House Bill 1513 errantly attempts to improve equity by tossing out almost all automobile equipment safety requirements contained in RCW chapter 46.37
In doing so, the bill attempts to supercede safety standards based on years of scientific automotive testing with new rules that could only have been written by hurried politicians. Here’s just one example from the bill.
“A peace officer may only stop or detain an operator of a vehicle when the primary reason for the stop is an equipment failure violation when necessary to protect against an immediate, serious threat to the safety of the operator or others on the roadway.”
“Immediate, serious threat to the safety of the operator or others on the roadway” means …. Having both taillights, headlights, or brake lights out at nighttime”
“Having both brake lights out at nighttime” is dangerous, but hey…who needs brake lights during the day, right?
The guiding premise of this errant bill is that automobile equipment safety laws are only an excuse for investigative police stops to find drugs and contraband. This is a faulty premise, and the legislature is taking this bad assumption to a deadly result. Drug runners figured out decades ago that they need to keep their vehicles in top working order, and police know that. Typically, people driving with broken equipment are not the ones running drugs. They are motorists that either don’t know a piece of equipment is broken, or they are not prioritizing their occupant’s safety and the safety of other motorists. In either case, a warning or a fix-it ticket, which generally carries no fine if the equipment is repaired, is the time-tested corrective action.
This bill essentially says motorists can legally drive around with important safety equipment broken and disabled on their cars. Having worked a 33 year career as an engineer, I can tell you that every headlight, tail light, marker light, bumper, and mirror on your car is there for an important reason. In what world are we showing concern for people to let them ride in a car with no tail or brake lights? They may die the first time it gets foggy, or in a rainstorm. Lights are not just needed at night. One headlight out may seem like enough light to some, but there’s an important engineering concept known as redundancy, in which you have two in case one goes out unexpectedly. Even if the driver feels good about driving around in a broken car like this, what about children in the car that don’t get a say in the matter? From the time of the first car seat laws, we’ve always protected children too young to speak up on behalf of their own safety. Did this legislature decide they no longer care about the lives of children? When I worked in aerospace, we frequently said that it was important to let the engineers design the product, not the lawyers. it would be even worse to let politicians design the product.
Driving safely is expensive. If a motorist can’t afford to replace a tail light bulb, how can we be confident their brakes and tires are safe. I’m all for providing assistance to families that need help maintaining their cars (a small part of this law that is unfortunately too vague and unfunded to be easily implemented), but I’m against letting these families’ cars fall apart on the highway because we don’t insist that they maintain them. Lives will be lost, not saved, by this law.
This bill has one other serious–almost ludicrous– flaw. The bill as currently written eliminates any need to actually pay car tabs. Police can’t pull people over for expired tabs anymore under this law. Considering how much the legislature and local taxing districts have been pushing up the price of tabs, even creating long-running controversy regarding bluebook values, they are now seeming to say “but you don’t have to pay if you don’t want to.” Where does that leave those of us that try to follow the increasingly confounding laws in this state? Will we be fools for registering our cars? I don’t know how a bill this poorly thought out even gets drafted, let alone presented to a legislative committee. The legislators have to start reading these bills for themselves instead of trusting a lobbyist or party activist to tell them what they should vote yes on.
In this week’s Renton Reporter, CM Carmen Rivera has an opinion piece that says : “To improve traffic safety for all, lawmakers should pass HB 1513”. After reading it, it makes Randy’s well-thought-out article so much more articulate and wise.
Please correct me if I am reading HB 1513 wrong. Is it saying that if a vehicule doesn’t have license plates that the police may not stop the vehicle?
Yes Dave, I think you are correct. The new section does not allow stops for missing license plates.
“NEW SECTION. Sec. 3. A new section is added to chapter 46.64
RCW to read as follows:4
(1)(a) Except as provided in (b) of this subsection, a peace officer may not stop, or otherwise detain, an operator of a vehicle to enforce one or more of the following violations:
(i) Any nonmoving violation;
(ii) Driving while license suspended or revoked in the third degree under RCW 46.20.342(1)(c) (ii), (iv), (v), or (viii);
or
(iii) Any warrant for a misdemeanor, other than a misdemeanor warrant for driving under the influence under RCW 46.61.502 or a domestic violence violation, or a civil court order.
(b)(i) A peace officer may only stop or detain an operator of a vehicle when the primary reason for the stop is an equipment failure violation when necessary to protect against an immediate, serious threat to the safety of the operator or others on the roadway.”
In my quick review of moving violations, it did not look like driving without a plate is included there, so I believe it is a non-moving violation that police could not pull you over for. So in addition to saving money on tabs, motorists get to save money on tolls under this law if they don’t bother to get a license plate.
Here are the moving violations, for reference: https://app.leg.wa.gov/wac/default.aspx?cite=308-104-160
Sweet! HOV lane, here I come.
Just kidding, whoever supports this needs their brains examined for parasites.
That is funny, but sadly to many will take advantage of the poorly written law.
I hadn’t even thought about the HOV lanes. 40 years of federal projects targeted at saving fuel by getting people to carpool…. gone… overnight… by a law that allows anyone who wants to cheat to drive without license plates. When I mentioned tolls I was thinking about bridges.
Looks like the state is trying to urgently collect tolls while they still can. Here’s today’s news https://www.king5.com/article/news/local/washington-unpaid-tolls-late-fees-penalties-resuming/281-ac5eeef2-f473-4ff9-b683-d174c0b158ed
Whoever came up with this idea is proof that we need to do better in educating mothers. We need to let them know that ingesting toxic substances will hurt their child in the womb and that the effects are permanent.
Please stop using the word mother. That’s considered by the LGBTQUIA+ community to be transphobic. The correct term is pregnant people because men can be pregnant as well.
Lmao I can’t tell if you’re trolling or actually that smooth brained.
10/10 comedy either way.
Coming soon to Renton:
You can’t have a serious idea without understanding the tradeoffs, understanding the costs of implementation, and without having hard data.
She has none of these.
They use the excuse that these new laws are based on equity. Trying to save black people from being arrested and lower the chance of police brutality. Also so that poor people aren’t made poorer by paying tickets.
Problem is there are a lot more white people are free to commit crimes than people of color. Percentage wise it seems more black people get stopped and arrested. But the real numbers tell the true story.
People of all colors and races who commit crimes need consequences so they think twice before doing it again.
Changing laws to allow nothing to be illegal is the wrong avenue. Instead they should have tougher and more frequent reviews of police standards. More random supervised response to calls to keep police honest and fair.
I’m all for a program that helps low income people repair cars and pay for tabs.
These are two completely different issues they’re trying to fix with blanket laws.
To make none of the laws matter anymore goes against everything law abiding citizens of all colors and races believe in and deserve to have followed for our own safety.