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Honolulu Lite Charles Memminger |
Putting pedal to medal
tests our mettleThe new law that revokes the licenses of drivers who go 90 miles per hour or over is a good start although many favored having offenders' fingernails extracted in a thoughtful, yet painful manner.
There was a strong effort to have certain driving-related offenses classified criminal acts instead of traffic violations, in light of the current situation in which a speeder who causes a fatal car crash is charged, I believe, with littering.
A gun sitting on a table is harmless but once it is shot it becomes a weapon. It's the same with a car. Sitting in your driveway or cruising along the roads slightly over the speed limit, a car is not particularly dangerous. But once it's going 90 miles per hour or over, it has become a weapon. And the idiot behind the wheel is pointing that weapon at everyone else on the highway.
Under the new law, anyone caught going that fast will lose their license for up to five years. Police catching the jerks is the tricky part. Cops can't be everywhere at once because if they were, there'd be no place for the rest of us. But everyone on the road has a cell phone these days. Why not put a bounty on the heads of speeders, which can be collected by any other driver who rats them out with a cell phone?
The bounty wouldn't have to be much. For five or 10 bucks, I'd snitch on my mother-in-law for speeding. Radio personalities Perry and Price have their "KSSK Posse," a loose band of busy-bodies who tattletale on any law-breakers they find on the roads. We should have a statewide "Rat Patrol" of mercenary-minded squealers willing to turn in street racers for cold hard cash.
BUT IT'S MORE than speeders who make the roads dangerous. There are all kinds of other forms of driving idiocy that should be criminalized.
Stopping at the end of a freeway on-ramp and then trying to enter traffic at 10 miles an hour should be a felony. Period. Put these people in prison however long it takes for them to learn that the purpose and design of an on-ramp is to build up enough speed to blend into freeway traffic, not cause a mile-long pile up.
Cruising at or below the speed limit in the left-hand lane of a highway should be a hanging offense. Seriously. How can so many drivers in Hawaii pass a test and get their license without knowing that the left lane is for passing, the middle lane is for cruising and the right lane is for anyone dumb enough to get stuck there? Not only should anyone getting that question wrong on the driver's test not get a license, they should be dragged out behind the police station and flogged.
Stopping at an intersection when the light turns yellow should at least be a misdemeanor. Lights are colored for a reason. Red means stop. Green means go. And yellow means go faster. People who stop when the light turns yellow should be put, at the very least, under house arrest.
So, revoking speeders' licenses is a good beginning. Torture, beatings and other subtle forms of persuasion should be considered next.
See the Columnists section for some past articles.
Charles Memminger, winner of National Society of Newspaper Columnists awards, appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays. E-mail cmemminger@starbulletin.com