I actually don’t see a problem here. Your registration is late? Good, fuck you.
Car emissions are poisoning your neighbors? Fuck you.
Driving a multi-ton box of iron at high speeds in public places is a heavy responsibility. It should be taken just as seriously, if not more seriously, than flying a commercial jet. Even the slightest mistake can kill people. KILL. I do not think it is too much to ask for someone who is permitted to perform this activity do so with absolute perfection.
An infraction may be slight, but it is an indication that the person does not take driving seriously. If they are unable to operate and maintain their vehicle without even avoiding the smallest and simplest mistakes, why should we allow them to drive at all?
The targeting of minorities and the least privileged among us is a policing problem. This is the reason I don’t actually believe in enforcement as a real solution to our transportation problems in the US. We need to make interactions with the police extremely rare. Anything that gives police an excuse to stop most anyone, any time, anywhere, has got to go.
But if you’re going to enforce, do it properly. If cars aren’t banned entirely, only people who can drive flawlessly should have the privilege of doing so.
Listen, I’ve been where you are. We call it car brain. You live in a world where cars dominate every aspect of life, and you just can’t imagine differently. So many things I once took as common sense I now view as patently absurd.
I would go a little over the speed limit when the road was very clear and I felt it was safe. Other people around me were also going fast. I never crashed. I would get a ticket and complain that it was just a small town trying to extract revenues from outsiders with shenanigans, and that’s not wrong.
But now I’m like woah. I could have literally killed people. We let people engage in these extremely unsafe behaviors, putting the lives of others at risk, and all we do is fine them a little? We let them continue to own cars and drive them? What the fuck is wrong with us?
I don’t think that anyone disagrees with your motives or end goals at all. The problem that the people in this thread bump up against is that, even with even-handed enforcement, the penalties and punishments suggested will disproportionately punish the lower class - people who don’t live in walkable cities and need their car to commute to an in-person job.
The focus should be on finding ways to un-car the communities so that people have options. I’m really excited about the Manhattan toll plan, and it works because people have the option of taking the subway instead. Currently there aren’t trains that go to the various factories, plants, or even shopping districts in and around most places in the US.
If you penalize people with cars without providing an alternative option first, then the most vulnerable people are going to be left with no options. And it’s not like the rich, who are the ones who can more easily work around this kind of thing, have any incentive to push for allocating funds toward making car-free spaces happen.
(In fact, in our current hell-world, this line of thinking may lead us right back to Company Towns.)
Absolutely yes. There is going to be pain that it would be nice to avoid if possible.
But is it possible? I see it as a chicken/egg situation. Will they ever budget for proper public transportation while everyone is still able to drive? Even if they do, will people use it while they still have cars at their disposal? If you can force the issue by taking away cars from irresponsible drivers, public transportation will become an urgent necessity. In the long term, doesn’t continued car dominance hurt vulnerable people more than the temporary pain of upending the system?
I’m the kind of person who pulls off a band-aid really quickly. It hurts, briefly, but then it’s off. Our society is the type that will leave a band-aid festering forever all because it might hurt a tiny bit when it is removed. We can never implement anything that will improve society dramatically in the long term because everyone whines about the short term suffering inherent in change. Almost all significant systemic change requires sacrifice, struggle, suffering, and difficulty. We can not allow that pain to be an automatic excuse that wins any argument in favor of maintaining the status quo.
Our society also insists on making the few changes it does make very slowly and gradually to ease the transition. That’s well and good when we have time. But for the climate crisis, we do not have time. For the child who will be hit by a car tomorrow, they don’t have time. We must change as quickly as possible.
The real question to ask is “is it worth it?” Is the long term upside big enough that the pain of change is worth suffering through? So what if someone can’t get to work and has to upend their whole life? In exchange for that, there is someone else who gets to live to see tomorrow. I’ll take that trade every time. How many cars and licenses do we take away before we start causing more pain than we prevent? I think that number is really big because the value I put on a single human life is infinity.
Another thing is that it’s not like I’m proposing taking every car, however nice that would be. Just get rid of cars that are not street legal, and get rid of drivers that don’t take driving seriously. If you do this, you will be left with plenty of people who are driving experts. Driving will be treated as a serious profession. These people will operate taxi and livery services in areas that are still trying to bring their public transportation up to snuff. People who are very good at driving will do very very well. How many vulnerable people will actually benefit and be uplifted by their ability to drive well?
