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Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

Or, and this is a controversial view, maybe some homeless people could be helped through cheaper access to cars. As part of my job I have recently sat through many days of cases at a local courthouse. In our rural area, judges are loathed to revoke a driver's license because they know that doing so renders a person effectively unemployable locally. If someone doesn't have access to a car, and therefore cannot find work, perhaps there is a place for giving them better access to a car.

(Anyone saying that the answer is better public transport, that isn't an option here. Rural area. Most work is in farms/oil fields/military. 24/7 bus service over thousands of square miles just isn't ever going to happen. No car or no cellphone = No work.)

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Rural areas existed before the invention of the automobile. Rural communities can still be dense and support active transportation (walking, cycling, etc.) for many people's daily activities.

Most people don't live in rural areas though, so the kinds of solutions (free cars!) that might work there are not appropriate for urban and suburban areas.

> Rural areas existed before the invention of the automobile.

Yes, and farming was ubiquitous and highly labor intensive then. In 1940, the US had about 13 million farm workers. Today it's about 3 million.

Farms were also much smaller.

I know a few amount of people who should never drive a car. That is they are so bad that drunks are better drivers. Some are just old and the body is failing, others never had the mental ability to do it.

At least in cities there can be (but often isn't) useful public transit.

this is a complex issues for sure, now the questionis what are these cases about?

if its stuff like parking tickets, broken tail lights, low-grade speeding then i totally agree woth the judge

if its drunk driving or driving while under the influence or things where you put others in danger then... why is the driver doing those things if their livelihoods depend on it?

Just food for thought

Depends on what you mean by "access" to cars. Simply giving away free cars won't work because they are expensive to operate and maintain.

I once lived in a city (Part of Vancouver) where the local health authority paid for cabs to drive seniors to medical appointments. Paying from them to be driven by cab, something environmentally worse than them driving themselves, was cheaper than dealing with missed appointments. I could see a situation where a city might pay for a homeless person to be driven each day if doing so allowed them to hold a steady job.

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