Comment by spuz
3 years ago
Sounds like the railway staff are indeed enforcing the spirit of the law by allowing mobility scooters on the platform. If I had to guess why your tricycle was not allowed it's because the staff perceive your tricycle as a potentially very fast moving obstacle on the platform which the mobility scooter obviously is not. They are probably more concerned about the safety of others than yourself when they apply that rule. In my opinion analysing the intent of rule is the right way to go about enforcement even if it means different people will arrive at different conclusions.
When visibly travelling at the same speed as pedestrians (… even when there are no pedestrians around!), and still insisting when you explain why dismounting is worse for everyone? No, it’s simply applying the rule because it’s a rule. The Protective Services Officers (cut-rate policemen) that are enforcing these sorts of rules are seldom interested in nuance.
On another occasion I was fined by PSOs for walking along beside the railway line, along a route that I understood to be a public right of way and which was not in any way blocked save an easily-walked-around vehicle barrier at the far end that they’d installed in the last year or so, and which our family and others had been traversing since before I was born. But no, they’d decided that wasn’t allowed any more, didn’t actually tell the locals, and ignored the explanation and an expressed willingness to not do it again (and the appeals process declined to listen too). I suspect and hope that regular police would have listened and just issued a warning to not use that route any more.
>No, it’s simply applying the rule because it’s a rule.
Thought experiment: A: Put your head down on the pavement and close your eyes or B: let your toddler stand on the pavement. Who you'd rather have approaching you or the toddler at the same exact speed: Someone walking, someone on a tricycle, someone walking with a tricycle - all three with their nose in their phone or whatever people do when they are not 100% there.
There's a clear difference that you for some reason seem to be angry at and want to ignore.
Someone walking can plausibly be on a phone or similarly badly distracted. The tricyclist, whether walking or riding slowly around people, cannot. You or the toddler are far more likely to be trampled by a careless pedestrian than run over by a cyclist of any form (and even less by a recumbent tricyclist than an upright bicyclist) in a shared space.
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> The Protective Services Officers (cut-rate policemen) that are enforcing these sorts of rules are seldom interested in nuance.
I actually agree here, and I probably should have been more specific with what I said originally. When I said:
> the enforcement of the law will hew to the spirit that the text of the rule is being interpreted to have, by those charged with its enforcement.
What I meant was more that:
> when encountering novel situations that can't be easily interpreted using the text of the rule, the enforcement of the rule will hew to the inferred spirit of the rule, rather than robotically trying to apply some "fallthrough" case of the rule (e.g. by permitting any vehicle not explicitly listed.)
So, bylaw officers won't let you do recumbent-bicycle things if bicycles aren't allowed, because to them, a recumbent bicycle IS-A bicycle, and therefore is covered by the explicit text of the law — even if the spirit of the law would have made an exception for recumbent bicycles had it known. (This is the kind of situation where there's a point to petitioning to get the wording of the bylaw changed — when the "case law" of enforcement can't legitimately override the "legislation" of the rule, because it would seemingly go against the explicit text.)
But bylaw officers will allow a pedestrian scooter, because pedestrian scooters aren't explicitly addressed in the rule; nor do they have an IS-A relationship with anything that is addressed in the rule. So they have to actually use their brains to make a decision. And that decision will use common sense — a sibling comment referred to the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mischief_rule, and I think that's exactly the kind of common sense being used — to infer intent.
Or, to put that another way: enforcement won't interpolate the rule by inferring spirit, when making fine-grained distinctions when things "fall between" the lines of text in the rule; it will instead "snap" each case to the nearest explicitly-legislated-for case and then apply the text of the rule. But enforcement will often extrapolate the rule by inferring spirit, when judging situations that fall outside the "explicitly-ruled space" bounded by the explicit cases covered in the text.
(Why? From the perspective of the bylaw-enforcer: CYA. Your boss, or some enforcement auditor, could make a reasonable case that "you made the wrong call" by considering a recumbent bicycle to not be a bicycle, and punish you for it; and almost inevitably, given the way we divide responsibilities in our justice system, that "wrong call" will be "not writing a ticket." But nobody's going to punish you for "making the wrong call" on an entirely-novel case — instead, whatever call you did make will instead just become part of a body of case-law for interpreting the rule in the future.)