On two recent
mornings, drivers caught speeding along the road between Tallinn and the town
of Rapla were stopped and given a choice. They could pay a fine, as normal, or
take a “timeout” instead, waiting for 45 minutes or an hour, depending on how
fast they were going when stopped.
The aim of the
experiment is to see how drivers perceive speeding, and whether lost time may
be a stronger deterrent than lost money. The project is a collaboration between
Estonia’s Home Office and the police force, and is part of a program designed
to encourage innovation in public services. Government teams propose a problem
they would like to solve—such as traffic accidents caused by irresponsible
driving—and work under the guidance of an “innovation unit”. Teams are expected
to do all fieldwork and interviews themselves.
“At first it was
kind of a joke,” says Laura Aaben, an innovation adviser for the interior
ministry, referring to the idea of timeouts. “But we kept coming back to it.”
Elari Kasemets, Ms Aaben’s counterpart in the police, explained that, in
interviews, drivers frequently said that having to spend time dealing with the
police and being given a speeding ticket was more annoying than the cost of the
ticket itself. “People pay the fines, like bills, and forget about it,” he
said. In Estonia, speeding fines
generated by automatic cameras are not kept on record and have no cumulative
effect, meaning that drivers don’t have their licences revoked if they get too
many.
Making drivers
wait requires manpower. The team acknowledges that the experiment is not
currently scalable, but hopes that technology could make it so in the future.
Public reaction,
though, was not what they expected. “It’s been very positive, surprisingly,”
says Helelyn Tammsaar, who manages projects for the innovation unit. Estonians
have praised the idea for being more egalitarian—monetary fines are not
adjusted according to income, as in neighboring Finland, but everyone has the
same number of hours in the day—and because they perceive the punishment as
being directly related to the offence, rather than an excuse to fill state
coffers.
