Comment by chmod775 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chmod775 | Hacker News Reader

That's information that anyone with a driver's license should have learned and been tested on, both theoretically and practically.

Besides making roads safer, I wonder how long society can go on without re-testing people's competence for moving tons of steel at 60 miles per hour on a regular basis.

There's very few dangerous activities that don't require regular re-certification and training, and driving really shouldn't be an exception.

Some main contributing factors to road fatalities are going too fast for conditions, exceeding the speed limit, failing to look properly (left turns!), reckless driving, and various forms of inexperience.[1] That means it's mostly people who don't know/forgot how to drive safely and mouth breathers who don't realize most traffic laws exist for a reason and are written in blood.

Can't hurt to remind people occasionally and make sure they can actually be trusted on roads.

[1]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000145751...

Society wants to pretend the issue doesn't exist because the consequences of taking away a person's ability to drive is so outsized. In some states you can go over half a century without taking an eye test. Though my license doesn't require me to have them, I always wear eyeglasses at night now when I drive even though most of my life I had excellent eyesight. Time simply comes for all of us and our laws don't always reflect that.

Exactly -- furthermore, I wish the US did things more like Germany; getting a license should be both extremely difficult and extremely expensive.

Driving should be considered a luxury, not a necessity, but sadly the entire US is designed around the assumption that everyone has a car.

Yeah, moving from point A to point B autonomously without relying on public transit i.e. sharing space with other people totally depending on other people's whims and fancies should be a luxury.

That's one way to look at it. Another is that you are driving a potential weapon and a dangerous machine. It should be treated as such. Maybe the price doesn't have to be high but unless you know of another way of making people think twice about loosing their license than money I see no other way than a high price. Besides, it isn't that expensive. Nowhere near being a luxury. It's only expensive when compared to the US system where you in most states are only paying for a piece of plastic, not tens of hours of people's time training you properly. Most European countries have the same system as Germany and the amount of traffic deaths and injured says it all. It's simply a better system even if not perfect.

> Another is that you are driving a potential weapon and a dangerous machine.

> It's simply a better system even if not perfect.

Americans also like guns a lot more than is sane so you might not be convincing them. I've heard many people say they prefer big cars because they know if something goes wrong, its the other guy who gets hurt.

> Besides, it isn't that expensive.

Okay, but the argument was that it should be "extremely expensive".

> It's only expensive when compared to the US system where you in most states are only paying for a piece of plastic, not tens of hours of people's time training you properly.

I definitely paid my driving instructor. The labor cost at the licensing bureau was only about 15 worker-minutes.

> totally depending on other people's whims and fancies

Last time I checked trains run on a schedule, not the whims of the engineer, but maybe trains are really weird in your country.

> totally depending on other people's whims and fancies

And that they're not infected with some novel disease...

Public transit was pretty dangerous and way less useful during most of 2020.

I think in addition to more regular testing, we need more "levels" of drivers licenses.

Driving in a rural or suburban area where there are almost no pedestrians or cyclists, and very few vehicles doing pickup/delivery etc is very different from driving in a dense area with many pedestrians, cyclists, scooters, etc. Should having passed a test in the suburbs with very little traffic when I was 16 really confirm I can drive in the urban center?

This is especially true for the gigantic trucks with poor visibility and handling which a lot of commuters are now picking as their daily driver.

You should need a CDL with regular retesting to drive those in a city because they’re far more likely to serious injure someone when misused. Actual cattle ranchers have the space for that but anywhere shared with pedestrians and bicyclists does not.

Or, Lordy, the old retirees in 32’ RVs, who got their license 60-odd years ago and have never even had a drivers test, much less driver training.

I have memories of being stuck behind those guys in Highway 1 in Central California and wondering how they managed to buy gas without a disaster.

I agree that society doesn’t want to touch this issue because it impedes freedom of mobility in a car oriented country. I would be in favor of 5-10 year relicensing requirements and higher license fees to incentivize higher quality drivers.

The problem is that taking a driving test in the suburbs is generally much easier than in the city, but the license counts all the same. People joke about how driving well in NYC/SF/LA/etc. traffic means you can handle driving anywhere, but that's not a joke, that ought to be the default you expect from every licensed driver.

I took my driving test in Boston, in the snow, and still got involved in an accident in the suburbs in winter. I generally think i'm an apt "city driver" which yes, is a different skill, but really doesn't translate very well to the rest of the roads.

i totally agree on more frequent and more rigorous certification, but there's much more to traffic collisions than fatalities, and focusing on speed (a factor in fatalities but not really in collisions) tends to take attention away from the biggest all-around culprit, distracted driving.

distracted driving unfortunately is relatively resistant to testing for rules. we need to create games/simulations as part of that driver certification process where the outcomes of our millions of little distracted driving events become very clear.

This is true but I think simply having drivers think of licenses as something they can lose would be an enormous improvement. Right now even killing people will frequently not lead to a revoked license and everyone knows that. If there was a non-zero chance of losing your license, many people would decide that Facebook could wait.

i don't think this would work because folks will just drive anyway and risk the additional fines rather than, say, miss work and lose their job. unfortunately, driving unlicensed/uninsured happens all the time already, at least in my neck of the woods.

How would you even test this? People will be careful during the test, and then back to typical afterward.

I suppose a yearly knowledge check could help a bit. Could even be automated, so not very expensive to implement.

I'm in favor of this, but I think it's a complete non-starter politically. It would largely affect the elderly, and the elderly love to vote.

The big issue is that many places are not walkable at all nor have good public transport. So, taking someones ability to drive implies taking away their ability to work, ability of their kids go to school, to go get ID or vote and even to go shop for food.

How is this different than not requiring a license at all? It seems as an arbitrary line. Either people have a right to drive or they don't. If they don't it is their problem if they break the law and have their license taken away. If they do there's no need for a license.

In California you only need an 80% on the written test to pass. And if I remember right you can retake it the same day.

To phrase that another way, you can be wrong about 20% of the driving laws and still drive. They should raise the bar.

Or if peoples can’t remember all the rules, they should reduce the number of rules while stiffening the consequences for causing a crash.

For example, if you’re at fault you loose a drivers license for life (or perhaps are restricted to operating only motorcycle-class vehicles and lighter).

As it stands we have all these rules that drivers forget or ignore. Then when a crash happens, they receive no consequences. I’d rather have people using intuition to driver safer for fear of punishment vs a set of rules that only increases safety in theory (see the unenforced three foot bike passing law).

The fact that you take issue with people being wrong about the law speaks volumes.

The test questions tend to be fairly simple, which sign is an octagon, how far before a turn should you signal, at a four way stop what happens, basic operational rules of the road stuff that has little to do with the law.

The law questions tend to be stuff about penalties that will rarely if ever have any bearing on you if you drive reasonably.

Go check the state's practice test questions if you don't believe me.

Aren't basic operational rules laws? How are there rules that aren't laws?

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