Yes, and it's especially obvious with the example of driving. Driving is a licensed activity where you have to pass a competency test before you're allowed to drive without supervision.
I've had the thought that a lot more things should be licensed with a competency test. Like, for example, I don't know... This is just off the wall and completely random, but maybe a person who runs for President of the United States should have to pass the same exam that people take as part of the process of becoming citizens. Probably the presidential candidates should take a much harder test, but that would require a lot of oversight to make sure the test isn't made to eliminate specific candidates.
My mother has Alzheimer's and I am always with her when she takes that test, so I end up mentally taking the test alongside her. They actually have two different tests, depending on which doctor she sees, a shorter one and a longer one, and my mother mostly gets the shorter one. There's one part where they list four (five? let's go with four) words and have you repeat them back to them. Then, they ask you some other questions, and then they ask you to recall those four words again.
Other than misremembering the exact date, which I'm guessing everybody occasionally has the wrong date in their head, that question remembering the four words after being distracted by a different question is the only part where I could ever have lost points, since I have occasionally forgotten one of the words. It's the only question that I feel a normal person has a chance of missing. It truly is a test specifically for dementia.
The fact that Trump always says the test is difficult and that he got a perfect score on it, given Trump's history lying about things like winning golf tournaments, I think is absolute proof that he does extremely poorly on the test. He very likely fails it. He brings it up all the time because he's as bad at lying as he is at everything else. Good liars know not to bring up the lie a lot. Bad liars keep repeating the lie because they're afraid you might not believe them.
I don't, I actually got that from my friend who's son is obsessed with trolleys right now. I'll have to check them out of that's a philosophy they jive with
As a bus driver, hard disagree! There's people who will wait at a bus stop, wait in line to board the bus, and only then will they spend 5 minutes digging through their pockets or bags for fare.
Or ask where the bus is going, expecting me to tediously list out all the places this bus goes, and when asked the very reasonable question"where are you trying to get to?" Become cagey and refuse to answer. Then ask the same vague and open ended questions.
These people should report to the nearest artillery practice range asap
Those are solvable problems though, there's plenty of busses who don't accept change already. You can add ticket 'vending machines' and have better signage for this.
I like the ones we have around here waiting at the bus stops on our main boulevard which is a perfectly straight road you can see up and down for about a mile and a half in either direction, but who will stand out in the travel lanes and craaaane their necks in this ridiculous pose apparently hoping this will allow them to see the bus coming sooner.
Too expensive. Most bus stations are basically just a sign, sometimes you also get an ad poster and a shelter. Bringing kiosks would imply setting up electricity and internet. When you could instead just make a phone app.
Yeah but still would have to do 100km by car because no train station close to to destination I speak of. Or I would have to take RER and add 2 hours of travel time.
I was at my first gun show with an older friend who knew guns better than I did who I was following around to keep me from making any stupid decisions.
There's a table with a sign for "Constitutional Carry," where they don't think you should need a special license to concealed carry a handgun.
My friend walks up to these two guys at the table, and says "Hey, just so you know, I hope you guys fail."
The younger of the two kind of bristles, but the older one, a dude with a long white beard, says "Oh, why?"
My friend says "Because I worked in a gun shop for fifteen years, and I helped fill out more concealed carry applications than I can count and..." at this point she gestures around at the huge room behind us, "I wouldn't trust 95% of the people in this room with any gun at all."
And the old dude behind the table smiles and nods his head and says "Yeah, that's a fair point."
So anyway, that's the day I bought a Ruger GP-100 in 357 Magnum.
“Wonderwall” is a song that’s very easy to learn on guitar so the meme is that bad guitar players will bust out a guitar and subject you to their bad rendition of the song at inappropriate times when nobody asked for a performance.
15 years ago me and a buddy were shooting pool in a local bar, maybe a dozen total people in there. Some I finished taking guitar lessons last month douche was playing acoustic in there and it's the same list of basic songs you'd expect. Partway through his set he was giving the usual platitudes, suggesting tips and saying we're a great crowd, then says "So anybody wanna hear Your Body is a Wonderland?"
At the same time we both casually said No.
