Wednesday, September 29, 2010

Boy racers and teh stupid

Young people are dumb. Some stay that way all their lives, but many learn through experience. Sometimes hard experience. Young men, in my view, are especially dumb. It's relatively easy to convince the average one that drinking 20 pints of lager and swimming across a lake at night is a good idea. Armies know they are easily convinced to madly charge into razor wire and machine gun fire. Young males often have a lethal unappreciation of the consequences of their actions and/or self-preservation.

This is why when I read this little report I cringed.

Motorists called police on Saturday at about 10:45 a.m. PT saying they had spotted two vehicles travelling at very high speeds on the public road up Mount Seymour, said Cpl. Peter DeVries.
An officer on patrol nearby was notified and moments later, "watched, stunned, as a blue Ferrari rocketed past him at almost 200 km/h. A BMW followed close behind," DeVries said.
The officer located the vehicles in the parking lot at the top of Mount Seymour.
The drivers, aged 21 and 22, both residents of Vancouver, were issued almost $1,000 in traffic fines for excessive speeding and driving without due care and attention, said DeVries.
Their licenses also were suspended and their cars impounded for seven days under provisions of new provincial legislation for excessive speeding and street racing, he said.

My first thought was something along the lines of "what the hell is someone that young doing in a Ferrari?" And my second thought was that someone that young should not be behind the wheel of a car with the potential of a Ferrari. And then I looked at the punishment. A thousand dollar ticket and a seven day impound/suspension. A grand is a paltry sum for someone able to afford driving high-end luxury cars. A seven-day suspension becomes a story for their mates about how the doing 200km/h up the mountain was worth the slap.
No, that kind of behaviour, IMHO, ought to fall under the purview of impaired driving. Drunk drivers are criminally faulted for their decision to drive when drunk regardless of whether they realised their judgement was impaired. Sober drivers, driving as recklessly as these punks, have no excuse. They made a willful and conscious decision to drive in a manor dangerous to themselves and others. 
If their judgement is that impaired when they're sober, they ought not to be allowed near a set of car keys until they've been assessed by a mental health professional and been served a punishment similar to that issued to their intoxicated counterparts.


4 comments:

Edstock said...

Major hoonage, at first glance. But, the report doesn't tell us what the minimum is or what traffic conditions were like, or even what the road really is, ie, 4-lane divided, 2-lane narrow, 60 kph limit? 90 kph? However, the fines should have been heavier.
Myself, I'm partial to big-block Cobras for that sort of thing. Say, like an alloy-block 460 with Boss heads and a 6-speed Tremec in a Factory Five chassis.

Dana said...

Two paved lanes, lots of curves, some dropoffs, all uphill obviously and the road starts about 1/4 click from my door.

The other things the report doesn't mention are whether the boys are known to police and their ethnicity.

My bet is that they're known for gang affiliations and their ethnicity is Asian.

Edstock said...

Two lanes? The fines should've been a LOT heavier.

Dana said...

Look here.

http://maps.google.ca/maps?q=mount+seymour+road,+north+vnancouver,+bc&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&hl=en&tab=wl