Vail Mayor Travis Coggin has proposed fining truck drivers who fail to chain up when the conditions on Interstate 70 warrant it as much as $20,000.  

He is right. Sometimes you just need a big fine to make a point.

Frankly $500 — the current penalty — seems like a pittance compared to the havoc the can be created by vehicles unequipped for the road conditions in our county on Vail Pass or on the way to the Eisenhower-Johnson Memorial Tunnels.

Traffic is always bad around the holidays, but even off I-70 this year’s jam ups seemed pretty epic. I had a nephew visiting me from Brazil and as we waited endlessly on South Park Avenue, he quipped, “See, it’s just like Sao Paulo traffic here.”

While not quite so bad, a certain portion of the traffic in our area is caused not simply by congestion, but also by ill equipped two wheel drive rental cars and drivers feeling like they did nothing wrong and should face no consequences for their disruption.

I can be sympathetic to the plight of these motorists who simply do not know what they are doing. Earlier this season, leaving Carter Park with my dog, a car was spinning their front tires fruitlessly trying to get out of a parking spot, blocking South High Street, frustrating people and their canine companions alike who simply wanted to enter or exit the area. I felt bad for the young woman driving the car. But should I have?

The truth is she should have never had that type of vehicle there to begin with. She deserved the ire and frustration of those witnessing her failure. This wasn’t an accident where no one was at fault. Driving an ill-equipped car into deep snow is going to lead to an obvious outcome. While the consequences in this case are mainly annoyance, the holiday traffic jams on I-70 can be deadly.

There are questions if harsh punishments in the criminal justice system act as deterrents to bad or illegal behavior.

While no study is perfect, at least some of the academic literature dating back decades has found when it comes to traffic crimes, increasing fines, decreases the targeted behavior. For example, a study published in the Journal of Law and Economics used “traffic data from a series of experiments in Israel and San Francisco to examine how illegal behavior is deterred by higher fines and whether deterrence varies with personal characteristics such as criminal record, driving record, income, and age.” They researchers found “that red‐light running decreases sharply in response to an increase in the fine.”

One the other side, often traffic fines have simply been used as a revenue raiser for their jurisdiction. In the worst cases of abuse, traffic fines and penalties have been used to unfairly punish racial minorities and put impoverished drivers in an endless cycle within the criminal justice system. It needs to be stated these types of penalties and enforcement actions have consistently been shown not to make our roadways safer.

In the case of I-70 these fines would be a failure if enforced that way. In this case there is a clear problem. As Summit Daily reported on Dec. 30 “more than a dozen semitrailers became stuck on Vail Pass with no chains during a snowstorm. The mess took hours to clean up, and as Highway 24 was also closed at the time, passage was blocked for motorists attempting to travel from Vail to Denver during the busy holiday period.”

This obviously is an unsustainable and dangerous situation. Sgt. Patrick Rice of the Colorado State Patrol, told the Vail Town Council, “Lots of times — just from my own personal experience — you stop a truck, or you’re out with them because they’re stuck, and they won’t ever admit that they passed the chain station knowingly; They’ll say something like, ‘the roads were totally dry at the chain station.'”

This is a moment where we need to demand our representatives in the Statehouse and Gov. Polis work diligently and immediately to improve safety on I-70, imposing steep penalties on those who put our lives at risk by operating their vehicles in an unsafe manner.

Ari Rabin-Havt lives in Breckenridge and served as deputy campaign manager on Sen. Bernie Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign and was a Sanders aide from 2017 to 2021. His writing has appeared in the Washington Post, Jacobin, The American Prospect, The New Republic and other publications. You can find him on Twitter @arirabinhavt or email him at summitdailyari@gmail.com.