Last month the New York Times’ Kashmir Hill published a major story on how GM collects driver behavior data then sells access (through LexisNexis) to insurance companies, which will then jack…
100% against everything being monitored and data sold like it is…… but part of me wishes there was a way to work towards getting bad drivers off of the roads.
This is not the way to do that as the insurance companies only have one goal and that is to raise profits.
But when you stand on any random street corner and 30-60 % of every driver driving by is looking down at their cell phone, it is very scary.
People don’t use turn signals, speed through residential neighborhoods, change lanes in the middle of intersections, it’s insane. We need to make our world less car reliant, it’s unacceptable.
You get rid of cars and you stop designing society to accommodate the one edge case where someone lives 100miles away from a city that they have to commute by car to everyday for some reason.
People can’t afford to live in the city precisely because so much of it is designed to cater to cars. For example, adding parking requirements to an apartment can easily increase the effective square footage by 50% (800 ft2 2-bedroom apartment + 2 parking spaces = 1200 ft2). Then the price goes up even more than that because parking deck is more expensive per unit area to construct than actual living space.
Me, with no bus with a route from my bumfuck nowhere town to my work a 20 minute backwoods drive in some equally Fuckwoods, Nowhere town:
Ever maybe think that maybe… JUST MAYBE!!! some people don’t actually want to live in a 10000 person/mile area and want a different life with trees or fields around them instead of more endless asphalt?
For those people, vehicles are the bridge between wanting to live around nature and not starving to death.
If you’re commuting from Bumfuck to Fuckwoods, you should drive*. Nobody cares! There are so few people like you that it doesn’t fucking matter what you do!
The issue is that people like you need to quit pretending your snowflake exceptions are an excuse to fail to solve the problem for the vast (80%!) majority of people who live in metro areas and are therefore not like you.
(* Actually you should just move to Fuckwoods, but that’s not the point.)
You will never be able to take away someone’s license for bad driving if doing so basically makes them unemployable and incapable of taking care of themselves. We need cheap, practical alternatives to cars in order to reduce the impact of bad drivers.
Yup. There’s a cause-and-effect chain that the anti-car crowd likes to ignore. The reality is that we need widely available alternative transport before restricting cars. If you start by restricting cars, all you’re doing is making it impossible for struggling people to get and keep a job. And that’s not good for anyone.
Give us cities that are walkable, with no point less than a 10 minute walk away from a train station.
Give us trains that are affordable and run regularly, not $10 per ride and only run every 45-60 minutes.
Give us actual separated sidewalks and prioritized pedestrian traffic, instead of roads without sidewalks and intersections that make pedestrians wait 2-4 cycles before giving them a crossing signal. Give us busses that actually run on time and run regularly.
Give us public transport that doesn’t shut down at 2AM, when all of the drunks are leaving the bars and are pushed into driving home because there is no public transport available after the bars close.
My daily commute by car is 13 minutes. Via public transport, it is nearly three hours. Without a car, I need to go 20 miles north to a connecting city, wait roughly hour for the next train, then go 20 miles south to get near my work. Then it’s another 20-30 minutes of waiting for the bus (if it’s even running on time) for another 5 miles. Or I can just fucking drive the 10 miles and be there in 13 minutes. No, I can’t walk because it’s nearly all highway driving and there are no sidewalks. No, I can’t ride a bike because no bikes are allowed on the highway.
Fix public transport. Make it usable. And then start restricting cars. If my commute was a 13 minute drive or a 15 minute train ride, I’d pick the train ride every time. But it’s not.
Obligatory US, I think the better way of filtering bad drivers is more stringent and frequent testing through the DMV (or your state’s equivalent). Look at Germany, they don’t mess around when it comes to licensing. I’m mid 30s, and haven’t had to retest or do any form of continuing driver’s education or retesting since I was 16.
It’s a little trickier here in the US due to our cities being built for cars, and being without one can be a huge detriment, especially with most public transit being a shitshow. But I agree, we definitely need some mechanisms to weed out bad drivers.
They were never really punished for this and I think this was a lesson learned by all that corps could do what they want without fear of repercussions.
