Driven to Repeal
March 15, 2010
by Brandi Grissom
The Texas Tribune
The tales told by Texas drivers are eerily similar. A traffic ticket for a relatively minor infraction leads to fines of hundreds, even thousands, of dollars. They can't afford to pay or, worse, don't even know they've been fined. They lose their licenses, lose their insurance, lose their jobs. Some even land in jail.
"I missed one payment for $80 dollars ... and had my license suspended without my knowledge. I was then pulled over and now face even more surcharges and possible jail time."
"This surcharge is ruining my credit and making it hard to pay all my bills."
"My husband has lost his job due to this surcharge, and I am now the single supporter of a 4 person family in a very poor economy."
"I owe 10,000, my unemployment is about to run out, I think I'm going to shoot myself."
The stories scroll by one after another on an online petition to repeal a law called the Driver Responsibility Act. Nearly 4,000 angry and devastated drivers, who have either lost their licenses or in some way dealt with the exorbitant surcharges of the program, have lent their names to the effort - just a fraction of the more than 1.2 million Texas drivers who have lost their licenses because of unpaid surcharges.
