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Comment by undersuit | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if the US and Canadian reliance on personal transport is ever going to be considered a failure or if we are just going to create another bandaid for our symptoms.

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Someone stole your car? You should be taking public transit anyways...

But how do we stop someone from stealing your car?

Maybe we could reduce the reliance on the car, but we're not going to do that.

But how do we stop someone from stealing your bicycle?

Make the theft of the bike unpalatable without increasing the amount of policing in NA please. Reduce the benefit they get from stealing a bike. Whether it just not having to look as long for a rental bike or reducing the cost of bike use in general so there is less profit incentive to steal a bike.

We could also reduce the pain felt by the person stolen from with the same actions. I would be less inconvenienced by my bike being stolen if their is a free bike I could use for these situations, or maybe free public transportation.

I would still be inconvenienced but I wouldn't be stuck in my rural home 30 miles away from my jobs because I live in a car-centric landscape.

> Make the theft of the bike unpalatable without increasing the amount of policing in NA please.

Have prosecutors strongly prosecute property crimes?

That's increasing policing. what if you could make the theft of a personal property hurt less?

It's not increasing policing, just increasing prosections and penalties.

But yes it would also be good to also strip money and welfare from offenders and force them to pay restitution to their victims, thereby reducing the hurt from their crimes.

>But yes it would also be good to also strip money and welfare from offenders

No, it would not be good. It would be harmful. It would encourage more of the crime you say you want to stop.

It would be good. It would not be harmful. Almost none of the crime I say I want to stop is driven by people driven to desperation to survive, so the prospect of consequences would make it a net positive for reducing them.

> Almost none of the crime

You said it.

> Almost none of the crime [] is driven by people driven to desperation to survive

Yep.

So you are advocating to increase the punishments of those driven to desperation to survive. Further harming them.

Wrong.

And how do we stop someone from breaking into your house? By moving everyone to barracks.

Why are they breaking into your house? Are they going to take your house for a joy ride until they can't anymore and then just find another house to drive?

I'm not advocating that you just stop caring about crime, I want you to think about how we can address the root causes. One of them being the prevalence of easily theft-able, expensive possessions we store on the street.

Burglars want to change ownership of things in your house, so why don't we move on to communal ownership where all things are shared?

The root of the problem is the "seed of evil", also known as selfishness or the idea of separateness. But selfishness is a necessary step in evolution, and if you remove all shiny things that provoke greed, and all other things that make selfishness meaningful, you'd derail the evolution.

So, shiny things that people can own and display bring more good than harm at this point.

OK cool you have a hypothesis on how you can reduce the amount of harm done in the world. How are you going to go about doing something about it? Are you going to increase the severity of the punishment for stealing a car? Or should you address a root cause? To use your metaphor a seed would be much easier to control than trying to tell a grown tree where to drop its leaves in the fall.

Most of these vehicles are stolen while parked. If people just drove them more, they wouldn't be getting stolen!

Canadian car ownership rates are higher than most developed EU countries, but it's not like Canadians are blowing them out of the water.

Tied with Finland. Within 10% of Malta, Cyprus, Luxembourg, Italy, Estonia and Iceland. Within 21% of Germany, Spain, France, Portugal, Norway, and Japan.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_vehicles_...

What a weird comparison. Europe is a bit denser and smaller with more public transport, don't you think?

That was exactly their point, that Canadian car ownership isn't that high when compared to places that likely have less need for cars.

I don't agree.

> Most of these vehicles are stolen while parked. If people just drove them more, they wouldn't be getting stolen! > Canadian car ownership rates are higher than most developed EU countries, but it's not like Canadians are blowing them out of the water.

What if they start stealing buses, too?

It is admittedly very complicated to steal an entire train, but with enough police indolence, I wouldn't dismiss the idea outright.

What if? Stealing a bus is just as illegal as stealing a car. Maybe there is some kind way the busses are protected from theft... like parking it in a secure lot, not on a city street that you may not even live right by because parking is congested.

Buses here in Czechia are pretty often parked in some non-secure place during the day and sometimes even during the night, but, then, vehicle theft tends to be prosecuted here. It is not a trivial crime by deranged individuals, the criminal syndicates involved in its commission are extensive.

But does Czechia have rampant vehicle crime whether, personal or public?

https://knoema.com/atlas/Canada/topics/Crime-Statistics/Burg...

Versus

https://knoema.com/atlas/Czech-Republic/topics/Crime-Statist...

Maybe the data from knoema.com is wrong somewhere but may I also present to you something you probably know about:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prague_Metro

I am not really sure why would you tell me about the Prague Metro, which I have taken for approximately 26 years by now. I can tell you every single station on every line by heart.

My US city just cut it's fixed bus service. I want my country/continent to try and be more like yours!

I suspect this has a lot of inertia based on the current situation.

Plenty of middle class citizens here in CZ take public transport, or their kids do, so they are fine with their tax money being spent on it, and they also insist on the service being safe, clean etc.

If everyone drove everywhere, like in most of the US, the prevailing political winds would differ.

Both situations are equilibria separated by a sharp ridge that needs to be overcome in order to change one to the other.

You suspect it? That's my hypothesis from the beginning.

>I wonder if the US and Canadian reliance on personal transport...

So people are stealing vehicles and your point is that people shouldn't have any personal vehicle in the first place? Do you think the same about any personal property that are being stolen?

If someone was stealing another personal item of yours, like your food, I'd be suggesting we approach the problem with deeper approaches as well.

A car in the US in unfortunately not a luxury for the majority of cases.

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