Either way, the bottom line is that it’s pretty difficult to go without a car in the US outside select major cities. Still, per the original comment I responded to, something needs to give in regards to the excess amount of bad drivers on the roads here.
I agree, but you’re talking about completely reengineering/rebuilding cities. Doable in the long run, but clamping down on negligent and distracted drivers in the name of public safety can be done in a much quicker manner.
I think we could find viable ways to engineer something workable without completely tearing everything down, we just have to work smarter. And get rich people to pay taxes.
How do you propose policing all the drivers without license and insurance? We are already way overpoliced, with horrific results. How would you propose bad drivers get to work and do necessary living activities? I think we need to look for inclusive, compassionate solutions, rather than more punitive, exclusionary solutions.
The drivers and in the netherlands are still some of the shittiest drivers outside of Italy.
80%+ of bmw and range rover drivers (of which a huge percentage of cars are) never ever use their turn signals, people literally stand still in the middle of intersections in a 5 car pileup combined with the fact that a huge percentage of people blatantly run red lights so when the light turns green in the opposite direction during a busy period, hundreds of intersections are completely blocked causing immense traffic. This comes from the rule where you generally pass behind the car turning opposite of you. When you have a 5 car pileup in both directions, nobody can pass behind.
Not to mention the rampant “Belgian exit” where cars speed up over the speed limit to go from the right lane, passing a few cars on the left, only to re-enter the right lane past a solid line to screech into the exit a second or two faster. I see this one multiple times every time I drive.
Strict requirements don’t mean much if your driving culture is completely fucked. But culture is also the hardest thing to change.
While licensing is definitely harder in Germany you also do not have to retest or do anything else to keep your license. It’s actually a problem that it’s pretty hard to take away the license from old unfit people (and the German government actually blocked EU legislation improving that).
Reliable public transport with a robust interstate passenger railway system coupled with a well designed intracity bus system, along with well maintained biking paths everywhere else would go a long way to getting bad drivers off the road.
We can’t get bad drivers off the road when basic everyday living requires driving. There are cost effective alternatives in use across the world. America just has to learn to accept good ideas that others have pioneered.
Autonomous vehicles are the only achievable solution to distracted driving. Individuals can be nice but people as a whole are lazy and selfish pieces of shit. You’ll never get anywhere close to even 90% doing the right thing just by relying on people’s good intentions.
Definitely but there’s practical limitations to implementing large scale public transit in the US even if the desire to build it existed, which I would argue it doesn’t at a large enough scale to make it happen.
The US is not special. The fact that the country is big doesn’t matter; people still cluster together in cities just like they do everywhere else. The only things that makes transit harder here than other places is the degree of regulatory capture by the automobile and fossil fuels industries and the degree to which the public has been brainwashed by their propaganda.
It does matter that the US is one big country, but even if it didn’t you still made my point for me. The other things you listed are just as large obstacles as the size of the country itself and there is no easy solution to those other problems but you just blew past them as if naming them would make them go away. The fact that you identified them correctly doesn’t mean you have any realistic chance of overcoming them.
I’d like to call your optimism inspiring but from where I sit it looks more like delusion. Don’t get me wrong I would love a huge public transit buildout in the US, I just don’t see any realistic path to making it a reality in the current political and economic climate. I also don’t see that changing within a decade or more at minimum.
No argument from me. I’m probably insane. But I’m not under oath, or doing a job, or undertaking a responsibility; I’m just me, talking to strangers in a public chat room. Why should I limit myself to the practical? Is there a rule against expressing dreams in this room?
And I agree, even if I convinced everyone overnight, and we had the willpower to do it, I’m still proposing infrastructure changes that I may not see finished in my life, but building for the next generation is still noble to me, in my insanity.
Full autonomous vehicles, and particularly significant levels of adoption of them are decades away. It’s taken roughly 20 years for hybrid vehicles to become “big”, and that’s after the tech already existed. We still don’t even have anywhere close to reliable full autonomous driving.