He was some college age kid in jeans, a white v-neck tshirt and a Glock on his belt....in a bar.
Wow what a bummer that trains, buses, bikes, electric scooters, and every other mode of rapid, inexpensive transportation has been un-invented. Those would have been really useful literally every moment since they were first invented. If we had those we could treat driving like it was the most dangerous thing people do every day, which it is.
My point is that driving is essential only because the people in power have unilaterally decided that it must be, and fuck them for that.
No, I get it, the problem the way we've chosen to build society, but now that it is the way it is, judges and juries are reluctant to ban someone from working and buying groceries for anything less than a prison sentence...
Like it's pretty crazy to me that the State (USA) can seize you car if you transport drugs with it, but not if yoU literally run over a human being. People with multiple violations and triple-suspended licenses still get to keep their cars.
I wanted to make a joke about how the American brain simply lacks the part that enables manual locomotion, but our cities straight up do not allow for it. If I cycled to work, it would take me an hour to get there and an hour to get home. I'd love to live within cycling distance of work, but I don't make enough money to rent in that area, let alone buy
Our cities are deeply unwell, and I don't think it's possible to fix them
God I wish... It costs me $250 a month for my car and I own the fucking thing (if you include maintenance costs) so I drive to work twice a day, five times a week, and try to get errands done during my return commute. I might drive once or twice on the weekend, and there are about 4.4 weeks per month on average. That means I spend $5.28 every time I drive. That is WAY MORE THAN TRANSIT COSTS!! Especially if we spent the money we spend on roads and cars, instead on trams or busses
For reference I also pay for car centric stuff through my utility bills. 10-30% of my utilities might be effectively me paying for the externality of ripping up roads to replace buried infrastructure, that then needs to be paid for AGAIN using my taxes when potholes form over prior ground disturbance, and paid for AGAIN when the road fails early and needs to be ripped up to fix the subgrade.
You could similarly say that Europe is huge, or that China is huge, or that the whole planet is huge, and therefore the people living there must need a vehicle. Except, most people dont leave their local area all that often, and when they do, theres nothing that inherently requires that the vehicle used to do so much be individually owned. This isnt to say that nobody needs a car, obviously if you live way out in the middle of nowhere, running transit might not be so viable- but that does not describe how and where most people live, even in the US, and for the majority that do live in urban areas, the size of the whole country is irrelevant to if they would need cars if we just built the proper infrastructure.
There are many such areas, what I was trying to say was more that that is a solvable problem, if the government of the area was sufficiently motivated to solve it, rather than something like "we're too big for anything but cars", which is more of an excuse to not do any of that change to the infrastructure because it implies that nothing can reasonably be done and that cars are simply the natural way of things.
The problem is that making my area pedestrian friendly would involve doing a lot more than just adding sidewalks.
For example, it would make much more sense to link all the cul de sacs with walking/biking paths. But to do that we’d need to bulldoze some houses, get easements from property owners, and then pay for the paths to be put in while hearing construction equipment for months.
And our local government just doesn’t have the power to do that in a reasonable amount of time, or with any guarantees of it even surviving election season.
And that’s not even talking about dealing with improving the main thoroughfare which is a state highway, meaning the local government has no say in how it’s built.
I guess what I'm saying is the big flaw with your plan is "if the government of an area was sufficiently motivated." The way the US government is structured means you need agreement from the voters all the way to the federal government for years to do it.
I could go down to Sunbelt and get a bulldozer and start knocking houses down for bike paths today if I wanted, but that is largely frowned upon.
The Local Group, which includes the Milky Way galaxy, is over 10 million light years, so you can easily see that I have no choice but to own a car to be able to get around.
Most places in Europe and many places in China have functioning mass transit. Most places in the US do not. The car lobby is very powerful in the US, and they work hard to make life impossible without a car.
Well yeah, that's my point though, there's nothing about the US's size that means it cant have that stuff, the big country argument is functionally just an excuse to distract from what the car industry has done here.
The size isn't that relevant. Trains are far better than cars for long distance travel. The problem with the US is the many areas of low but non-zero population density.
