Off the Road Again

Do you have kids in the 16-21 year range? Maybe they are bigger but still party going clubbers? Whose car do they drive? If it’s yours beware of the long arm of the law. Because if your kids drive your wheels you run a pretty good risk of having your car confiscated for a month, with all the storage costs at your expense. And that could be at 50 shekels a day. How’s your arithmetic?
If your kid is less than 21 years old, and even if they’ve passed the stage where they’re obliged to drive with an escort, they aren’t allowed to drive a car with more than 2 passengers. There is an exception to the rule. If the person in the passenger’s seat fits the bill as a new drivers’ escort (the same conditions that applied during the first few months after the apple of your eye got their driving licence) they can drive with as many passengers as the car licence allows, like everyone else.
What I’m getting at is this, if your darling progeny bends to peer pressure one night out on the town, and gives a lift to 3 or more passengers, or takes an extra kid from the scouts while doing you a favour picking up their younger sibling on your roster date, you could very easily find yourself summonsed to a hearing in front of a police officer at the traffic branch, and have him give you an administrative order to store your car at one of the assigned parking lots that the police have contracted for this purpose. Be aware. If your little darling inadvertently puts you through all this rigmarole, you will not only have to waste any number of hours hanging around the corridor at the police traffic branch til the officer gives you your hearing, and you’ll also have to explain your absence to your clients or boss, then after that in all probability take your car down to the contracted parking lot, and then for good measure catch an awful lot of buses and taxis in the next 30 days. If your kid does go and put you through all this, then I certainly hope for your sake that in the normal run of things you don’t have to bus your other kids across town to school or pedal merchandise around the country or depend on your car to get to the office on time; because with your car confiscated you’re going to be up the proverbial creek without a paddle. And forget about getting sympathy from the officer or the reviewing judge. This patent threat of collective punishment at the car owner’s expense is the object of this piece of legislation.
One pin point of optimism in this tunnel of pessimism is that you can choose any of the contracted parking lots in any city to pay a month’s parking fees. The police traffic branch is very enlightenedly encouraging competition between the various lots so it might be substantially less expensive to use the lot in say Jerusalem rather than in another given town. Bully for you.
By the way the law governing this administrative action allows for two recognised defences, to be considered by the police officer or in a judicial review, but they’re not likely to be relevant here. We’ll get back to them later.
The other nasty piece of trouble your driving licensed kids can get you into, the same trouble, i.e. administrative confiscation of your car, is drink driving. That can be either driving under the influence, in other words insobriety discernable by the average bloke or Sheila you'd be likely to find travelling on the local omnibus (but probably in the personification of a policeman), or else you can be found to have at least a 0.05 blood alcohol level or the breathalyser equivalent. Back when I was a newly licensed 007 driving around Perth in my Datsun 1200, the legal level there was 0.07. Probably the same goes for you too. They've gone and made the trap even more treacherous.
Whatever your kid, or for that matter you, have heard about being able to get away with drinking a glass of beer or wine and then driving, basically forget it. It’s the same trend over the western world. Drinking and driving hasn’t been abolished but the legal level is so low that effectively speaking you can’t afford to drink any alcohol before driving. You need a real, absolutely sober skipper. To transliterate from colloquial Hebrew, the law allows you the feeling of being with but actually means without. Once again the same administrative process applies to the car owner whether its junior that’s got you into deep shit or you yourself.
Basically the legislation allows for two defensive arguments, both at the administrative hearing and at a judicial review. The first is that in committing the prima facie offence the person driving the car has categorically disobeyed the owner’s instructions and the owner has done everything in his power to prevent the commission of the offence (But that defence usually will apply to other sorts of relevant offences like having used the car as an unlicensed taxi). The second defence is that the car was taken without your knowledge and without your approval. As I hinted above these defences aren’t very likely to be of much use to a parent who has handed over their car keys to their progeny knowing full well that the sprogs are going out.
Well there you go. That’s it in a nutshell. If you’ve got kids in the “danger zone age” start thinking about opening a trust fund. As the Romans were wont to say; Caveat lector.