Let us begin with Shakespeare: “My words need not be pleasing to you, but there is the law...” This is practically a key quotation that shapes our lives in a community. I will keep reminding you that I am not a lawyer and do not hold an academic degree. I studied law and its principles during the period that has “rightly passed”, but one cannot deny the quality and consistency with which the lecturers approached the thorough education of future guardians of the law.
The law must be logical in order to be enforced
When establishing regulations governing our daily lives, logic, the validity of introducing them, and the sanctions for violating them must be maintained, as must consideration of whom their enforcement is entrusted to. The law should educate through its effectiveness.
Now please focus on the role that the law and punishment for failing to obey it are supposed to play. The law defines the rules: what we are allowed to do, what we are not allowed to do, and what threatens us if our guilt and the element attributed to it are proven. The law cannot be empty; the law must be logical.
Whether a law is obeyed is not determined—paradoxically—by its severity, but by the inevitability of enforcement. I do not want to sound like a know-it-all; I am merely pointing out—and this is not the first time—that legislators are increasingly giving us populist rather than practical laws. Excessive sanctions and excessively high penalties produce the opposite effect.
How do other countries solve the problem of crossings?
I have been a driver for decades—whatever that may mean in international heavy transport. I have driven through almost all of Europe. Different countries solve the problems of places where railway and road routes intersect in different ways: from viaducts and flyovers to ordinary crossings.
Nowhere have I encountered such demonstrative ignorance concerning this as in Poland. There may be even greater absurdities connected with railway crossings than those in Poland, but I have not come across them. Let me explain: when I hear the leading politicians comment on the recent road incident near Warsaw, where the so-called concrete mixer truck became stuck between the barriers and caused a serious accident involving a passenger train, I simply get furious.
Who is really responsible for the accident?
Starting with the prime minister, everyone talks about “tougher penalties”, “losing one’s driving privileges” and other populist nonsense, while avoiding acknowledging the guilt of the state in the broad sense.
First, nowhere have I encountered traffic being stopped for “half a day” so that a locomotive, rail trolley or train could pass. Everywhere, traffic is stopped, something passes a moment later, and traffic resumes. Not here—we wait a long time beforehand and a long time afterward.
If—as the media and so-called experts and politicians claim—the barriers should have been broken because their construction allows it, then one’s hands fall limp. Does anyone know the consequences of breaking through the barriers? Has anyone taken the quality of the warnings, or their absence, into account? How many times have the warning lights been dimmed by sunlight, and only the experience I possess protected me from a collision or simply driving through on what is known as a red light?
Antagonisms are the norm, because on the one hand ministers lament the shortage of professional drivers, while on the other they create systems in which this professional group is fought. State, ministers and MPs—you have failed, diluted your own responsibility, and in reality bear none of it at all. You have limited yourselves to mediocre literary creation in the form of multi-page regulations that contribute practically nothing beyond fear and the possibility of using them in the event of defiance—which is already a fact. Meanwhile, society pays for your deliberate ineptitude, as this commented-on accident is among the things that demonstrate.