It usually is much more effective to make plans and changes based off what currently exists rather than anything that isn’t absolute immediate future. No reason to say no to the good because you’re busy waiting for “perfect”.
Full autonomous vehicles, and particularly significant levels of adoption of them are decades away
the only way fully-autonomous vehicles will truly work and work as envisioned, is if user-operated ones are taken off the roads entirely. and yes, that is at least ‘decades away’
At this point we’re not even sure if fully autonomous vehicles are possible.
Yes that one guy has been saying it’ll be ready next year for the passed 10 years, but no self driving company has been able to get an autonomous car from point A to point B in all road conditions that a competent human can manage.
Even aircraft autopilot is not as autonomous as what people want out of self driving cars. Pilots are still required to be at their seats the entire flight in case something unexpected happens. And there are a lot more unexpected things on a road than in the middle of the sky. Even discounting human drivers being in the way, a self driving car needs to be able to recognize everything a human can and react to it better than a human would. I’m not sure that’s possible, even with “AI”. The human brain is insanely good at pattern matching, and it took millions of years of trial and error evolution to luck our way into that. How can someone guarantee an AI is going to be better?
That’s not just “at least decades away;” that’s literally impossible. Streets, by definition, will always need to accommodate road users that will never be computerized, such as pedestrians, cyclists, horse-drawn carriages, etc.
“decades” from now, autonomous vehicles will have their own roadways, designed for them and with the infrastructure needed for the tech at that future time.
the streets as we know them today will be for last-mile (literally) transport, pedestrians, bicycles, some forms of public transit, and what not.
Maybe, but probably not because where would you put them? We’re not going to bulldoze through the street grid again like we did for the freeways and “urban renewal” (read: kicking out the black people) back in the '50s. We learned our lesson about not displacing people like that and passed NEPA to make it extremely difficult to do from now on.
Sure that works great, now since that infrastructure doesn’t exist just go get it built. I’m sure massive government spending that benefits the general public more than corporations will be very easy to secure.
Make the passing grade for a driving test 20% higher than it currently is, and make everyone take a driving test every five years. You get one re-test if you fail.
And once you hit 70, driving tests every year.
Anyone who fails under the new regulations would have been causing a lot of problems on the roads.
You had me until only 1 chance to fail; instead, you should temporarily get your license reduced back to the level 2 learners license. Then another chance to fail and retest before you get bumped down to a level 1 learners license.
Also, every year for 70+ is excessive. Passing a cog screen should be sufficient. Retesting every 5 years is already pretty good.
I have seen some cool videos about this, although they are kind of boring I guess…. Using infrastructure to bring the speed limit down naturally and force drivers to keep their hands on the wheel
Traffic calming is a thing, but not what I’m talking about.
I’m talking about repealing zoning restrictions in order to allow traditional development again, which (since property owners aren’t forced by law to cater to cars), tends to have walkable density that discourages driving.
In other words, you don’t have to worry about bad drivers if almost nobody’s driving to begin with.
One part of the answer is enforcement. Ticket the shit out of dangerous behavior and people will do it less. I literally never see anyone pulled over for traffic violations anymore, whereas it was common 10-20 years ago. What happened to traffic cops, and why don’t we have cameras that detect this shit? In Colorado people don’t even bother to renew their tags and there are no repercussions. It’s like fucking Mad Max out there, I hate it so much. Obviously making the world less car reliant is critical, but the lack of any visible enforcement is absurd too.
100% against everything being monitored and data sold like it is…… but part of me wishes there was a way to work towards getting bad drivers off of the roads.
This is not the way to do that as the insurance companies only have one goal and that is to raise profits.
But when you stand on any random street corner and 30-60 % of every driver driving by is looking down at their cell phone, it is very scary.
People don’t use turn signals, speed through residential neighborhoods, change lanes in the middle of intersections, it’s insane. We need to make our world less car reliant, it’s unacceptable.
You get rid of cars and you stop designing society to accommodate the one edge case where someone lives 100miles away from a city that they have to commute by car to everyday for some reason.
Thank you for your well educated and nuanced opinion that takes people who can’t afford to live in a city into account, very cool!
