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Comment by spacehome | Hacker News Reader

> Causing injury can mean responsibility for lifetime care.

As well it should.

No, there is insurance for that. Motor vehicles are inherently dangerous machines, and we all take the risk of injuring someone every time we drive. Insurance distributes the risk of driving across all drivers. You should only be punished for injuring someone with a car if you were negligent.

> No, there is insurance for that.

Then being responsible means having the insurance. Not having the insurance is being irresponsible.

That's why having insurance is a requirement for driving in most countries.

Do you think having a law is enough in a country that big? Its probably cheaper to bribe your way out after being caught than to pay the premium.

Or lie. My friend was rear ended recently. When the officer came he took both their statements and checked their insurance. She finds out after the crash the guy that rear ended her had let his car insurance lapse and lied to the officer about the validity of his coverage. Apparently the liar is also a law student at the local university.

This happened in the US and luckily my friend spent the money for uninsured motorist coverage on her policy.

Some burdens are simply too severe to levy on a single person for an accident. These should be borne by a combination of insurance, the community, and/or the state.

The language "accident" (and the associated story) implies that one cannot control whether they injure someone with their 2000lb death machines. That is not true.

It's pretty clear that the incentives are all wrong. People doing these things are making the judgment that it's less expensive and less risky to kill than to injure. This is terrible, and a necessary but not sufficient part of the solution is making sure the incentives are right via insurance and liability limits.

> The language "accident" (and the associated story) implies that one cannot control whether they injure someone with their 2000lb death machines. That is not true.

It's an accident because it's not on purpose. If you intentionally kill your ex with your car then people don't call it an accident.

Moreover, there are less than 5000 pedestrian fatalities per year in the US, and the reason there are that many is that US drivers drive three trillion miles a year. That's less than one pedestrian fatality for every 600 million miles. At 12,000 miles a year it would take more than 50,000 years before the average driver would kill one pedestrian. And that isn't doing any accounting for the cases where the pedestrian was at fault.

Most drivers never kill anyone. And that remains true even though almost all drivers are idiots at least some of the time. Because to kill someone you have to be an idiot and be in exactly the wrong place at exactly the wrong time. But you can't control random chance, which is why we have insurance.

Many (most?) accidents are predicated on a purposeful choice to drive dangerously: speeding and unable to slow down sufficiently, fiddling with your phone, driving drunk or tired. You may not mean to harm someone but American society has failed to recognize acts that directly contribute to injury and death.

I really don't think that's the case. Those are the ones that get paraded around, but there are plenty of collisions that are results of simple mistakes or invisible road hazards.

> Many (most?) accidents are predicated on a purposeful choice to drive dangerously

"Dangerous" is one of those words that have been so abused it has lost all meaning. Infiltrating a violent criminal organization is dangerous. Explosive ordinance disposal is dangerous. Driving 11MPH over the speed limit is completely mundane.

It is obviously possible to drive very dangerously, but people also have a pretty good sense about these things and therefore don't. The number of people who are stupid enough to drive 120MPH in a residential neighborhood is small.

It is also true that e.g. driving faster can be, in a relativistic sense, "more dangerous" than driving slower. But that is true regardless of the point of reference. Driving 10MPH can be "more dangerous" than driving 5MPH. Driving 5MPH can be "more dangerous" than not driving at all. But that doesn't make driving 10MPH (or 40MPH) "dangerous" in an absolute sense. It just puts it in the same category of weighing costs against risks that government engineers do when deciding whether to build a sidewalk or catwalk or traffic light, or pedestrians do when deciding whether to cross at a blind intersection or walk to a different one. Each of which is a "direct cause" when a driver traveling at 40MPH hits a pedestrian crossing at a blind intersection with no traffic light.

It is true that one can substantially control whether they injure someone. It is not true that one can perfectly control whether they injure someone (short of abstaining entirely from driving).

Moreover, the word "accident" does not in any way imply that the result could not have been avoided if different decisions were made or more care were taken - that is almost universally the case for "accidental" things.

And that makes the incentive to kill them instead it injur them.

Not if you set the penalty for killing even higher. The problem here is the order of the size of the penalties, not the penalty itself.

You also need to get the probability of getting caught higher, in fact that's probably more important than the size of the punishment itself. Many governments cannot realistically commit to increasing the chances. Edit: Besides, isn't the penalty for murder in most places either the death penalty or life in prison, barring degrees of how much of an accident it was?

> Not if you set the penalty for killing even higher. The problem here is the order of the size of the penalties, not the penalty itself.

Increasing the penalty for the behavior the government created an incentive to engage in is completely backwards. When the source of the trouble is that the driver is stuck between a rock and a hard place, you don't improve the situation by making the hard place harder. It provides the even more perverse incentive to not only kill the victim but also any witnesses, or do other bad things in order to avoid getting caught.

Look at the root cause. You have an unexpected liability that is so large it makes the person desperate.

What you need then is mandatory insurance. Take the ruinous liability away and the motivation for killing the victim disappears.

It might depend on the circumstances. Even if the driver is fully at fault, though, it doesn't have to financially devastate the individual. This situation is tailor-made for insurance.

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