I'm not sure that ticket is crazy. Having fixed price tickets disproportionally punishes the poor. Having them based on income seems much more fair. $500 may be worth more to someone who can barely afford gas for their car to get to their minimum wage job than $100,000 is to a guy who can't decide which yacht to buy.
The fine ought to float to make the person reconsider their behavior. If that's $100 for a cabbie and $10000 for a hedge fund manager, then great. The problem is, the income disparity in the city is immense.
When I lived in Boulder, we had a 3-4 month period in the winter where water usage was the "base usage" for the rest of the year and if you went over that, i.e. in the summer, you got nailed a higher rate for water consumption. So it was a got scaled system, whether you were a single person or a family, you were paying an affordable base rate always and including in the summer, but if you watered your lawn, you paid a much higher rate for the overage above base.
So what you'd need to avoid having to invent a new layer of bureaucracy to NYC is something like that. "Zones" based on your NYC income tax for example (yes NYC has city income tax) to base your traffic fines on. So, it'd be a course granularity, not exactly fair within each zone, but overall it'd make everyone "wince" and change their stupid behavior that risks others' lives unfairly. The speeding thing gets my goat, but running red lights is like - you should lose all your registered cars, your license, and get massively fined. You run red lights you should stop driving. Idiots.
