Sounds like we need better enforcement of insurance requirements. Driving a car uninsured should have some extremely stiff penalties. Once again, maybe if the penalties are high enough and the costs expensive enough for more people, there'd actually be more of a push to re-think overly car dependent life.
It will optimize society overall to have risky, uninsurable drivers not driving.
It's not like healthcare. There will always be healthcare costs. We don't have to have everyone drive all the time, we choose to.
> Driving a car uninsured should have some extremely stiff penalties.
I want to agree with you, but wonder if you have ever been poor? When you need the car to get to work so you can feed your kids, but you can't afford all of
- feed kids
- rent
- insurance
because you got hit by a surprise medical bill (kid got sick, maybe?)
I'm strongly in favor of your end goal (less car-dependent life), I'm just cautious about using punishment as a way to get there.
Rather than subsidize the poor person being poor via insurance, we can subsidize them by say, building public housing nearby their place of work, or direct payments.
Let's expand that. Let's name your hypothetical person, Bob. He's living on the edge financially, and decides to go without insurance.
Let's bring in another person, Alice. Alice is also not in great financial shape. But Alice is able to pay for insurance and follows all the rules. Alice has a small amount of savings, go Alice!
One day, Bob hits Alice. It causes medical issues for Alice. Alice might have insurance, but it's potentially still expensive for Alice. Because of her injuries she can't work for a few weeks. She works hourly, so now loses wages. Luckily with FMLA she won't necessarily lose her job, but she needed every paycheck. But it doesn't really matter, because her car is now gone. She can't drive to work anymore. She can't drive to groceries. She can't afford a car, as a huge chunk her savings went to cover those medical bills and missed paychecks. She's pretty SOL huh.
Sounds like we need to let Bob off the hook for inflicting all this on Alice. After all, he needed to drive without insurance.
No. We should just make it possible so Bob didn't need to drive in the first place instead of excusing his choice to still drive when he couldn't really afford it. We should structure the incentives so Bob doesn't want to drive if he can't afford it.
People driving without insurance ruin lives like Alice's all the time.
That scenario is completely missing the point. Bob has to drive because of the lack of good public transportation and the fact that he can't afford a house near his work. Not to mention if he can't afford a car with insurance it's because his job simply doesn't pay enough.
It's much more likely that external factors put him in that situation, rather than himself. Yet you propose we should punish him personally and paint only Alice as a victim. That's naive. Both are victims.
These are systemic problems and trying to solve them with individual punishments is only going to hurt individuals while not fixing the underlying issues that really matter.
I'm fully aware Bob is the victim. That's why I'm saying the solution is to make it so Bob didn't get in a car. He is a victim of car dependency. Subsidizing insurance to make sure Bob could always afford it isn't solving that. Ensuring he can always afford insurance just furthers his victimhood.
But the only question that really matters in the end is: is that profitable?
If we really cared about safety many people would not be allowed to drive in the first place. Tests would be much more strict and rightly so. But it's way more profitable to let those people spend money on cars (and eventually kill people) than it is to provide good public transportation.
Especially with the auto industry, they have basically won the lobbying game. Most people can't even imagine a world where cars aren't in the center of it, so we keep moving the goalpost...
Realistically, the other person ends up in jail and then you still can’t get compensated for car repairs. It’s not super clear why that would be better than the pooling of risk that happens today that results in compensation.
American society has chosen to create a built environment that is inhospitable to anything else except driving, so I don’t think this is actually a real choice. The people who are getting into crashes all the time are not the ones pushing for that built environment.
I'm saying they should face such extreme penalties it's not worth it anymore and have it policed so those people aren't on the roads in the first place to get in a collision. Right now you're pretty much not going to have anything happen driving without insurance unless you get into an accident that you can't escape from. If it was highly likely for someone to face judgement every time they went out you'd probably have significantly fewer uninsured drivers out there.
Then you basically just have a roving class of jobless people stuck at home.
We’re not talking about the currently uninsured. We’re talking about a “hot-take” proposal to significantly increase the amount of uninsured people today, people who today can get insurance.
Or we get a stronger political will to no longer force car dependency on everyone when people actually start to understand the real costs of car-centric design.
When the stores and restaurants where rich people shop can't get anyone to work there anymore without paying people the full costs of actually driving far away maybe there will be a will to change things.
Lots of people around the world can go to work without needing a car.
Using our justice system to meter out extreme punishment would mostly impact poor people, and it is not as if the US has historically been very good at listening to the suffering of poor people.
The Bay Area can barely keep service workers in housing and its taken several decades of this problem to get even the slightest bit of progress.
Being frank, you shouldn't be making the 40+mile commute in a car if you can't afford all the ramifications of it. It's a failure of societal design to force people to drive 40 miles on a vehicle they can't responsibly afford to operate just to survive.
In the end, they shouldn't live 40mi from where they work. It's not a good thing to force such a lifestyle.
Honestly it's depressing you're suggesting we should continue to force people to spend so much of their productive lives commuting to dead-end jobs that will never lift them out of the poverty of their situation. It's sad you're continuing to argue people should live an hour+ away from where they work, and that should just be the norm and the basis for our designs.
If you want to live 40+mi from your work and can afford all that involves and are willing to live with the tradeoffs, sure go ahead. Pay the tolls for the highways. Pay the congestion fees. Choose to spend more time with the insides of your car than you do spending time with your family on an average weekday. Pay the higher insurance compared to those who live close or take the train. Just quit asking for handouts and subsidies to pave over other people's homes, force bullshit parking minimums which lead to seas of empty pavement, demand other people pay for the roads you drive, etc.
your proposed change will take decades to rework cities to move away from car-centric city design, to introduce public transportation, to rework current districts, to move shopping malls/restaurants closer to living districts etc.
all of this just because you wanted to make stricter insurance just to make it more (by how much?) efficient for insurers, so that they would make more profit.
No, I'm suggesting it because I don't want to pay for Bob to smash several cars a year. I'm saying it because there's lots of people who have no business being out on the road. Having Bob drive when he's a bad driver makes everyone around less safe.
But I guess you'd have society pay for all the cars Bob ends up destroying. We'll subsidize him crashing cars over and over and hurting Alice but we just can't seem to find the money to add another bus line!
It will optimize society overall to have risky, uninsurable drivers not driving.
It's not like healthcare. There will always be healthcare costs. We don't have to have everyone drive all the time, we choose to.