People can’t afford to live in the city precisely because so much of it is designed to cater to cars. For example, adding parking requirements to an apartment can easily increase the effective square footage by 50% (800 ft2 2-bedroom apartment + 2 parking spaces = 1200 ft2). Then the price goes up even more than that because parking deck is more expensive per unit area to construct than actual living space.
Me, with no bus with a route from my bumfuck nowhere town to my work a 20 minute backwoods drive in some equally Fuckwoods, Nowhere town:
Ever maybe think that maybe… JUST MAYBE!!! some people don’t actually want to live in a 10000 person/mile area and want a different life with trees or fields around them instead of more endless asphalt?
For those people, vehicles are the bridge between wanting to live around nature and not starving to death.
If you’re commuting from Bumfuck to Fuckwoods, you should drive*. Nobody cares! There are so few people like you that it doesn’t fucking matter what you do!
The issue is that people like you need to quit pretending your snowflake exceptions are an excuse to fail to solve the problem for the vast (80%!) majority of people who live in metro areas and are therefore not like you.
(* Actually you should just move to Fuckwoods, but that’s not the point.)
Literally the definition of an edge case, but consider this, if you never had a car you would have never been in that situation to begin with.
I live 100 miles away because I never want to deal with city slickers like you.
So you don’t need society designed to accommodate your presence in a city, then?
So why drive into the city?
You will never be able to take away someone’s license for bad driving if doing so basically makes them unemployable and incapable of taking care of themselves. We need cheap, practical alternatives to cars in order to reduce the impact of bad drivers.
Yup. There’s a cause-and-effect chain that the anti-car crowd likes to ignore. The reality is that we need widely available alternative transport before restricting cars. If you start by restricting cars, all you’re doing is making it impossible for struggling people to get and keep a job. And that’s not good for anyone.
Give us cities that are walkable, with no point less than a 10 minute walk away from a train station.
Give us trains that are affordable and run regularly, not $10 per ride and only run every 45-60 minutes.
Give us actual separated sidewalks and prioritized pedestrian traffic, instead of roads without sidewalks and intersections that make pedestrians wait 2-4 cycles before giving them a crossing signal. Give us busses that actually run on time and run regularly.
Give us public transport that doesn’t shut down at 2AM, when all of the drunks are leaving the bars and are pushed into driving home because there is no public transport available after the bars close.
My daily commute by car is 13 minutes. Via public transport, it is nearly three hours. Without a car, I need to go 20 miles north to a connecting city, wait roughly hour for the next train, then go 20 miles south to get near my work. Then it’s another 20-30 minutes of waiting for the bus (if it’s even running on time) for another 5 miles. Or I can just fucking drive the 10 miles and be there in 13 minutes. No, I can’t walk because it’s nearly all highway driving and there are no sidewalks. No, I can’t ride a bike because no bikes are allowed on the highway.
Fix public transport. Make it usable. And then start restricting cars. If my commute was a 13 minute drive or a 15 minute train ride, I’d pick the train ride every time. But it’s not.
Obligatory US, I think the better way of filtering bad drivers is more stringent and frequent testing through the DMV (or your state’s equivalent). Look at Germany, they don’t mess around when it comes to licensing. I’m mid 30s, and haven’t had to retest or do any form of continuing driver’s education or retesting since I was 16.
It’s a little trickier here in the US due to our cities being built for cars, and being without one can be a huge detriment, especially with most public transit being a shitshow. But I agree, we definitely need some mechanisms to weed out bad drivers.
Well GM and Goodyear lobbied against public transit when they wanted everyone to buy a car, and probably still do , is why public transit is so awful.
That, plus GM literally bought up streetcar companies and shut them down or converted them to running buses.
Yes. The Great American Streetcar Scandal.
They were never really punished for this and I think this was a lesson learned by all that corps could do what they want without fear of repercussions.
That’s right.
Either way, the bottom line is that it’s pretty difficult to go without a car in the US outside select major cities. Still, per the original comment I responded to, something needs to give in regards to the excess amount of bad drivers on the roads here.
