True its not really fair because people automatically assume its you.
-
Join the MyBroadband community
South Africa’s biggest forum. Discuss, discover, and connect with thousands of members.
-
Question of the Day: What is your preferred Chinese car brand?
Should we be Naming & Shaming Drunk Drivers?
- Thread starter Skeptik
- Start date
True its not really fair because people automatically assume its you.
Well, drunk driving at least is extremely serious. It kills people. In large numbers. I'm all for naming and shaming. These murderers are a danger to the communities they live in. They also cost taxpayers enormously every time they do something stupid like smash into a street light pole, and divert massive amounts of policing and emergency service resources away from actual crimes at the very times when they are needed most e.g. Friday/Saturday nights). I think I'd like to know if my next door neighbour is inclined to drive over my children.
Last edited:
Hehe, yeah, if they do this, it needs to be done properly so there is no chance of mistaken identity, otherwise it's bound to happen, even with less common names, that some innocent's life is damaged badly. (I suspect probably more frequently than one would expect, cf. eg. Birthday Paradox.)
I think its a bit dramatic to say someone that might have had one too many drinks is inclined to run over children don't you? Not that I support drunk driving or do it myself.
No, not in the least. We have over 10,000 road deaths a year and over 50% of these involve alcohol. That's ONLY deaths, that doesn't include all the injured and maimed, nor the economic or psychological havoc it wreaks. This would seem somehow more acceptable to me if it wasn't completely unnecessary and wasn't perpetrated deliberately, but I know this pathetic culture that thinks drunk driving is huge LULZ, I grew up in it.
But I guess you have to wait until somebody close to you dies (or is left disfigured or brain-damaged or crippled) before you realise this is at all serious. We will never grow up and grow out of it.
Before you comment any further: Befriend a cop or paramedic and spend just one Friday evening travelling with them to "accident" call-outs. While you watch them trying to restart a girl's heart who is lying bleeding to death and breathing her last on the tarmac, or while you watch them unwrapping someone from a tree trunk, or while you help look for the pieces of an innocent pedestrian, or while you watch them writing up all the reports and doing the paperwork, ponder how badly those resources are needed for crime - Friday nights are one of the peak crime times when drugged-out gangs of tsotis run rampant. Really, this is very, very, very serious stuff. You can't stress it enough with just words on a forum. I don't see how people just can't "get it".
If carnage and death don't bother you much, alternatively consider how much of YOUR taxpayer money is pissed down the toilet every time some drunk wipes out a robot or streetlight, and how much manpower is required to keep restoring this pointlessly vandalised infrastructure to a working state, only to have it destroyed again possibly even the very next weekend. I live near an intersection (near a popular 'drinking area') where somebody manages to destroy at least one set of robots or streetlights etc. seemingly nearly every weekend. And it's not just the cheap manual labour putting in new robots etc., it's all the overhead and paperwork and reports etc. of the cops, the ambulances, the traffic department, etc. etc. ... not to mention costs of state care for victims lying in hospitals.
IIRC the average car accident costs the taxpayer around half a million Rand.
This still has further knock-on effects for economic production, driving up inflation and destroying job creation, keeping unemployment high, destroying valuable skills and experience, and making everyone poorer. It also ensures high insurance premiums for everyone else. Then there are the economic costs of daytime accidents and resulting traffic jams - hundreds of thousands of lost man-hours every day. Then the written off cars. The cost of dealing with orphans and families that lose breadwinners. The costs of healthcare. The implications for medical aid premiums for everyone.
No, when the true scale of the implications of road carnage start to dawn on one and 'sink in', you realise the seriousness of this problem cannot be exaggerated.
Last edited:
Moederloos
Honorary Master
I did not read this whole thread in the interests of my blood pressure, but:
We should name and shame every ****wit that breaks the road rules on a regular basis (say, more than 3 fines in 6 months) as well as drunk drivers and "high-speeders".
We should name and shame every ****wit that breaks the road rules on a regular basis (say, more than 3 fines in 6 months) as well as drunk drivers and "high-speeders".
Moederloos
Honorary Master
Kim_Webchick
Expert Member
I have to agree to you both should be named!!!!!!
This system will be introduced in Gauteng first if im not mistaken.....like a school debit points system, you start with 10 points ,-1 for speeding,-9 for drunk driving, ect ect....
yes, they should be publically humiliated.
PS...no women on the list?
Yeah
Same here sex offenders should be named and shamed and so should drunk drivers.....
They've been "about to introduce it" for at least five years now. Every so often they announce they're going to implement this great new system, then some time passes, nothing happens, everyone forgets ... then suddenly they announce, again, a new initiative to (blah blah, repeat from step 1, infinite loop) ... I shudder to think how much money disappears every time this thing gets re-initiated (and we all know for what by now - as a phony premise for securing yet another round of funding that will quietly disappear).
It's like groundhog day around here sometimes.