—Experts call for the classification of conduct such as driving without a licence, exceeding certain speed limits and greatly exceeding permitted blood alcohol levels as a criminal offence

—The event forms part of the abertis foundation Road Safety Programme

Experts agree that penalties are needed to reduce the number of offences and accident rates. Nevertheless, employing penalties as the sole solution has a limited effect, and there is a need to combine them with road safety education. This is one of the conclusions of the VI International Road User Anthropology Symposium, organised by the abertis foundation in collaboration with the Universitat Internacional de Catalunya (UIC, the International University of Catalonia) and held today at Barcelona’s Palau de la Música, under the title The law: offences and penalties.

Road safety education has more positive, lasting effects than penalties since the subject ends up complying with safety regulations, and not just through fear of being punished. To reduce the number of offences, experts have also highlighted the need to ensure social acceptance of regulations and sufficient resources to guarantee that the law is enforced. Spain has the lowest number of road checks and the lowest level of penalties for bad driving, with a rate in 2004 of 25.2 offences detected for every 1,000 vehicles, whilst Holland reached a figure of 850 for breaking the speed limit alone, according to a study by the European Road Federation.

Additionally, speakers supported an update of Spain’s Penal Code to include new criminal offences, such as driving without a licence, breaking speed limits by 70 kph or driving the a blood alcohol rate 100% above that permitted.

The VI Symposium benefited from the presence of Pere Navarro, Spain’s Director-General of Traffic, who gave the speech Legal aspects of road safety policy, and Luis Montoro, Professor of Road Safety at the University of Valencia, with a paper entitled Penalty versus education: two strategies for improving road safety.

Pere Navarro thanked the abertis foundation for its work in the field of road safety, and highlighted the Foundation’s contribution as part of Operation Crossing the Straits and to producing the study Highway and motorway emergency response systems, which analyses road accident coordination models.

For his part, Universitat Internacional de Catalunya Rector Josep Maria Argemí declared his satisfaction at the results of the collaboration between the University and the Foundation, and congratulated Dr. Josep Olives for developing the discipline of Road User Anthropology which is, in his view, increasingly consolidated and called for.

The debate on penalties

The round table session Anthropological reflections on traffic penalties, moderated by Montserrat Nebrera, Director the UIC’s Advanced Studies Centre, saw the participation of Xavier Baulies, Deputy Director-General of Technology and Systems of the Highways Directorate-General of the Generalitat de Catalunya; Alfonso Perona, Executive Secretary of the Fundació RACC; Joan Royuela, Superintendent of the Traffic Unit of Barcelona’s Guardia Urbana (local police); and Eugènia Domènech, Director of the Fundación para la Prevención de Accidentes de Tráfico (P(A)T, the Foundation for the Prevention of Traffic Accidents). The Director of the Catalan Traffic Service, Rafael Olmos, closed this Symposium, directed by Josep Olives, President of the Catalan Road User Anthropology Society and Dean of Humanities at the UIC.

This is the sixth consecutive year that the abertis foundationhas organised the International Road User Anthropology Symposium. This discipline studies road use, focusing on the human factor as the key to driving safety, and forms part of the abertis foundation Road Safety Programme, whose goal is to provide information on and raise society’s awareness of the problem of traffic and road safety through four main lines of action: road safety education in schools, research work, technical workshops and divulgation.

The abertis foundation is dedicated to encouraging and disseminating research into road safety and the impact of large-scale infrastructure on the territory, especially on the environment, the economy and demographics. 

VI International Road User Anthropology Symposium: The law: offences and penalties 

 CONCLUSIONS

1. Freedom and independence must be guaranteed, whilst stressing safety. Freedom of movement and transport is one of today’s society’s key freedoms. However, this individual freedom is limited by the need to uphold the common good. Traffic laws stem from two principles: independence and safety. The tension between the two forms the basis for the dynamics of this type of legislation. We must guarantee freedom and independence, but must place ever-greater stress on safety. Today, this means we must revise the system, complementing administrative with criminal penalties.

2. The legal system covering road use does not begin and end with traffic regulations. The legal organisation chart for the road use action system is highly complex. Legislation goes beyond traffic regulations and should be further extended to fields such as the production of motor cars, infrastructure, driving licence administration, education and training, formal control, communications, etc. Currently, the entire system is fragmented and, all too often, management lacks transversal and collating tools.

3. For laws to be effective, the public must accept and respect them. It is proven that, as far as road use is concerned, good laws are effective in reducing accident rates and improving traffic conditions. For laws and regulations to be effective, the public must accept and respect them –with good reason is it said that the worst kind of law is that which is not complied with. In this way, laws receive the required public acceptance, without which they are not effective. For this reason, laws and regulations must be significant: in other words, credible. If not, a dangerous situation arises of tolerance of infringement, and the law therefore loses its effectiveness.

4. There is a need to complement penalties with education. There is a direct relationship between legislation and teaching. If one is looking for a real change in road user and civic attitudes, there is a need to complement penalties with education. This also means tempering repression with prevention or, more generally “social control” (or “formal control”) with the taking on board of regulations by the road-using public. A step forward in this direction is provided by the “by-points” driving licence, because it combines the two: it penalises, but also rewards and provides positive reinforcement.

5. Improvements are needed in the penalty process. Before changing laws and penalties, there is a need to improve the penalty process. For a penalty to be really effective in improving road use, it must meet certain requirements, important amongst which is the swiftness of its enforcement. A fresh look also needs to be taken, in a number of senses, at the civic and moral value of financial penalties, beyond their income-generating value. A proper relationship should be established and an attempt made not to confuse offenders, leading them to believe that the main reason for them is financial and not civic.

6. 40% of the most dangerous attitudes, acts and omission are not penalised. The law, offences and penalties solely (or in their great majority) cover conduct that is aware of the public and thus can have no direct effect upon a large part of the main causes of accidents, which are not aware of it. As a result, it is estimated that up to 40% of the most dangerous attitudes, acts and omissions are not punishable: examples include distraction, non-intentional conduct, etc. Improving serious road use problems depends in the first place more on the safety model employed than the legal model.

7. Spain’s Penal Code needs revision: breaking the speed limit and exceeding blood alcohol limits should be classified as crimes. There is also a call for revising the Penal Code to include certain types of conduct leading to serious accidents, and also risk-causing drivers (the majority of whom will re-offend, etc.) Excess speed and drunk driving should be crimes, since they place the common good at serious risk. In the case of driving without a licence, a distinction should be drawn between a misdemeanour (such as driving with an expired licence) and a crime (driving without having passed the licence or when legally banned from doing so).