Is it time to change traffic fines in North Dakota?

0:00Good afternoon everyone. You're listening to Afternoons Live with Tyler Axis, but this is Carla Rose Hanson. I'm substituting in for Tyler while he's out of town. Good to be on with you, Eric. Thanks for having me on. We are having a lot of good conversations this afternoon and what we're going to be talking about for the next half hour is traffic violations. All of us have probably gotten a ticket or two in our life going a little too fast or maybe running through a stop sign. And the fines and points related to some of those traffic violations haven't always kept up with inflation or with the times. Some of them have stayed the same for a very long time. So the legislature directed a study for the highway patrol and law enforcement to actually study what this system is right now, the driver's license points system and the traffic fee schedule. And determine,

1:01you know, should we be updating this? Should we be updating it with the times to maybe provide a better deterrence for some dangerous behavior out there? So who, the person who is joining me this afternoon to talk a little bit more about this is Major Tom Iverson. He's with the highway patrol and he's going to tell us a little bit about what that study found and what some of the recommendations are about it. So Tom, thanks for joining us this afternoon. Hey, Carla. Thank you for having me on. I appreciate it. Yeah, absolutely. Well, first of all, your highway patrol tells us a little bit about what you do for them. What's your role? My role with the highway patrol is I am our agency's assistant superintendent in charge of our field operations. So I oversee the kind of a day-to-day activities of our troopers, sergeants and commanders out in the field. We split our agency kind of into two areas, I guess, administrative and then I'm on the field side. I've been working for the agency for 22 years now. 22 years. So you have probably seen it all when it comes to

2:07violations and you know, if you're looking at people who are out in the field, all the different behaviors that lead to crashes or other problems. So yeah, so you were part of the study that the highway patrol and land enforcement looked at related to the points and the fines and looking at all the different activities that lead to both dangerous outcomes like a crash or also just maybe getting pulled over and getting a fee or a fine and then maybe some points added to your license. So tell us a little bit about this study, what were some of the things that you looked at and found? Yeah, absolutely. It was a definitely an interesting study, a lot of time, a lot of effort went into it. So kudos to everybody who was involved in the process and also shout out to our legislative body for assigning the study, even though they assigned work to us. It was definitely work worth doing. So during the 2023 legislative session,

3:15it was House Bill 1298 specifically directed the highway patrol in conjunction with local enforcement to review North Dakota's driver's license points system and our traffic fee schedule and to come back with some recommended improvements. It was kind of an opportunity to determine whether consequences are consistent or they proportional to the seriousness of the violation and meaningful enough to encourage safe driving. And that was kind of the approach that we took with this. So we worked with our local counterpart with the police department, sheriff's department, the DOT, North Dakota upper great planes was involved in that with quite a few entities involved helping us and kind of started off with a rough framework. We all basically wanted to address things proportional and take into account and always consider serious injury crashes, fatal

4:17crashes on our North Dakota roadways and are the fines and points matched appropriately to those violations. Ultimately, that's our goal is to keep our roadway safe. And if we work ourselves out of a job someday that that that being excellent problem half. I would I would love to see that, but as of right now we still still have quite a bit of work to do. So that was the overall intent of it was to work together and we submitted the the study to the legislative body. We presented it in front of the judicial committee and the feedback from the group seemed very positive. It was it was definitely an interesting study. Yes, well I sit on that in term committee and yes, I can speak for them that we were all very impressed by your work. It was a very high quality study and so you presented it very well and it was good information, you know, because it's always good

5:19to make policy decisions based on based on facts. And so one of the things I remember that you presented is that some of the leading contributors to crashes and unfortunately, fatalities is distracted driving, careless driving, failure to yield, speeding of course and then of course impaired driving people who are driving under the influence. So that makes sense to me, but was there anything in the findings of the study that that surprised you that sort of jumped out to you as something you didn't expect or was it all kind of in line with what you've been experiencing just, you know, looking after, you know, your field officers over the last couple of decades. Well, a lot of it did reaffirm, I guess, what we already know in law enforcement. After you know, working on the road for several years and if my troopers are listening to this right now, they're rolling their eyes because I work in the office here right now, but our troopers

6:22out on the road do an excellent job. They're out there day in and day out. Patrol on the roads looking for violations, spawn in the crashes and it's all with that ultimate goal of simple keeping a road safe. We don't just simply pull somebody over for speeding just because the law says, you know, you can't speed in and of itself, it's because, well, we don't want people to be exceeding the speed limit because then it's going to raise the risk of a crash from happening. So when we're looking at everything, probably one of the things that stood out the most, I guess, was kind of how disconnected some parts of our current system are from actual roadway risk. And that's I'm not throwing any shade on anybody when saying that. It's just, we haven't kind of followed a good path, I guess, with keeping up with times throughout time, you know, or kind of the

