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Comment by firesteelrain | Hacker News Reader

Poverty may explain uninsured driving. It doesn’t justify making everyone else eat the risk.

I fully agree with that. It's an extremely selfish crime in many ways and I agree there should be harsh penalties for the crime. But at the same time it's also kind of a failure of society that we've designed most places to live in the US to need a car to survive.

It's not surprising people are willing to do the bad thing when you don't really give them many other good options. We should all be better at empowering people to not have to be in such a situation where the bad option seems like best choice for them in the moment.

If the options were drive and potentially end up in jail or just take the cheap/free reliable bus to get to work, which would they take? If the options are potentially end up in jail or lose your job, which choice do you pick?

This is framing it as a false binary. People need to take personal responsibility. They can walk, ride, bike, phone a friend, relative etc

So yes it is surprising and wrong

> They can walk, ride, bike, phone a friend, relative etc

Yeah they can walk in a city without sidewalks. They can bike in a city without any bike infrastructure. They can ride in a city without busses. Sure sounds effective and safe.

You're blind to reality if you think the average American city and town is actually designed to get by with people walking or biking or riding public transit.

Let's say you live here:

https://maps.app.goo.gl/c7Zd2Ce2aKJaq7xV6

You can't legally drive for whatever reason now. How do you get to your job in Plano? How do you go get groceries? It's a 40 minute bicycle ride each way to the closest grocer. There is no transit.

lol, Copeville TX

I can find tons of other examples in every state and practically every metro area.

You are making excuses.

Yeah, even if they properly enforced this and made cheap car ownership more expensive, people always have their choices and can deal with it. If this makes car-dependent cities non-viable then ok. Probably wouldn't even do that, they'd either find the money or use motorbikes instead.

I'm not. I stated these crimes should be severely punished, and I'm all for cop.cars with ALPRs that match insurance info/expired registrations/etc to make enforcement higher. I'm probably for even more strict enforcement than you're comfortable with. This is a bad crime, and we should do more to make it not happen.

You have no answers for people in that position.

I do.

We shouldn't design our cities and towns like this.

If you find a machine you've been building tends to mangle the operators hands you don't just shrug your shoulders to the problem. You figure out the proper ways to add guards, build in lockouts, make it so people practically can't mess up their hands in normal operation as much as possible.

The problem with that analogy is people aren’t machines. They’re making choices.

Bad city design can make things harder, sure. It still doesn’t remove personal responsibility for choosing to drive illegally.

In the example the machine is the city design. It's the thing we can make better designs so people are less likely to put their hands (or someone else's) into the grinder part. You make it so it never even begins to make sense to drive illegally. Why risk prison time when it's a short bike ride or a reliable bus ride?

> It still doesn’t remove personal responsibility for choosing to drive illegally.

I never, ever, once even slightly suggested otherwise. I've been very consistent: it's a harsh and selfish crime that routinely ruins innocent lives which should have steep penalties and strong enforcement. I just don't like that we then don't actually address why people end up making that decision, we just act like it isn't really a problem at all, meanwhile more and more people drive illegally.

Quit burying your head in the sand to the actual solutions to this problem. You'll have far fewer people stealing food when they're no longer hungry.

This is a different argument now. While better transit /may/ reduce uninsured driving, that doesn’t make urban planning the root cause of it.

Also, stealing food because you are hungry isn’t analogous to driving uninsured or justifiable for stealing food. Quite the leap! Really? No one does that.

> This is a different argument now

It's been the same argument the entire time.

> While better transit /may/ reduce uninsured driving

It'll do far more to reduce the rate than just taking away drivers licenses. Ooh wow you took away some paperwork and made an illegal thing they were doing more illegal. What a solution to the problem, really finding the root cause there.

> that doesn’t make urban planning the root cause of it.

It absolutely is the root cause. If you have to drive to realistically participate in society, people will drive no matter what. It doesn't matter what punishments you levy on them, they will end up doing it. Because, to them, there is no other real option. Take the bus...but there's no bus service? Ride a bike...on roads where massive cars are blasting by at 50mph while drivers are looking at their phones? Yeah, sure, you see how long taking that "option" works for you.

You edited your comment about the stealing food part, it was quite a bit more obvious about the connection the way you had it before. People in desperate positions do desperate things. If you think the only way to get to work and not spiral even deeper into poverty is to drive illegally, you're probably going to drive illegally. If you think stealing that bread is the only way you're going to be able to feed your family, you're probably going to steal that bread. Give that same person nutrition assistance, support food pantries, etc and suddenly there's choices other than stealing. Give people another way to move in society and they'll choose another way. Once again, if you think I'm trying to justify either of these activities you're massively misreading what I'm actually saying.

> Really? No one does that

Hungry people don't steal food? That's how much you're burying your head in the sand to reality? Incredible.

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