Fixed penalties by degree
From Austin Bicycle Helmet Law
From the Missouri Bicycle Federation "Thunderhead" Listserv:
We discussed increasing penalties for motorists hitting/injuring/killing bicyclists through the state legislature.
One possible strategy is simply to work to increase all penalties for all violations that result in injury or death. We moved in that direction in Missouri after our initial bicycle-only ideas were criticized as being narrow & favoring one type of road user over the other.
Great--we'll improve things for everybody, and since bikes/peds have a somewhat higher proportion of injuries than motorists, we'll also get more of the benefit--that was our thinking.
What we found in Missouri is that their is no correlation with reality in the severity of punishments. For instance if a policeman catches you rolling through a stop sign you may get 2 driver's license points. If you go through at high speed & kill a whole school bus worth of kids you might get 3 points (there is an additional point added if property damage is involved).
So rather than modeling our proposal on the type of laws that increase penalties if a pedestrian is hit, we decided to go for increased penalties across the board.
Basically, this was like, if you break the traffic law & it causes an accident, there is a certainly penalty. If it causes minor injury, there is a greater penalty. If it causes serious injury, there is a much greater penalty (and enough points to lead to automatic license suspension). If it causes death, more serious penalty yet and yet more points. These penalties were not "throw them in prison" type penalties but high fines and (most important) enough points to really affect the person's driving record.
The benefit of this is that if you can develop a coalition that believes in road safety they can all get behind this. It could be really broad-based.
Another approach, similar, is to create specific penalties of "operating a motor vehicle causing injury" and "operating a motor vehicle causing death". One state has done this (New Hampshire?). The advantage of this is, prosecutors can use it in cases where they don't feel the facts/evidence/likelihood of conviction allows them to bring serious manslaughter or vehicular manslaughter charges.
I can send you sample language for the above if you like (though it is Missouri-specific . . . ).
Yet another approach (which was used in Washington or maybe Oregon?) is to have mandatory bike/ped safety education for any driver convicted of an offense involving bicyclist or pedestrian.
And last of all, personally I think things will change when we get insurance companies involved and working on our behalf rather than against us. Best way, it seems to me, would be some kind of "no fault" insurance that would cover all ped/bicycling injuries that happen on roads. (Frankly one reason there is little followup on bike/ped collisions is because there is no insurance company working on behalf of the bicyclist/pedestrian try to have blame definitely established on the motorist.)
Obviously some of these are huge far-reaching proposals that will take real coalition building and maybe years of work.
One advantage of just making a "bicycle penalty bill" modeled on your "pedestrian penalty bill" is that most legislators will consider this a rather small unimportant "specialty bill" made to solve a particular problem and not necessarily of tremendous global importance. And for that reason it just might slide on through.
Obviously the above includes many random thoughts and I don't know your particular situation or resources very well. So take it for what it's worth, just some things to think about!
Also, we haven't gotten any of the above passed, yet--but we've tried on all of them!
Brent