To accommodate that you need a good rail network and then probably cars to take you the last few hours. This would work best if those cars were self driving, so they can get back to a hub rather than wherever you are in bumfuck nowhere.
I agree that subsidizing more rail would be good, but it’s pretty fixed, location wise. It’s already in place for most intercity travel.
Rural/outside city living is diffuse, scatters in all directions from a city. It’s why there’s rush hour in most cities. How do you run rail to all those locations? Can you imagine the nimby screams? It also significantly drops real estate values having trains rolling through the backyard.
According to Wikipedia there are three U.S. cities with populations over 2 million that have no intercity passenger rail service (Las Vegas, Columbus OH, and Nashville). Dozens of cities used to have rail services but don't any more. In European countries, it's normal for all cities and towns with a population of at least, say, 50,000 to be served by intercity rail, so there's a lot of improvements possible.
I'm not saying that US rail should aim to serve the rural population - that's what the cars are for.
Well yeah in a truly just society I would have one of limousine chairs that gets carried everywhere by a bunch of dancing whatchamacallits. You know, grad students.
Yeah, isn't a world where all the transport money's spent on highways, so fun? Too bad there just isn't enough for, you know, a couple extra bus routes.
Shouldn't be forced to drive, the US is deliberately designed to be hostile towards pedestrians in ways that the vast majority of people are unable to do anything about. A good percentage of those people also know damn well they're bad drivers and would choose anything else if they could
Nobody should have a right to drive on public roads, they should have a right to prove that they deserve the privilege, and the privilege should be revoked a lot more than it is today.
Equal rights means you are given equal access to the tools that will allow you to learn to drive. If you’re too stupid to drive that’s an entirely different matter.
A vehicle is a 3000lb bullet. If you’re not competent, or irresponsible with chemicals, then everyone on the road is at risk.
No one likes picking up body parts on a road or extracting what is basically meat from a vehicle. Or meeting people who should’ve had a normal.life and are now paralyzed from the neck down. Or, alternatively, a TBI. Broken neuro wiring like someone took an egg beater to sections of their brain, leaving them just sane enough to know they’re fucked up.
That isn’t a privilege. Competency should be required with 3000lb bullets.
I don’t disagree that better mass transit is needed in some cities, but that doesn’t mean we hand drivers licenses to incompetent or irresponsible people.
No one likes picking up body parts on a road or extracting what is basically meat from a vehicle.
You could make the same argument about train derailments or plane crashes.
That's not what is at issue. Virtually nobody is seriously suggesting we de-industrialize transit.
The problem at hand is profit motive. Personal vehicles force people into debt, both directly through purchase and through secondary demands - parking, gasoline, maintenance. That's what generates the economic pressure that keeps them in place.
If we were fixated on safety, we could make cars smaller and slower and we could shield pedestrians from them with infrastructure. You'd save far more lives by lowering the speed limit than raising the DMV licensing standards.
that doesn’t mean we hand drivers licenses to incompetent or irresponsible people
People aren't consistently competent or responsible. So you either install some kind of panopticon for drivers (the private insurance model) and try to price people you suspect are high risk out of your personal risk pool. Or you get people out of cars entirely, knowing anyone can have a day that makes them highly prone to driving mistakes.
You’re being pedantic. We call them 3000lb bullets to describe what they are when not controlled well, not because of their speed. As a driver, it’s good to think of your vehicle in those terms too.
As for monitoring, check out Loyal Moses. His vid on what tech Ford just patented.
you’re right, but the solution is not to give everyone the inalienable right to drive, it’s to redesign the city such that people who can’t drive can still live in it fully (i.e. build public transit and walkable/cyclable path of ways)
the solution is not to give everyone the inalienable right to drive
It's not a question of "solution" writ large. It's a recognition of existing infrastructure and the consequences of denying a subset of the population its use.
redesign the city such that people who can’t drive
Sure. Love that idea.
But, in the meantime, if you've dropped 40 miles of concrete through my neighborhood, such that I need a vehicle to get across it...
