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Comment by gcatalfamo | Hacker News Reader

You guys may all be right, but what if actually LIKE driving, and therefore cherish finding moments to drive for pleasure and not just for the daily commute?. Does this make me a dinosaur in the age of self-driving Teslas?

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It's perfectly fine to like driving. However, any manual driving, and yours too, increases the chances of injury / death for other people. So, basically, pleasure drivers get their pleasure at the expense of other people's safety.

My solution would be to somehow segregate pleasure driving in such a way that people living their normal everyday life are not affected by it -- the same way pleasure shooting / fighting is segregated away from streets, restaurants and cafes to shooting ranges / fight clubs.

There's nothing wrong with driving, but since it takes up a ton of space, there's no reason for it to be subsidized in urban areas; quite the opposite, in fact.

Speaking as an European, can you really call driving subsidized (if it is in one single area, such as building code) when much more cash is spent in social services paid by fuel taxes?

Compare the all-in cost spent supporting drivers (including e.g. the value of public land that's used for roads) with the total revenue received from them.

I'm less familiar with the economics of it in Europe, where gas taxes are much, much higher than in the US, and there's not nearly as much road and highway sprawl.

> more cash is spent in social services paid by fuel taxes

That might be the case in Europe, but it's not true of the US. Here fuel taxes only cover about 50% of the cost of roads with the rest coming from the general fund.

It's fine to have a hobby you enjoy, but you shouldn't expect taxpayers to pay you for it.

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