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Comment by alexpetralia | Hacker News Reader

Routinely in New York City at least, you can kill someone using a motor vehicle almost with complete impunity.

The driver who led to Sammy's Law (which still hasn't passed) only received a 180 day license suspension a year and a half after the accident, even though he sped past a stopped vehicle on the righthand side (the vehicle had stopped for the child). Death by car is often considered acceptable.

There is really no disincentive to dangerous driving, to say nothing of the preeminence of driving more generally.

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Which is absolutely wild to me. It is a great responsibility to wield a multi-ton machine in the proximity of other people. Driver's licenses are handed out quite freely and it seems the reason has less to do with competence than a complete failure of the economy as we know it if people couldn't bring themselves between the places that earn them money and the places they spend them, especially considering how far apart they are from each other in cities built after cars were brought into public awareness.

It seemed wild to me years ago, but in aggregate and after reading your comment it makes more sense. Private vehicle ownership is a great deal for for a variety of businesses (cars, insurance, maintenance, road builders, oil companies, attorneys), and who cares if a few people die, because that's how capitalism works. :(

7,485 pedestrians were killed by cars in the whole of the US in 2021.

this is a great example of where whataboutism is not a logical fallacy. i mean what is your solution? ban all driving?

sure, but give me a proper public transport network that can supply the suburbs and rural areas. fix urban cost of living while you're at it.

2021 is obviously an outlier in terms of driving and walking. Can't quite tell what point you're making but your example is not representative.

Remove zoning restrictions is step 1 to allow denser more walkable areas, which will reduce urban cost of living.

Step 2 is to change the highway code to make stroads illegal and make more normal safe roads.

Step 3 is change the fha rules so more dense homes are built.

Step 4 change cafe standards so smaller lighter cars are the norm, possibly tax suvs and trucks.

These are all stroke of a pen changes.

> These are all stroke of a pen changes.

In a democracy you need buy-in from society at large. What's the plan on achieving that?

You can poll people about things that they want, but (like it happened with many great inventions) people don't actually know what they need. Do they want less car-centric environment? Most will answer "no" because they've never lived in a society that wasn't as car-centric. Most people are not urbanists and most are content with their lives. You can poll them and do inquiries to death, or you can allow experts to implement all of the things that are unambiguously good from any perspective, let people grumble for a bit, adjust and after that reap benefits.

A part of being a democratic society is accepting that an opinion of an average person is worthless.

> i mean what is your solution? ban all driving?

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

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