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Comment by ojbyrne | Hacker News Reader

Doesn't this preclude the manufacture of automobiles?

It seems that the citizenry of the United States, the carmakers, and the government have come to an agreement on the regulation of automobiles. In addition to safety regulation compliance before sale is allowed, most states have emissions standards and complex road laws.

Yes, automobiles have many negative externalities but they are distributed and stochastic. Arguably, it is actually the petrol that is directly responsible for these externalities as simply owning a car endangers no one and only has a sunk environmental cost.

In the case of automobiles, we have, as a society, agreed that this is a good trade-off. In the case of industrial accidents, we have, as a society, agreed that the scale of the potential failure should be matched with commensurate concern for safety.

BP clearly has difficulty controlling their risk and they should be held liable for that just as you or I would be held liable for causing an auto accident.

It's the government's own highway infrastructure that causes the problem. The problem there is that government, vis a vis its role as provider of infrastructure, has enabled, incentivized, and encouraged the use of large numbers of automobiles--not that the private automobile industry is at fault.

So there would be no motorized individual transport if not for streets built by governments? Would we all be taking the train … no, wait, I would guess that train networks are a pretty bad example in this case. So, would we all be flying instead? Riding the bike? Hiking?

Despite all it’s shortcomings, motorized individual transport still seems like a pretty sweet deal to me – I can’t really fault the government for forcing everybody and me to pay for the infrastructure, especially if – like you seem to argue – there is no other way to get that kind of infrastructure.

Somehow I don’t really think you are making a good case for your argument.

Trains are a great example, since they're motorized mass transport instead of motorized individual transport, and are more efficient and less ecologically destructive per capita at high densities. In cities that aren't built for cars at the expense of human-scale forms of transportation, cycling and walking are often legitimate options as well. (On cycling, read this about Copenhagen's infrastructure: http://www.sightline.org/research/sprawl/res_pubs/Livable_Co...)

If the standard is endangering thousands and wreaking ecological destruction at a wide scale, the disastrous choice of designing cities to favor the automobile over other forms of transportation is not only a failure, it's a government failure more so than a market failure.

Train networks are public – not private – projects in Europe or they were, at least, at the time they were built. I don’t know about the US but that’s why I think trains might not be such a good example.

My point is that the government builds highways instead of trains.

With the advent of electric motor vehicles and such technology non-dependent on oil, we should be transitioning to Type 2 technology

No, but it does require the manufacturers to build in safety features.

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