At the absolute bare minimum, we should be applying the smash policy to the worst offenders. You want to talk about poor people in areas where cars are a necessity, sure. That doesn’t include the coal roller. That doesn’t include the race car dodging and weaving on the highway. That doesn’t include the fart car waking up the whole neighborhood. That doesn’t include someone with tens of unpaid violations that is somehow still out on the street. That doesn’t include people covering up their license plate with a retractable shield to avoid tolls. Those kinds of fuckers deserve to have their lives ruined no matter how fortunate they are, or aren’t.
When I see these responses from Scott it feels to me somewhere between trolling and AI spam. You don’t have to read or respond - your life will be better; he’d probably say the same thing.
Yeah. At a certain point whenever I engage, I realize he’s working from a place that this country is never going to get to. I can see where he’s coming from and the noble ends he wants to achieve, but the only way his solutions work is under a government with the power and will to simultaneously provide punishments AND solutions at once, rather than doing one and waiting for the other while people suffer.
On an actual War on Cars note, I do feel like we need to rethink DoorDash, Uber Eats, etc. It’s like, you can do all the recycling you want, but if a person orders food from one of those and puts another car on the road just to be a taxi for their burrito, they’re doing more harm overall. We talk about how much more traffic there has been in recent years, and a big part of that is definitely gig-economy delivery cars that don’t need to be on the road.
When it comes to the Uber/DoorDash/Lyft drivers, it’s not entirely bad.
Of course the biggest downside is that those companies are Silicon Valley tech bro garbage companies that exploit the drivers. Fuck ’em.
But the real downside is that there is no limit on them. With regulated cabs, cities would only sell so many medallions. It was actually really hard to get away with driving a cab without one. TLC would come after you big time, because they were protecting the welfare of the cabbies who spent a fortune on medallions.
When the app drivers came along, it was a legal gray area. They weren’t doing street hails. They were in the same category as black cars where you schedule a ride in advance. The cities did not work fast enough to change their laws and put a stop to them. The cabbies with medallions got fucked as the value of those medallions plummeted, but they still owed so much to pay them off.
The cabs that are clogging up the streets are the ones that are just waiting for someone to book them for a ride. If the supply of drivers exceeds demand, then that’s how we get where we are today. If those cabs were actually limited and regulated properly, they could actually present a huge upside. If five people want pizza, and one delivery car makes five stops, that’s four fewer cars on the road. If someone needs a car very rarely, the existence of cabs means they don’t have to own or rent a car. If someone needs a car regularly, but is unable to drive, and there’s no public transportation option, the car services are a life saver.
The key is that you just have to regulate the cabs very strictly. NYC did it with yellow cabs. London was even more strict about their cab service. We just need to apply all those same rules to every car service. The governments missed their chance, and are too cowardly to go back and fix it because the services became too popular. Of course those companies are popular with customers. They exploit the drivers for their benefit.
Yes, but also their friends, family, and everyone else who gets their hands on a courtesy card.
Sadly, he settled, so the city didn’t have to admit wrongdoing. But that’s the justice system for you. If there’s a miracle maybe once in my life we’ll get a mayor who will do something about this.
We will need an effort on the level of effort required for 50a to pass to get reform. It won’t make any difference unless enforced at the state level anyway since courtesy cards are issued by every department in the state and NYPD expects reciprocal acceptance of the cards with suburban departments. Also the cop lives on Staten Island so screw him.
Car makers in Europe are being encouraged to stop using touchscreens for basic functions like turn signals and wipers in an attempt to promote safer driving. As reported by the Times, the European New Car Assessment Program (NCAP) — an independent and well-regarded safety body for the automotive industry — is set to introduce new rules in January 2026 that require the vehicles it assesses to have physical controls to receive a full five-star safety rating.
I live about 1/2 a mile from an elementary school and really enjoy seeing kids walking/biking/scootering to and from school each day. Though it is obviously less in the winter and I believe I have seen a slow reduction in the decade plus I have lived here. Whenever I make the mistake of leaving the house and driving past the school in the morning or afternoon during the start or end of the school day the amount of cars is ludicrous, they spill out onto the side streets and cause massive traffic congestion, near gridlock. But it is about a 15-25 minute period in the morning and afternoon that I have mostly learned to avoid.