That seems like a bandaid for a tourniquet problem. We need to address causes, otherwise unlicensed, uninsured drivers will increase.
I agree, but you’re talking about completely reengineering/rebuilding cities. Doable in the long run, but clamping down on negligent and distracted drivers in the name of public safety can be done in a much quicker manner.
I think we could find viable ways to engineer something workable without completely tearing everything down, we just have to work smarter. And get rich people to pay taxes.
How do you propose policing all the drivers without license and insurance? We are already way overpoliced, with horrific results. How would you propose bad drivers get to work and do necessary living activities? I think we need to look for inclusive, compassionate solutions, rather than more punitive, exclusionary solutions.
Licensing is also harder here in Belgium.
The drivers and in the netherlands are still some of the shittiest drivers outside of Italy.
80%+ of bmw and range rover drivers (of which a huge percentage of cars are) never ever use their turn signals, people literally stand still in the middle of intersections in a 5 car pileup combined with the fact that a huge percentage of people blatantly run red lights so when the light turns green in the opposite direction during a busy period, hundreds of intersections are completely blocked causing immense traffic. This comes from the rule where you generally pass behind the car turning opposite of you. When you have a 5 car pileup in both directions, nobody can pass behind.
Not to mention the rampant “Belgian exit” where cars speed up over the speed limit to go from the right lane, passing a few cars on the left, only to re-enter the right lane past a solid line to screech into the exit a second or two faster. I see this one multiple times every time I drive.
Strict requirements don’t mean much if your driving culture is completely fucked. But culture is also the hardest thing to change.
While licensing is definitely harder in Germany you also do not have to retest or do anything else to keep your license. It’s actually a problem that it’s pretty hard to take away the license from old unfit people (and the German government actually blocked EU legislation improving that).
Reliable public transport with a robust interstate passenger railway system coupled with a well designed intracity bus system, along with well maintained biking paths everywhere else would go a long way to getting bad drivers off the road.
We can’t get bad drivers off the road when basic everyday living requires driving. There are cost effective alternatives in use across the world. America just has to learn to accept good ideas that others have pioneered.
Trollies?
I respect boxcars, but does the world need more trolls and troll accessories?
Autonomous vehicles are the only achievable solution to distracted driving. Individuals can be nice but people as a whole are lazy and selfish pieces of shit. You’ll never get anywhere close to even 90% doing the right thing just by relying on people’s good intentions.
Could public transit be considered to reduce the need for everyone to drive?
Could? Yes!
Will? Well, not in the US at least. :(
Definitely but there’s practical limitations to implementing large scale public transit in the US even if the desire to build it existed, which I would argue it doesn’t at a large enough scale to make it happen.
The US is not special. The fact that the country is big doesn’t matter; people still cluster together in cities just like they do everywhere else. The only things that makes transit harder here than other places is the degree of regulatory capture by the automobile and fossil fuels industries and the degree to which the public has been brainwashed by their propaganda.
It does matter that the US is one big country, but even if it didn’t you still made my point for me. The other things you listed are just as large obstacles as the size of the country itself and there is no easy solution to those other problems but you just blew past them as if naming them would make them go away. The fact that you identified them correctly doesn’t mean you have any realistic chance of overcoming them.
It’ll never happen if we all agree it’ll never happen. I like taking about them, as it’s my way of making it more likely to happen
I’d like to call your optimism inspiring but from where I sit it looks more like delusion. Don’t get me wrong I would love a huge public transit buildout in the US, I just don’t see any realistic path to making it a reality in the current political and economic climate. I also don’t see that changing within a decade or more at minimum.
No argument from me. I’m probably insane. But I’m not under oath, or doing a job, or undertaking a responsibility; I’m just me, talking to strangers in a public chat room. Why should I limit myself to the practical? Is there a rule against expressing dreams in this room?
And I agree, even if I convinced everyone overnight, and we had the willpower to do it, I’m still proposing infrastructure changes that I may not see finished in my life, but building for the next generation is still noble to me, in my insanity.