"We should build more pedestrian friendly infrastructure" is very different than "ban a subset of bad drivers and let them pound sand about it"
Yesterday on the way home I thought I was going to be affluenza’d by some crazy kid in a green glittery wrapped Beamer. They were so close to my bumper and making so many jerking, erratic movements that I was too worried to merge lest they did at the same time and sent us all rolling. Traffic was dense enough that I couldn’t speed up and really couldn’t safely merge initially. They ended up driving down the middle of the two lane highway and nearly ran a few people into the ditch. At least my demise would have been on the dash cam I guess.
In a civilised country, driving would be reserved for those capable of doing so safely and efficiently (the qualifications would be on a par with certifications for operating similarly powerful industrial machinery, and would not be graded on a curve to ensure a car-dependent society can function), but infrastructure would be designed so that one could live a full life without driving.
In the immortal words of George Carlin: "Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?"
I’m gonna be real with yall, the only person that should ever have even allowed to drive is Dale fucking Earnhardt, I include myself in that but the only time I hate humanity more as a whole than on the road is in a busy Costco
The guy known for aggressive driving and died in a crash is who you think should be allowed to drive? Not sure I follow that one.
Not so fun fact: a friend of mine was trying to get me into watching racing with him. To this day that's the only NASCAR race I've seen and caught it live when I was a kid.
Eaaasy, buddy. No matter what did you do, next to normal consequences your driving license goes buh-buy for a year. Hit someone's car? Fine + License buhbye for a year. Hit a lamp post? Same. Hit a kid? Jail for manslaughter or whatever it's called...plus licence buhbuye for a year. If they also take your license, then that also qualifies.
Speeding ticket? Guess what. Fine plus license buhbye.
No buy backs, no slippin, fuck your status. Can't drive? Ride public. Can't afford to be so poor? Pay someone to drive you. If they hit something tho, you better start walkin'. xD
If you don't pay attention to other drivers, then you won't get road rage, but since you're not paying attention, you shouldn't be driving.
But once you start paying attention to other drivers, you're bound to notice what bad drivers they are, at which point, you will likely feel road rage, and you shouldn't be driving.
To get past that, you need to change the way you drive to compensate for the terrible driving around you. This way, at least the bad drivers won't interact with you too much. The easiest ways to identify the worst drivers are that they follow close, brake hard, and change lanes frequently.
You can minimize their interaction with you by driving better. And the number one thing you can do is to significantly increase your follow distance. Note that you're not driving slower. You're just following further behind. Don't get upset when people get in front of you. That's actually part of the point. People drive badly when they can't get into the lane they need to get into.
If you can change this one thing and follow further behind, you're well on the way to becoming a person who should be allowed to drive.
Following distance is the most common way I see people drive badly. On major roads I'd say 90% or more are driving too close. My car has automatic cruise control which makes keeping a safe distance require zero effort, though I have no idea how close it follows if you decrease the distance setting - I always have it 1 off max.
Eliminating homelessness goes a long way towards curbing bigotry. It's far easier to exploit and abuse folks with no permanent place to live. And our propaganda machine loves to pin problems produced by structural failures on the victims.
Once you house the homeless, a lot of the low hanging fruit of fascist agitation fades away. And a significant pool of young, uneducated, easily exploitable people are no longer in easy reach to radicalize.
The DMV is working off the information of the police. You are fine with the police telling you what is. Seemingly unaware that the police lie as they speak.
We can have equal rights, even as many rights as possible (as equal rights could include no one having any rights) and not be allowed to harm or endanger each other, or by extension the environment.
This alone takes care of practically everyone who shouldn't be allowed to drive, without giving them any less rights.
More importantly, though, the fact that you're experiencing road rage and thus driving while impaired by it means that you shouldn't be allowed to drive, because you're evidently a threat to everyone else on or about the road.
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Right ≠ permission
Yes, and it's especially obvious with the example of driving. Driving is a licensed activity where you have to pass a competency test before you're allowed to drive without supervision.
I've had the thought that a lot more things should be licensed with a competency test. Like, for example, I don't know... This is just off the wall and completely random, but maybe a person who runs for President of the United States should have to pass the same exam that people take as part of the process of becoming citizens. Probably the presidential candidates should take a much harder test, but that would require a lot of oversight to make sure the test isn't made to eliminate specific candidates.
