Speeding fines and populism

The pretension that the Spanish government was moved by mere eagerness to collect more fines in its recently implemented proposal to lower the highway speed limit to 110 km/h, was a crooked argument used by the opposition Popular Party (PP). This has become clear with the release of the first official data collected since the measure came into effect. Not only has revenue from traffic fines failed to increase, as our principal opposition party, puffed up with populism, had predicted. In fact, it diminished, by no less than 48 percent, during the first two weeks of application of the new speed limit.

Radar-captured speeding reports fell during the first seven days by 62 percent. Such reductions may be due in part to drivers' initial fear of the new measures, so that infractions (and the consequent fines) may well reverse their downward trend. But these statistics do constitute a clear signal that makes nonsense of the rhetoric used by the PP, a party which, even now when it appears to have a clear road ahead toward power in the next legislature, seems incapable of abandoning its demagogic strategy.

In the face of a measure so obviously unpopular (some 69 percent of Spaniards reject the new speed limit), the PP has once more attempted to fish in troubled waters with a transparently dishonest argument which, even before it was belied by the data, was already an insult to our intelligence. Because the attempt to reduce fuel consumption, as the government intends to do in order to reduce the national energy bill and Spanish dependence on foreign sources, unavoidably carries with it a reduction in tax revenues which some experts have estimated at as much as 732 million euros annually, a figure far superior to what it receives annually from traffic fines (some 409 million euros for this year).

The state does need to collect more income, and spend less, in order to balance the public accounts; but it is obvious that to solve the equation by means of reduction of fuel consumption (taxes account for almost half the price) would have been absurd. The rise in crude oil prices and the Libyan crisis demanded, on the contrary, measures such as the one that entered into effect on March 7, in which the temporarily reduced speed limit came accompanied by the proposal to reduce public transport prices by five percent.

Prime Minister Zapatero did not receive the support of the opposition on either of these measures, though he might have done well to remember that previous negotiation with the opposition is a prudent course when announcing certain reforms, especially when these do not depend solely on the national government, but also on other authorities such as the regional ones, many of them in the hands of the PP.