7:24base fine structure of the $20 starting base was set back in 1973. And that's still where we're at today. So it's kind of disconnected from actual roadway risk because we have some relatively minor administrative or even some equipment violations that actually carry some points. And our recommendation was to remove that. But then there's also some behaviors that we know contribute to serious injury and fatal crashes that don't necessarily carry an appropriate consequence that's ultimately proportional to the risk that they are creating. If they're driving, you know, 40-50 miles per hour over the speed limit, that's going to create a very substantial risk. And the point structure and fee structure for violations such as that should should reflect that in there. Exactly. Well, we're going to take a quick break now. But when we get back, I want to hear a

8:26little bit more about what some of those key changes are that you're proposing specifically, you know, to be a little bit more in line with what should go up and what should go down. So we're going to take a break and we'll be right back with Major Tom Iverson talking about traffic violations and points and fee fines. Good afternoon. You are listening to afternoon's live. I am Carla Rose Hanson in for Tyler Axness. And we are talking about traffic violations. There is a legislative study that's been done that might make some changes to the points and fees that we pay if we get caught with certain traffic violations. So that will be up for consideration when the legislature reconvenes in January. And we have with us today Major Tom Iverson from the highway patrol and he was involved with this study. And Tom, tell us a little bit about specifically what kind of changes the study is recommending from changing some of the low risk violations to be have kind of less

9:32consequences, but some of the high risk violations that lead to dangerous safety situations have maybe a higher fine or more points. What are some specific changes that you're recommending? Okay. Well, first of all, Carla, I noticed during the break the first song that came on was Alabama's I'm in a hurry. The wording is I'm going to hurry to get things going 0 to 16 5.2. So kind of had a little bit of a chuckle here and you know we live in a society that is hustle and bustle and we're all kind of in a hurry from getting from point A to point B, I get it that's just human nature. And once and while kind of push the limits and that's I guess why why we're out there. So I had a good chuckle about that while waiting at break, but to address your question on some of the more specifics of the risk, kind of the simplest way to describe it

10:32is essentially that we're trying to modernize the system so that the consequences, aka the traffic fine and associated points better reflect the danger of the driving behavior. So if there are lower risk violations, there's some equipment violations such as failure to dig your headlamps. Maybe some registration ones, failure to display a two license plates on your vehicle. We're not suggesting an increased fine amount in those sort of things or even an increase in points associated on your driver's license. The goal isn't just to increase penalties across the board. It's to put the emphasis where it belongs and that emphasis needs to be on behaviors that are most likely to cause crashes, specifically injuries and deaths out on roadways. So looking through some of the recommendations that we had right away violations are a heavy hitter in North

11:35Dakota. The majority of them are at $20 and the proposed fine in the study was to adjust that to $50. Many of those points also stayed the same. There were a few that were adjusted from zero points to two points. So right away violations, there's a couple equipment ones to specifically seat belts. You know, if driving without a seat belt from $20 to $50 and then there'd be two points on your driver's license and then all support, trials or trained device is currently $25 and the group recommended a proposed fine of $50. Overtaking is another one, another heavy hitter when vehicles are unsafe passing things like that. And then of course the speeding violations

12:36and distraction, those are some areas that we wanted to address in there. We came up with a kind of a new speed chart, I guess, that starts off with a baseline of $50 and then works up incrementally. One of the interesting things that popped out to the group or maybe it was just me is that the number of points assigned for a violation was capped out at 15 points. So no matter what the speed was, once you got up to that category, I guess I should say, the most points you could accumulate in your driver's license in any one violation was 15 and that just didn't seem correct that it should be able to go up incrementally from there, you know, based on those really high excessive speeds that we do come across once in a while. I don't want to make it seem like

13:37everybody's out there driving like that because it certainly is not the case, but that was an area that we wanted to address within this study. Yes. Well, I could talk about this all day with you. Obviously you had such a great study. We could go into a lot of details, but we're still a long ways. I want our listeners to know we're still a long ways from making any of these changes. You know, it won't be even debated until starting in January when the legislature reconvenes. So meanwhile, just the minute that we have left, I want people to hear your advice about safer driving. So if you could leave us with what are your top three things that people should be remembering to prevent a crash, what would you say those top three tips would be? All right, here's where I need to shine in this interview. There's a lot of things I could touch on, but the top three I would go with is for one

14:42watching your speed. Number one, slow down, drive for the conditions. We all know winter is coming. It comes every year. Here in North Dakota, whether we like it or not, I personally do like it, but we have to we have to remind ourselves and drive appropriately just because the speed limit says 65 on this road absolutely does not mean we should be driving 65 at times. And we do see a large number of our crashes. I don't know what percentage it is off top of my head, but I know it's a large number of them where people are driving too fast for the conditions that happens quite frequently. Number two, put the distractions away, limit yourself on use. And number three is worry seatbelt, keep your seatbelt buckled up, and of course, I have to throw in reframing from drinking and driving. Absolutely. Major Tom Iverson, thank you for joining us in talking about traffic violations today. I appreciate it very much. We'll take a break now. Thanks.