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.
OK, that sounds like a very American problem. They don’t suspend a licence just for fun in my country.
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.
Sure, we’ll certainly give up vehicular transportation any day now. /s
I’m not sure what your point is supposed to be. Look, people become disabled and have to stop driving very, very frequently. People lose their earning ability and cannot afford to keep driving very, very frequently. I know you can’t wrap your head around it, but it’s not a fucking death sentence. It’s just a life change.
Where is the human empathy if the suspended driver harms or kills another community memeber in a car crash?
“Better than shit,” got the US Biden and Harris. My standards of ethical and moral choices aren’t measured relative the lowest common denominator.
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.
They’re expected to fail and end up in prison. But, you recommend it. That’s not only absurd, but also inhumane and unethical.
Do you think anyone ought to go to prison?
Extensive public transit hardly means functional. And women are far more likely to be harassed/abused on public transit than men.
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.
I mostly agree. Ideally we would end car dependency first so that driving can truly be a luxury and not a necessity, but that isn’t happening so if someone doesn’t respect our traffic laws we still need to take their license away.
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.
Loss of licence in a city built exclusively for car based transport isn’t going to be very successful in keeping people from driving
Yeah, the drunks with several DUIs.
Which country?
Guelph is in Canada.
I was taking a jab at their “the country”.
Well I almost said the world, but figured a pedant would come correct me about a specific example…
And boy you got one
Of course you did. And that specific example would’ve been still on this planet.
This was me for 8 years. I had multiple driving on suspended in multiple states. Finally paid everything off, which was a LOT of money, and got my license back. If you don’t have much money you really don’t have much of a choice if you live in a rural area.
My town has several, they generally use their riding lawnmower instead of a car though.
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.
because everything is when you get rural.
This is US specific. But somebody did cook it up for a reason…
Made me remember this: Man with suspended licence joins court call while driving
Does she need to work? Is commuting by public transit intolerably slower than driving a car?
It would justify the behavior.
It would not justify it, you just like the excuse because you tend to do similar things. You are not entitled to murder others, especially those who aren’t responsible for your situation, in order to satisfy your “needs”. Cannibalism doesn’t magically become acceptable because you’re starving.
Pretty weird that you’re baselessly accusing this person of doing similar things just for asking whether or not she’s doing this in the absence of a viable transportation alternative.
Like why are people on this site such dicks? It’s way past Reddit levels of snark and it just makes for a shitty experience here. It’s like hanging out with a bunch of jaded and snarky IT guys.
I’m no fan of shitty drivers and I think if we live in a world where license suspensions are a thing, that’s fine but don’t be surprised when stuff like this happens when public transit sucks. It may exist but there’s a reason why a lot of folks prefer their car over poorly funded public transit.
If your job is indirectly about murdering people, you’re just a soldier and this is war. It is the Nuremberg defense, the “I was just following orders” excuse.
I’m no fan of shitty drivers and I think if we live in a world where license suspensions are a thing, that’s fine but don’t be surprised when stuff like this happens when public transit sucks. It may exist but there’s a reason why a lot of folks prefer their car over poorly funded public transit.
Have you thought about why public transit is poorly funded and developed?
Have you thought about why public transit is poorly funded and developed?
Because the automotive industry actively dismantled it in the early twentieth century and then lobbied ever since to redirect funding to highway maintenance? The largest single government project in existence in the US National Highway System.
Indeed. And that automobile industry is supported by a large segregationist population who loves living where the buses full of non-white poors don’t reach. That and there’s physical competition over road space for buses, as they require bus lanes. Bus lanes aren’t car lanes, that’s the point of bus lanes, and installing bus lanes is usually unpopular (due to all the car drivers who don’t want to lose a lane or street parking).
What I’m trying to point out is that all sides of system matters, especially if there’s some kind of democracy going on. Blame is distributed.
Did you reply to the right person? I’m not sure how your comment is relevant to mine. I’m well aware of why public transit is poorly funded and developed.
Some people, when given a choice between cannibalism and dying of starvation will choose the former. The ones that do may choose to regret it, but they are alive to have the capacity to regret.
At the point that you are struggling to survive, any society that does not immediately render aid is no society at all (not to you), and is either an enemy, taking resources you need, or prey.
I find it unfathomable that people imagine that poor people and untermenschen should just resign themselves to dying off. It explains why the working class might resort to terror attacks to assert their right to exist.
but they are alive to have the capacity to regret.
Oh, wow, that’s so comforting to know: the monster feel a tinge of guilt. So, are you ready to die for someone else’s character development (best case)?
I find it unfathomable that people imagine that poor people and untermenschen should just resign themselves to dying off. It explains why the working class might resort to terror attacks to assert their right to exist.
The least one can do is understand the class war. You don’t punch down or to the side. You don’t do reverse-Robin-hood.
Aside from that, if all that’s left of this species is monsters, there’s no point to it.
Sound like you’ve never gone hungry, or even suffered from precarity.
We are all monsters once we are desperate enough. Even you.
But then we, as a species, careen towards multiple great filters we are ill-prepared to navigate. We may be too savage to survive after all.
Justify? Maybe not. But explain? Yes.
Well, it depends on whether you believe everyone is, to borrow from the US Declaration of Independence, endowed with inalienable rights.
Here in the States there’s actually a legal defense, Necessity . This is the same category under which self defense lies, that if a crime committed is necessary to preserve life and well being it may be justified or exculpable.
Usually the justifying life and limb cannot exceed the harm done by the crime. So in the case of cannibalism (which was mentioned elsewhere in this thread) one isn’t justified to kill someone else to preserve their own life, but if they happen to be dead already, it’s justified to eat their remains to live (as per the Donner Party incident – though in that case, they decided to eat their fallen after considerable deliberation)
It gets weird when, say, a mother breaks into a pharmacy and steals very expensive medicines in order to keep her kids alive because the price of the medications raises questions as to the value of a human life.
Now in the US, the courts are terribly corrupt, and thanks to prior incidents exculpation based on circumstances (e.g. Dan White’s twinkie defense) federal and state courts in the US are less likely to actually consider circumstances without some top lawyer guns making a big stink (usually hiring expert witnesses to painstakingly explain why those circumstances make a difference). So if you’re poor enough that you need to steal bread to live, you’re probably not going to benefit from a necessity defense, even when it should be valid.
Licenses are a wrongdoing against the state, and behaviors are licensed by the state allegedly in protection of the interests of the public. Licensed driving is to assure one is qualified to drive, so the wrongdoing against the community doesn’t happen until the driver is involved in an incident that brings harm to others (or to other public interests, such as the environment – driving into a lake would count).
But where this goes under necessity is that her occupation, and thus her survival may depend on her capacity to drive, and if the state is going to strip her of license, it has to take that into consideration, or deal with the consequences of motivating more crime.
Need money but have to waste time working? That justifys theft.
Getting a job takes months on average. And the way our current system works, you have to lie about experience to get your first job, and then upgrade a couple of times to get a living wage with survival benefits. That takes years.
You have to eat and sleep today. If you have ongoing medical requirements, your healthcare can’t wait for a job.