Full autonomous vehicles, and particularly significant levels of adoption of them are decades away. It’s taken roughly 20 years for hybrid vehicles to become “big”, and that’s after the tech already existed. We still don’t even have anywhere close to reliable full autonomous driving.
It usually is much more effective to make plans and changes based off what currently exists rather than anything that isn’t absolute immediate future. No reason to say no to the good because you’re busy waiting for “perfect”.
the only way fully-autonomous vehicles will truly work and work as envisioned, is if user-operated ones are taken off the roads entirely. and yes, that is at least ‘decades away’
At this point we’re not even sure if fully autonomous vehicles are possible.
Yes that one guy has been saying it’ll be ready next year for the passed 10 years, but no self driving company has been able to get an autonomous car from point A to point B in all road conditions that a competent human can manage.
Even aircraft autopilot is not as autonomous as what people want out of self driving cars. Pilots are still required to be at their seats the entire flight in case something unexpected happens. And there are a lot more unexpected things on a road than in the middle of the sky. Even discounting human drivers being in the way, a self driving car needs to be able to recognize everything a human can and react to it better than a human would. I’m not sure that’s possible, even with “AI”. The human brain is insanely good at pattern matching, and it took millions of years of trial and error evolution to luck our way into that. How can someone guarantee an AI is going to be better?
That’s not just “at least decades away;” that’s literally impossible. Streets, by definition, will always need to accommodate road users that will never be computerized, such as pedestrians, cyclists, horse-drawn carriages, etc.
“decades” from now, autonomous vehicles will have their own roadways, designed for them and with the infrastructure needed for the tech at that future time.
the streets as we know them today will be for last-mile (literally) transport, pedestrians, bicycles, some forms of public transit, and what not.
Maybe, but probably not because where would you put them? We’re not going to bulldoze through the street grid again like we did for the freeways and “urban renewal” (read: kicking out the black people) back in the '50s. We learned our lesson about not displacing people like that and passed NEPA to make it extremely difficult to do from now on.
How about trains? That way 99% of people dont’ even need to drive, ever.
Sure that works great, now since that infrastructure doesn’t exist just go get it built. I’m sure massive government spending that benefits the general public more than corporations will be very easy to secure.
Make the passing grade for a driving test 20% higher than it currently is, and make everyone take a driving test every five years. You get one re-test if you fail.
And once you hit 70, driving tests every year.
Anyone who fails under the new regulations would have been causing a lot of problems on the roads.
You had me until only 1 chance to fail; instead, you should temporarily get your license reduced back to the level 2 learners license. Then another chance to fail and retest before you get bumped down to a level 1 learners license.
Also, every year for 70+ is excessive. Passing a cog screen should be sufficient. Retesting every 5 years is already pretty good.
More stringent requirements for drivers license? Actually punishing people for texting and driving?
Culturally you can help too. I personally lay on the horn when someone is texting and driving.
There is: it’s called zoning reform.
I have seen some cool videos about this, although they are kind of boring I guess…. Using infrastructure to bring the speed limit down naturally and force drivers to keep their hands on the wheel
Traffic calming is a thing, but not what I’m talking about.
I’m talking about repealing zoning restrictions in order to allow traditional development again, which (since property owners aren’t forced by law to cater to cars), tends to have walkable density that discourages driving.
In other words, you don’t have to worry about bad drivers if almost nobody’s driving to begin with.
Want to get bad drivers off the roads? Give them another way to get around.
It’s been like that since I was a kid in the 80’s.
Back then cars also made bad drivers go squish.
Unfortunately so did everyone else involved
I see a mother fucker run through four-way stops nearly every day by my home. It’s infuriating.
One part of the answer is enforcement. Ticket the shit out of dangerous behavior and people will do it less. I literally never see anyone pulled over for traffic violations anymore, whereas it was common 10-20 years ago. What happened to traffic cops, and why don’t we have cameras that detect this shit? In Colorado people don’t even bother to renew their tags and there are no repercussions. It’s like fucking Mad Max out there, I hate it so much. Obviously making the world less car reliant is critical, but the lack of any visible enforcement is absurd too.