Many who do this have no choice but to drive or lose their housing, job, children, etc. But, this city seems to have an extensive public transportation network.
I don’t live in Guelph, but I know a few who do, and have also briefly read from others complaints about the transit system in Guelph. Sure it’s better than it is in some other places in Canada, but that’s a looooow bar. Toronto has the best transit that I know in Ontario, and there’s still a lot of shortcomings with it.
Here’s an article that gives a bit more info on Guelph transit system. It seems that there’s some disagreement on whether it is actually “bad” or not in the article. To be fair, I’m biased as to what qualifies as a good transportation network, as most people from this community would be.
Even without that option, if a license is suspended, it usually is for a reason. And more often than not the reason is that the driver is not safe for the environment. The risk of losing whatever is dear to them if they lose the licence is a something that should have been taken into consideration before whatever lead to the suspension.
My license was suspended in rural Michigan because I had a broken muffler. I fixed the muffler, but the fix wasn’t recorded correctly, and so I rec’d an administrative suspension of my license. …Which I didn’t even discover until I was pulled over a year later, and arrested. But there’s not any public transit in rural Michigan, and the distances too far to realistically ride a bicycle, which meant that I couldn’t stop driving to get to and from work. I kept paying my fines, but every time i had enough saved to pay the reinstatement fees, I’d get pulled over again (yay for having a shitbox car and living paycheck to paycheck, right?). Eventually I ended up in a place where I could bike to work, and ended up riding five miles a day to work in west Michigan for about a year, including through blizzards.
Don’t assume that licenses get suspended for reasons that have anything to do with the safety of the driver.
Even without that option, if a license is suspended, it usually is for a reason. And more often than not the reason is that the driver is not safe for the environment. The risk of losing whatever is dear to them if they lose the licence is a something that should have been taken into consideration before whatever lead to the suspension.
Treczoks
Loss of security of employment, thus security of water, food, clothing, shelter, sleep, and defense for self and children, is not a humane punishment. It inhibits the individual’s ability to rehabilitate themselves. Perhaps you should’ve thought about this before demonstrating in public your lack of basic human empathy, now preserved in quote.
Loss of security of employment, thus security of water, food, clothing, shelter, sleep, and defense for self and children, is not a humane punishment.
Here, at least, suspending a license is done only when a driver has definitely shown that he or she is a danger for other people. For somemone going through a school zone with 90km/h or driving completely drunk, I care more for the actual or potential victims of the driver than the drivers’ ease of transport.
Predicating your very survival on a privilege that you may not always be entitled to is hopefully something that will be bred out of the species in a few more generations.
Where is the human empathy if the suspended driver harms or kills another community memeber in a car crash?
If a person has harmed others, and is likely to do more harm in the future, it’s appropriate to remove them from society. This is why prisons exist.
Drivers licence suspension typically is the consequence of crimes that are too minor to warrant prison. In this case, the perpetrator has the chance to make changes to their life to avoid prison. For example, they can accept slow public transit, bike to work, get a closer job, move to a place where it’s easier to live without a car.
Obviously, It will be challenging for the perpetrator to reorganize their life in a way that does not require them to risk harming others, and many will fail.
But your argument that society is required to accept being victimized by dangerous drivers because it would be inhumane to force them to use alternative forms of transportation (used by millions of people too poor to afford a car, even in the most car dependent cities) is absurd.
The comments on this post defending the driver seriously alarm me. There is no reason to excuse this kind of behaviour regardless of where the driver lives. If they don’t have public transit she can damned well walk! No one’s life is less important than her driving privileges. People have a RIGHT to life, it is a PRIVILEGE to drive. Get your heads on straight!
While I agree with you in principle, work may not be that easy to come by.
I used to live ~6 miles from the nearest business. If I had to pick between endangering other people and being thrown out on the street, the choice is obvious. I imagine most people will make the same choice when it comes down to it.
Isn’t there someone like this in every town in the country?
I wouldn’t be surprised if half of the people who lost their license are still driving. Losing your license in the first place, is not a sign of good decision making.
Maybe if every town in the country has properly funded public transit that was safe and reliable, we’d see less situations like this.
My city’s of public transit is a joke and we wonder why there’s so many drunk drivers. Can’t even sleep off the booze in your car without getting a DUI from some dickhead cop.
Take away that car and auction it off. It’s the only way people learn. If it isn’t hers, well, tough luck if someone made it available to someone without a licence, and paying it back might teach her a lesson.
I’d have some sympathy if it weren’t for how far you need to go to get a license suspended in the first place.
I get that there are some places where needing transportation is basically required to live… Which is all the more reason not to fuck up bad enough to get that very means of travel suspended in the first place.
I see enough dangerous driving on a daily basis that it’s practically second nature around these parts… The less of the those on the streets the better.
I’d have some sympathy if it weren’t for how far you need to go to get a license suspended in the first place.
All you have to do is talk back to a small town cop.
Once they decide to punish you, there’s nothing to be done. They can sit a block from your house and pull you over every single day and write a bullshit speeding ticket. The same cop wrote me up at least a dozen times. Admittedly I was speeding the first time, and possibly some of the others, but I was always with the flow of traffic and close to the limit. He would just write up whatever he wanted.
The most annoying part was when my father borrowed my car one morning and got pulled over instead. He was mad at me for it, because me pissing off the cops got him pulled over even though he never goes above the limit.
And if you live in a small town, there is no public transportation, there is no taxi service. If you don’t drive you have to walk or ride a bike. And all of the work available is many miles away, because everything is when you get rural.
Although I don’t disagree with your comment about the number of bad drivers, I just think this article lacks enough details to come to your conclusion.