But Trump took a cognitive test, he is good to be president. /s
My mother has Alzheimer's and I am always with her when she takes that test, so I end up mentally taking the test alongside her. They actually have two different tests, depending on which doctor she sees, a shorter one and a longer one, and my mother mostly gets the shorter one. There's one part where they list four (five? let's go with four) words and have you repeat them back to them. Then, they ask you some other questions, and then they ask you to recall those four words again.
Other than misremembering the exact date, which I'm guessing everybody occasionally has the wrong date in their head, that question remembering the four words after being distracted by a different question is the only part where I could ever have lost points, since I have occasionally forgotten one of the words. It's the only question that I feel a normal person has a chance of missing. It truly is a test specifically for dementia.
The fact that Trump always says the test is difficult and that he got a perfect score on it, given Trump's history lying about things like winning golf tournaments, I think is absolute proof that he does extremely poorly on the test. He very likely fails it. He brings it up all the time because he's as bad at lying as he is at everything else. Good liars know not to bring up the lie a lot. Bad liars keep repeating the lie because they're afraid you might not believe them.
You know he's lying because his mouth is open.
Assuming he'd open the door himself and not have others do it for him. Also, missing a McDonalds bag in one of his tiny hands.
Equal access also doesn't mean that abuse and unnecessary risk will be tolerated.
Solid public transport would fix a lot of that but Ford and GM gonna Ford and GM.
People go "ooh, a trolley car!", when's the last time you heard anyone go "Ooh, a Lyft"?
Somebody watches CityNerd!
I don't, I actually got that from my friend who's son is obsessed with trolleys right now. I'll have to check them out of that's a philosophy they jive with
Definitely do check him out, he's dry humor about cities' unique challenges and wins for mass transit. On Nebula or any of the YouTube variants
Everyone should have equal rights
To ride the bus
Boom. Solved.
As a bus driver, hard disagree! There's people who will wait at a bus stop, wait in line to board the bus, and only then will they spend 5 minutes digging through their pockets or bags for fare.
Or ask where the bus is going, expecting me to tediously list out all the places this bus goes, and when asked the very reasonable question"where are you trying to get to?" Become cagey and refuse to answer. Then ask the same vague and open ended questions.
These people should report to the nearest artillery practice range asap
Those are solvable problems though, there's plenty of busses who don't accept change already. You can add ticket 'vending machines' and have better signage for this.
Usually when someone asks "where the bus goes?" they mean the last stop of the bus, but maybe it's just in my place idk
I like the ones we have around here waiting at the bus stops on our main boulevard which is a perfectly straight road you can see up and down for about a mile and a half in either direction, but who will stand out in the travel lanes and craaaane their necks in this ridiculous pose apparently hoping this will allow them to see the bus coming sooner.
The first part could be fixed by making buses have no fare
Never understood why bus stops didn't have little kiosks to buy a ticket there, like train stations do.
Too expensive. Most bus stations are basically just a sign, sometimes you also get an ad poster and a shelter. Bringing kiosks would imply setting up electricity and internet. When you could instead just make a phone app.
I've seen people lose that right. Hell, I almost did.
I don't want to drive, give me walkable cities and public transportation
Same I am forced to drive, please teleport me. At least biking is fun but you can't do 400km in 4h.
Well, you can always give this a shot.
A high speed train would manage 400 km in way under 4 hours
Yeah but still would have to do 100km by car because no train station close to to destination I speak of. Or I would have to take RER and add 2 hours of travel time.
I was at my first gun show with an older friend who knew guns better than I did who I was following around to keep me from making any stupid decisions.
There's a table with a sign for "Constitutional Carry," where they don't think you should need a special license to concealed carry a handgun.
My friend walks up to these two guys at the table, and says "Hey, just so you know, I hope you guys fail."
The younger of the two kind of bristles, but the older one, a dude with a long white beard, says "Oh, why?"
My friend says "Because I worked in a gun shop for fifteen years, and I helped fill out more concealed carry applications than I can count and..." at this point she gestures around at the huge room behind us, "I wouldn't trust 95% of the people in this room with any gun at all."
And the old dude behind the table smiles and nods his head and says "Yeah, that's a fair point."
