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Comment by Severian | Hacker News Reader

Germany also has much higher standards for driver education, stiffer fines for infractions, and a safety first approach towards operating heavy machinery. In the US, you can get a license by answering 25 questions, driving around a block, and doing some sort of parallel parking exercise. They pretty much hand them out regardless of actual driving ability.

One thing that would reduce the number of crashes in the US is making tailgating and passing lane camping a heavy infraction. To drive safely is to anticipate conditions and expectations.

I would also support 10 year renewal testing before age 65, as bad habits quickly become routine. Shorter intervals thereafter.

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We have to make the USA a viable place to live without a vehicle before we can increase license requirements. If we raise the standards too high, then people will just drive without licenses. Of course, it's probably a self-correcting problem, because I suspect many poor drivers are doing so out of obligation and would no drive if they had a viable alternative.

Designing our cities around the automobile was one of the worst mistakes this country made.

Also of note is that it's illegal to pass on the right in Germany, making traffic more predictable and orderly.

It's illegal in the US as well, just hardly ever enforced here.

It depends on which US state you're in.

Germany also has much higher standards for the engineering of the actual roads themselves.

Like, they are designed to function 24x7x365 for years and decades on end, because they have a much deeper and thicker roadbed, and much better irrigation and runoff control.

Part of this is because the road maintenance costs are built into the initial build cost, and any further maintenance in the future has to be done for free, at the cost of the road builder. And to the standards required by law. Since no road builder wants to ever have to pay for any future repairs, they seriously engineer the heck out of the roads to begin with.

Here in the US, repairs to roads are a profit center. So, of course road builders are going to make them as cheap and cheesy as possible, so that they can cash in on all that great guaranteed future income from all the repairs they're going to have to make in the next few weeks, months, and years.

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