You know what vehicle I see all the time that doesn’t require a license or minimum age, doesn’t have any safety features and can go 15-20 mph alongside traffic and often on a city sidewalk amongst pedestrians? A bicycle ;)
Also the person that ties down loads with multiple ropes | straps truckies hitches and stoppers. Not to mention stopping every few hundred miles to check tensions and reset as required.
Loose loads are a pain in the arse and often dangerous.
A soup can rolling loose and jamming up under a brake or accelerator pedal is something that really happens .. and it's no fun when it does.
It's dumb to mandate helmets or any other specific technology because it removes the possibility for something better or for context-based decisionmaking.
Suppose you ride your motorcycle into the desert and then lose your helmet into a canyon. Your phone is dead. Your choices are a thirty hour walk out of the desert which might cause you to die of dehydration, or riding your motorcycle without a helmet. Should you get a ticket for making the obvious choice?
Meanwhile, there is a general necessity defense to violating all traffic laws for your motorcycle example. We don't list every possible emergency or every possible rule we would allow an exception to.
They argued against mandating helmets in cars. Your point was that we could do something better than helmets and less inconvenient, namely airbags. But that is an argument for not mandating helmets. And the same argument generalizes to any specific technology. What happens when someone comes up with something better than an airbag but then it doesn't satisfy the rule "is an airbag" and is therefore prohibited?
> Meanwhile, there is a general necessity defense to violating all traffic laws for your motorcycle example.
In practice this kind of general exception either consumes the rule or isn't available when it legitimately applies. If you can say you lost your helmet and would have been stranded then everyone says this and you can't enforce the law. But if you can't claim that when it's true then the necessity defense isn't meaningful.
And for the same reason the exceptions are typically excessively narrow. Suppose you lose your helmet while camping, so you have plenty of food and water and can make the 3-day walk back to civilization. There is no risk of death. But then you have a three day walk for what would have been a two hour ride, which is going to make you late for work on Monday. Is not being late for work a necessity? And yet, is it reasonable to punish someone who makes that choice?
Given the chance of the story being fabricated close to 100% catering for it is unreasonable.
This doesn't contribute to the upkeep of roads in the same manner as a yearly tax on those that use them.
So no, not the same benefit at all.
But also, the value of roads scales poorly with any of these things. The ability to have a package delivered to your front door is valuable regardless of whether or not you even have a car, and the value of it depends on what's in it rather than how much the truck cost. The most sensible way to fund any kind of basic infrastructure is from general revenues.
But yes, truck used to haul building materials for a building site is the vehicle fulfilling its purpose and any replacement for that purpose being suboptimal.
Truck bought to haul 2 bags of groceries is not. Tax the second one.
How do you do this without taxing the first one?
If someone buys a truck to haul building materials to a building site, they are understandably not going to buy a separate vehicle just to haul 2 bags of groceries. But then how do you know what anybody is using it for the rest of the time? The list of legitimate purposes is unlimited. You're a homeowner who is into gardening and always bringing home mulch and saplings and renting landscaping equipment for projects. You're a retrocomputing enthusiast whose hobby requires you to be constantly transporting old mainframes. You're a parent who has to transport an entire junior varsity soccer team to practice every night.
How do you propose to distinguish any of these from someone who only buys a tank to carry home groceries?
I'm stating that a number of charges go towards the upkeep of roads and related services (at least in the country I'm present in) these charges include driver and vehicle licences, fuel taxes, etc.
> So the most sensible way to ..
Proposing an alternative doesn't negate the present practices, moreover it makes sense that as much of the public cost associated with roads should come from those that use the roads the most.
It's the fact that the driver license fee is paid at renewal, which isn't yearly in any US state for anyone under the age of 79. Moreover, the amount of the fee is such that it's essentially paying for the licensing bureaucracy, which you wouldn't need if you didn't have licensing.
> Proposing an alternative doesn't negate the present practices
Present practices have to be meritorious to justify preserving them.
> it makes sense that as much of the public cost associated with roads should come from those that use the roads the most.
But what does that mean?
If it's contribution to the cost of road maintenance then the cost should be paid almost entirely by a per-mile tax on large trucks, because road damage is proportional to axle weight to the fourth power and passenger vehicles are a rounding error.
If it's value of the roads then we're back to general revenues because the value is proportional to economic activity enabled by basic infrastructure which has no real relationship to number of miles traveled. One truckload of electronics is worth more than ten truckloads of scrap iron. One life-saving ride in an ambulance is worth more than a thousand days of commuting.
That's your quibble?
When doing the bookkeeping on revenue flowing in against cost going out it's a simple matter to look at licence fees per annum, axle taxes per annumn, fuel taxes per annum Vs road program costs per annum.
These can be broken down to monthly or per quarter, etc.
Here we have licences that can be paid for three months, or six months, or twelve months or for three years, even so the public data from the Department of Infrastructure and Regional Development (the federal department that oversees all the road related revenue (multiple sources), plans and funds road upkeep and extensions) talks about licence numbers per year.
The median license renewal cost in the US is around $30, for an interval of typically 6-8 years. Which is to say, less than $5/year. Subtract the overhead of the licensing bureaucracy. If the result is nonzero there's a decent chance it's because it's a negative number. In neither case is it paying for a material amount of road maintenance.
> axle taxes per annumn, fuel taxes per annum Vs road program costs per annum.
Car tax and fuel tax?
But put that to the side for a moment. Even if you had a country that collected a significant amount of revenue from driver licensing, and you inadvisably wanted to continue to collect that amount of money from that population (note: this is a regressive tax anywhere that most people drive cars), why would you need driver licensing for that instead of adding the same amount to the car tax?
I care for a basic and selfish reason beyond the "human missile" one: if I'm in a car crash with you and there's only one bed available in the ER, I don't want your lack of a seatbelt to be the source of a hard choice by the doctors operating on us.
Also, you know who dies in much greater numbers than pedestrians due to vehicle crashes? The pedestrians walking by the bicyclists.
So should pedestrians be forced to wear massive armors of steel when they walk around?
Oh wait, that’s how so many awful American cities are designed. With absolutely no space for pedestrians who have to drive everywhere.
In reality there’s only 1 source of danger on streets. Massive 2 ton vehicles that endanger their own occupants and everyone around them. Take away the 2 tons of metal usually carrying 1 person and everyone is safe.
But yeah, without cars motorcycles and scooters suddenly become much safer way of transport