Identifying good drivers and bad drivers is critical to maintaining safe highways. But California's system--operated by multiple government agencies and private companies--appears hobbled by loopholes, troubled by a lack of common standards and not always able to deliver equal justice.
Most drivers know about the system in which accidents and citations are counted as points on their driving record. But which record and whose points?
It turns out that two agencies in California have point systems that operate for different purposes and under different sections of state law.
The Department of Motor Vehicles is the point keeper when it comes to identifying negligent drivers. And it is the DMV that makes the decision to revoke a license.
The Department of Insurance is the agency that operates the point system used to determine who gets a good-driver discount and who can be denied insurance.
Numerous local police agencies and private insurance companies decide to award points that are tabulated and put on computerized databases operated by the two agencies. But not all the police and insurers are on the same wavelength when they forward data to Sacramento.
The way the DMV and the insurance department operate their point systems and how they decide what counts as a point is different. In many cases the two systems overlap, but sometimes they operate in separate universes.
The systems can fail to catch all information on a problem driver and can impose tougher sanctions on drivers in some jurisdictions than on equally bad drivers in other jurisdictions. In some cases, drivers can get points even when there is no verdict or admission of guilt.
The DMV gets reports of vehicle accidents from the Statewide Integrated Traffic Records System, a database operated by the California Highway Patrol. The accident reports generally include a finding of fault, which is used by the DMV to assess points even when there is no court conviction.
The DMV also adds points to driving records based on moving violations that do not involve accidents. It obtains that data from old-fashioned computer tapes generated by municipal court systems, which themselves are backwaters of information technology.
Under the DMV system, accidents, speeding or other similar moving violations contribute one point to a driver's record, said Jacqueline Zeigler, program administrator for driver safety at DMV headquarters.