So anyway, that's the day I bought a Ruger GP-100 in 357 Magnum.
explain joke plz me chronically stupid
man with gun go "bang bang bang". man with guitar goes "bang bang bang". one with gun the other with instrument.
ah so the meme was in american, got it
Yeah, you unfortunately have to manage your expectations here
It's better than reddit, but still mostly 'Murican, and hence pretty stupid and with a warped sense of what constitutes freedom
wow....what an incredible sense of humor...how can you possibly be so funny...
“Wonderwall” is a song that’s very easy to learn on guitar so the meme is that bad guitar players will bust out a guitar and subject you to their bad rendition of the song at inappropriate times when nobody asked for a performance.
15 years ago me and a buddy were shooting pool in a local bar, maybe a dozen total people in there. Some I finished taking guitar lessons last month douche was playing acoustic in there and it's the same list of basic songs you'd expect. Partway through his set he was giving the usual platitudes, suggesting tips and saying we're a great crowd, then says "So anybody wanna hear Your Body is a Wonderland?"
At the same time we both casually said No.
He was some college age kid in jeans, a white v-neck tshirt and a Glock on his belt....in a bar.
So you're the one who puts pointless red circles everywhere?!?
Such a heartwarming and inclusive remark
Driving is not a right. WAY too many people are allowed to drive. What’s worse is that WAY too many people have no option BUT to drive
That's exactly why it's treated as a right. Can't drive?Can't live.
Wow what a bummer that trains, buses, bikes, electric scooters, and every other mode of rapid, inexpensive transportation has been un-invented. Those would have been really useful literally every moment since they were first invented. If we had those we could treat driving like it was the most dangerous thing people do every day, which it is.
My point is that driving is essential only because the people in power have unilaterally decided that it must be, and fuck them for that.
No, I get it, the problem the way we've chosen to build society, but now that it is the way it is, judges and juries are reluctant to ban someone from working and buying groceries for anything less than a prison sentence...
Like it's pretty crazy to me that the State (USA) can seize you car if you transport drugs with it, but not if yoU literally run over a human being. People with multiple violations and triple-suspended licenses still get to keep their cars.
Yeah you make a good point. I hate all of it
I wanted to make a joke about how the American brain simply lacks the part that enables manual locomotion, but our cities straight up do not allow for it. If I cycled to work, it would take me an hour to get there and an hour to get home. I'd love to live within cycling distance of work, but I don't make enough money to rent in that area, let alone buy
Our cities are deeply unwell, and I don't think it's possible to fix them
Driving is a privilege, not a right. Easy fix.
Equal Rights == None of us fucks are allowed to drive.
Honestly as a bicyclist I feel cars are way to powerful for regular people. Ebikes are great, fast and small
Trains and trams and busses.
God I wish... It costs me $250 a month for my car and I own the fucking thing (if you include maintenance costs) so I drive to work twice a day, five times a week, and try to get errands done during my return commute. I might drive once or twice on the weekend, and there are about 4.4 weeks per month on average. That means I spend $5.28 every time I drive. That is WAY MORE THAN TRANSIT COSTS!! Especially if we spent the money we spend on roads and cars, instead on trams or busses
For reference I also pay for car centric stuff through my utility bills. 10-30% of my utilities might be effectively me paying for the externality of ripping up roads to replace buried infrastructure, that then needs to be paid for AGAIN using my taxes when potholes form over prior ground disturbance, and paid for AGAIN when the road fails early and needs to be ripped up to fix the subgrade.
But who will drive them? 🤔
Synthesis is: no-one should be allowed to drive
The US huge. Unless you live in a metro area and never leave you’re going to need a vehicle.
Moving state to state, generally, it will take you an entire day at a freeway speed to get 2 states over. We have 48 on the drivable side.
You could similarly say that Europe is huge, or that China is huge, or that the whole planet is huge, and therefore the people living there must need a vehicle. Except, most people dont leave their local area all that often, and when they do, theres nothing that inherently requires that the vehicle used to do so much be individually owned. This isnt to say that nobody needs a car, obviously if you live way out in the middle of nowhere, running transit might not be so viable- but that does not describe how and where most people live, even in the US, and for the majority that do live in urban areas, the size of the whole country is irrelevant to if they would need cars if we just built the proper infrastructure.
