Mustn't say 'And why not?'...Mustn't say 'And why not?'...Mustn't say 'And why not?'...Mustn't say 'And why not?'...

[INJ] I agree with your expressed sentiment. In New South Wales, where I live, the R.T.A. (Roads and Traffic Authority) erect huge signs by the roadside announcing that there is a fixed 'speed camera' ahead. People still get caught travelling above the designated speed limit. Really, how stupid can some people be?
There are constant 'Letters to the Editor' in newspapers declaiming speeding fines as 'revenue raisers' and that for some obscure reason the writer feels that a fine for exceeding a speed limit is some form of tax.
There is a simple answer isn't there?

(INJ) If the fine is proportional to the speed this would mean someone on £100 a day (fairly modest by Swiss standards) who exceeded a limit of (say) 120 kph by 10kph would get a fine of £13,000, which is absurd. Even if the fine is only proportional to the excess it's still £1000 for a fairly minor infringement.
The actual fine is so huge that either his income is much higher than £2166 a day or some other formula is used. Logically, it ought to be proportional to the square of the speed minus the square of the speed limit thus giving the excess braking distance. Doing this, one finds

fine = 0.004 x daily income x (V² - V²_lim) with V in kph

But applying this to the ordinary geezer on £100 a day doing 130 kph in a 120 kph limit gives, coincidentally, the same £1000 as before. Maybe it's proprtional to the cube of fourth power of the speed or possibly to income above a certain level. But then if you were poor you'd have no fine at all. I can't make sense of it It's all bollocks and obviously quite beyond the innumerates at the Grauniad, a paper I read BTW.
(Duj) Of course there is and they never catch me despite a tendency to leg it. But it depends on the fine. Speeding on a motorway (say 85 mph instead of 70) is hardly arson, rape and bloody murder, except maybe in Switzerland, a very well-ordered country.

Haven't I anything better to do? Well, just tonight, no, alas.

[Rosie] You may not know that you have to pay an annual tax in order to be allowed to drive on motorways in Switzerland at all, even if you are only passing through the country. Also, it's very hard to get in and out of Switzerland without using a stretch of motorway. Cunning, eh!

[Phil] Yeah - the payment covers January to December rather than a rolling 12-month period from the date of purchase, so if you buy it in October you've been done out of two-thirds of the benefits already, and the sticker they give you to show you've paid the highway robbery tax doesn't peel off either. Hmmph.

(Phil, pen) What a horrible little place, and in so many other ways as well.

Oh, I quite liked it...once I learnt to love efficiency.