By defending overly stringent regulations that provide limited extra benefits at high marginal costs, busy authorities spends both precious resources and political capital. Doing so limits their capability to address other, more significant problems. A new regulation may displace rather than eliminate a problem because it has not attacked the problem's root cause. Sometimes the displaced problem will have greater impact than that which it replaces. We will always need some enforcement, particularly to bring the 'bad apples' into line.
Rules also have a role to play in broad scale attitudinal change.
However the beneficial effects of regulation should not blind us to its shortcomings. This doesn't mean that UAM laws should be abandoned. Instead we should recognise the inherent failings of regulation and understand how these failings operate in the particular policy context in whichwe are working - spending all our resources on enforcement will not likely to achieve universal compliance or responsible behaviour by everyone all the time. By contrast, voluntary compliance, if it can be achieved, will just about always provide more meaningful, lasting changes in behaviour. It depends more on overcoming ignorance, indifference and incompetence than on prescribing concrete forms of acceptable behaviour.