hand-to-mouth could be totally ruined by what many of us would consider a small amount and so effectively the penalty for even dropping a crisp packet could mean going without food for some people, while a hefty fine for a serious offence can have no impact on others.

The other side of that coin is very practical – incentives.  One purpose of fines is to punish, but another is to act as a deterrent.  If the fine for parking on double yellow lines was 20p would you feel deterred from doing that?  Well for some people a fine of £60 would have as much financial significance for them.

If you are a millionaire faced with a choice of spending time hunting for a legal parking spot or parking in a very convenient disabled bay with a very high chance of a fine it must be tempting to take the hit – time is money after all.

All the examples are motoring-related but could, of course, apply to any sort of offence.

The Swiss system seems to take this into account using judiciary discretion, but maybe more fixed systems would be possible, even if just as guidelines.  Perhaps a fine would not be x number of pounds but x number of points with points getting converted into percentage of income or wealth or something like an index of ability to pay?

Take the supposed £1000 fine for not having a TV licence.  For one person it could represent the value of their TV, car and bank balance combined, while for another it would represent petty cash and would not hurt at all.  If the fine represented the value of their car, TV and bank balance combined then it would have the same effect as both a punishment and a deterrent wouldn’t it?

The obvious flaw is the loophole, especially in many traffic offences, of getting somebody else ( who has less ability to pay) taking the fall for you.  Of course this already happens when people get caught by a speeding camera and get a husband or wife to say they were driving because they can ‘afford’ the points on their licence… but that is an offence already and imagine what the fine would be for that if caught out!

Our car (foreground) in its new location.

Our car has not moved from where it was abandoned parked on Friday – halfway down our road, pointing uphill.

Actually that is only half-true.  The truth is even worse, and a little more embarrassing.  I did move it on Saturday morning.  I got it far enough uphill to turn around, then I went off to the shops.  When I came back it got stuck just a bit further up from where it had been parked and could get no further: all I could do was let it roll/slide back to exactly where I started.Saturday night we had a party to go to, and thought it might be worth trying again but the thing would not even budge an inch – just a lot of wheel-spinning on the ice.  So we just went back home. Our neighbour reckons it is because of the way the treads go on our tyres, but there is no way I am going to go and swap them round in this weather.

Today there was a lot of activity in the road.  Some blokes from right at the top had come down with shovels and hacked away the worst of the ice in the road at the bottom so they could get their cars and vans up to the top, and others had been spreading grit.  I thought it might be worth trying to move my car after all that so I went back down hill, spent ten minutes scraping the windows, and then had exactly the same result as before.  I reckon we could make it up the hill OK if only we could get the car out of its parking space: all that grit and shovel work was only in the middle of the road and not right in front of our wheels.

Earlier on I had taken a walk to the shops and see that there are still a lot of people in the roads off Tollgate Hill leaving their cars at the bottom of both ends of Hollingbourne Crescent just to be sure.  It makes some sense, although it also makes the entrances to Hollingbourne a little more hazardous than they would otherwise be.

I didn’t go as far as Hobbs Road (Crawley’s steepest road – my arse!).  I imagine it is bad, but no worse than Hollingbourne Crescent, Hammond Road, Ranmore Close or Wye Close.  The county council boasts that it has loads of grit – enough to last the winter – so it is frustrating they can’t spare any for those few roads that really need it.   It is fortunate that nobody up here needed an ambulance or fire engine over the weekend!

Anyway…  a few photos from my walk:

The northern entrance to Hollingbourne Crescent

The southern entrance to Hollingbourne Crescent

A closer look at the south end of Hollingbourne Crescent

I’ll be taking the bus to work tomorrow…   What is even more frustrating is that Chrystal’s little Daewoo seems to have to trouble getting up the hill.  Must have the right kind of tyres or something.

I don’t know the answer, but I do know I will be hiding that copy of the News from Chrystal.  She is already cocky enough about passing first time at 17 and doesn’t need any more fuel for that fire thank you very much!

Am I missing something?  Isn’t that a characteristic of all hills?

Not that a great big estate car is something a new driver really wants to be driving anyway, especially when it comes to the parking.  Not after spending all their lessons in small hatchbacks.

When I passed my test (in my late 20’s) I didn’t buy a car for a couple of years.  In fact, after I passed it was a full six months before I drove anything at all.  That was a company pool car so I could get to a meeting, and I had to take a few minutes to remember what all the pedals were for.  I suspect Chrystal is not going to be as patient as I was.

To tell the truth though, it is a bit of a relief that she will not be on the road much, if at all, for a while.  Each week the local papers are full of stories of  crashes, pictures of cars wrapped around lamp posts and coverage of funerals for young drivers and the protective aprt of me would still prefer to see her miserable than mangled.

Still… she has a weekend job and can now save up all the money she would otherwise have been paying on lessons, so maybe she will be in a position to get a little runaround.  Or she could spend it all on lottery tickets and be in with a chance of being able to afford insurance on a small runaround if she gets six numbers.

It gave me chance to play Death Magnetic on the car’s CD player and get more familiar with it.  Danivon reminded me yesterday that it is only two weeks until we go to see Metallica at the O2 so I felt I should get up to speed with the newer stuff.

It also had the added benefit of helping me to forget that I was driving a Nissan Note: easily the worst pool/hire car I have had so far.  It really does not feel stable at speed or in corners.

In the end it all went very smoothly and coming back only took about two-and-a-half hours.  Very good considering we stopped at a services to take on some food and then encountered a heavy snow storm on the M1.

Even so, the ratio of time spent driving to time spent working was appalling. Athough the long-term gains of the meeting should make up for it, it still felt like a waste of a day.

It does not help that I do not really enjoy driving much and had to do all the driving since my colleague keeps ‘forgetting’ to get her licence registered with HR so she is not allowed to drive company pool cars or hire cars.

Just to put the cherry on the cake, no sooner had I got home and had something to eat than I was off out to spend two hours at a constituency AGM, which is as exciting as it sounds.

The mystery was solved when an eagle-eyed Garda spotted that Prawo Jazdy is ‘driving licence’ in Polish and not a name so Mr. Jazdy is no longer on the most-wanted list over there.

I expect a whimsical Hollywood film to be made about it soon.

That is an average of nearly 70 miles a week.  Just goes to show how all those odd trips out to Horsham, detours to the shops on the way home, and meetings at the Labour club all add up because I didn’t think I was doing much more than 55 miles a week on average.

On the plus side, the service and MOT was less than half the cost that it was last year.

The story has some quotes about advertising more to make us aware that trying to read words on a tiny screen and then concentrate on composing a reply on tiny buttons might make us less able to safely control a moving car.  I just doubt that anyone who can’t work that out on their own is going to be paying attention to such messages, and according to the research there are a lot of us in that particular boat – 50% of 17 to 24-year-olds have texted while driving apparently, and that really is scary.

Actually I do wonder if the flashy features on some of the flashier cars are not nearly as distracting.  It can be bad enough operating a sat-nav or stereo, but how about those screens in the new Jaguars with that big control knob down by the gear lever and the multiple levels of menu?