Large parts of the US today there's no public transport, and even no sidewalks(!) in some places. You could ride a bike, but that requires physicality and drivers aren't exactly bike-friendly.
If there was a realistic alternative to driving, you might see it become easier to revoke a driver's license, but until then, it just isn't viable.
For a majority of those living in the US the places they live and work have been so fundamentally designed around cars that no alternative form of transit is usable. Busses might run once a day, no sidewalks, no bike lanes amidst 5 layer highways. Even getting out of ones housing development via anything but a car can be challenging if its a fenced in community with winding lane and a half roads parked full of cars.
I'd naturally much prefer more strict licensing and more frequent license revocation - if for no other reason than it would demonstrably save many lives - but only after we solve the car sprawl hellscape that is a majority of settled US territory.
There's a villainous cycle at work here. Car supremacy produces cities in which you need a car, so that attempts to push back on car supremacy can be credibly opposed on the grounds that they hurt the poor and less advantaged, when of course the very opposite thing is true.
You can't suddenly make getting a license harder without also changing a hundred other things too, if you have any intent to preserve any other lifestyle than one that does not require a car, or is not at risk of losing their license. Such a claim is indeed a self-centered one, if you aren't also arguing for the other things as well, simultaneously.
To suggest it without the even referring to the rest alongside it is to create the image of horror, to anyone who isn't already aligned with your premise. And if you weren't intending that statement for people who didn't already agree with you, then the most you could have accomplished was virtue signaling, and I don't know why you would want to do such a horrible thing
So in any such argument, they’d naturally become the front of the topic.
If anyone is going to get fucked by a broad policy, it’s the poor.
You're going to build blanket standards and rules without acknowledging its effects on the population, and the proportion of the effects on different groups within that population?
Without accounting for the migration process to the new standard?
Without trying to minimize damage across the groups?
Addendum:
There is a world that exists, and there is an ideal image of the world. We aren't going to suddenly transfer to the ideal version, but we're perfectly capable of pretending we can in law. Congress is perfectly capable of arbitrarily requiring that all cars today meet 50mpg, and declaring it law. But we do not want to do that, because it would stupid, and shut down industries and cities across the nation.
Regardless of whether this is what our ideal looks like, it's not a suggestion that takes us anywhere near it. When someone goes around advocating for it to people who do not already agree with it, the first question is whats wrong with it? And the first answer inevitably features the poor, because they're the most affected. And the next question is, by how much? And again, the best example is the poor, because they bear the brunt of the negatives.
Everyone else will also eat shit, but they get the most of it, and so they show it off the most, making for the clearest example of what damages a blanket policy might incur.
They only know the hole. The hole seems like a natural, immutable feature of the world.
That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. Inaction is a form of action, so it's not good enough to oppose a net good on the grounds that the transition will be painful.
Consider the Bay Area, population 7 million, with closer to 1 million of those in SF and Oakland. Then consider that the Sunset and Richmond, also basically suburbs, make up a huge chunk of SF’s land.
For a sample size of one I don’t actually need one myself.
But this is a huge exception to what the rest of my life was like. If I lived in the burbs it would be very difficult to manage without a car.
I have to imagine a significant portion of the 80% you cited lives in the suburbs and are 30-60 minutes away from their jobs and 15-30 minutes away from grocery stores.
From the UK, where stick shift is very much the norm, it doesn't.
It's common here to see people texting while driving and I don't understand what goes through people's minds to make them think this isn't a crazy thing to do?
Doesn't that go against the adage that after a week shifting becomes muscle memory or is there something else?