The problem is that even in my local area the infrastructure is built for cars so much that walking takes 10x longer than it should.
There are many such areas, what I was trying to say was more that that is a solvable problem, if the government of the area was sufficiently motivated to solve it, rather than something like "we're too big for anything but cars", which is more of an excuse to not do any of that change to the infrastructure because it implies that nothing can reasonably be done and that cars are simply the natural way of things.
The problem is that making my area pedestrian friendly would involve doing a lot more than just adding sidewalks.
For example, it would make much more sense to link all the cul de sacs with walking/biking paths. But to do that we’d need to bulldoze some houses, get easements from property owners, and then pay for the paths to be put in while hearing construction equipment for months.
And our local government just doesn’t have the power to do that in a reasonable amount of time, or with any guarantees of it even surviving election season.
And that’s not even talking about dealing with improving the main thoroughfare which is a state highway, meaning the local government has no say in how it’s built.
I guess what I'm saying is the big flaw with your plan is "if the government of an area was sufficiently motivated." The way the US government is structured means you need agreement from the voters all the way to the federal government for years to do it.
I could go down to Sunbelt and get a bulldozer and start knocking houses down for bike paths today if I wanted, but that is largely frowned upon.
The Local Group, which includes the Milky Way galaxy, is over 10 million light years, so you can easily see that I have no choice but to own a car to be able to get around.
Intergalactic travel is rough, make sure you get all wheel drive
What, you want to trust Boeing, now that it too has been enshittified? No thanks, I drive the lower 48.
Most places in Europe and many places in China have functioning mass transit. Most places in the US do not. The car lobby is very powerful in the US, and they work hard to make life impossible without a car.
Well yeah, that's my point though, there's nothing about the US's size that means it cant have that stuff, the big country argument is functionally just an excuse to distract from what the car industry has done here.
The size isn't that relevant. Trains are far better than cars for long distance travel. The problem with the US is the many areas of low but non-zero population density.
To accommodate that you need a good rail network and then probably cars to take you the last few hours. This would work best if those cars were self driving, so they can get back to a hub rather than wherever you are in bumfuck nowhere.
I agree that subsidizing more rail would be good, but it’s pretty fixed, location wise. It’s already in place for most intercity travel.
Rural/outside city living is diffuse, scatters in all directions from a city. It’s why there’s rush hour in most cities. How do you run rail to all those locations? Can you imagine the nimby screams? It also significantly drops real estate values having trains rolling through the backyard.
According to Wikipedia there are three U.S. cities with populations over 2 million that have no intercity passenger rail service (Las Vegas, Columbus OH, and Nashville). Dozens of cities used to have rail services but don't any more. In European countries, it's normal for all cities and towns with a population of at least, say, 50,000 to be served by intercity rail, so there's a lot of improvements possible.
I'm not saying that US rail should aim to serve the rural population - that's what the cars are for.
In addition to what a lot of others have said already, in a more egalitarian society most people wouldn't have to drive
And yeah, equal rights doesn't mean anyone can just do anything
Well yeah in a truly just society I would have one of limousine chairs that gets carried everywhere by a bunch of dancing whatchamacallits. You know, grad students.
Or, you know.
A bus.
I'm sure the passengers on the bus would love a 25 minute detour just to pick me up from my rural farm.
Yeah, isn't a world where all the transport money's spent on highways, so fun? Too bad there just isn't enough for, you know, a couple extra bus routes.
If we aren't building highways, how are the busses getting to rural communities?
The bus can just take the train
You have the right to exercise your driving skills, if you have them
Shouldn't be forced to drive, the US is deliberately designed to be hostile towards pedestrians in ways that the vast majority of people are unable to do anything about. A good percentage of those people also know damn well they're bad drivers and would choose anything else if they could
I always told driving is a privilege, not a right.
Everyone has the right to drive, provided they can show the required level of skill and competence to do so.
Unfortunately, unskilled and incompetent describes far too many drivers.
Nobody should have a right to drive on public roads, they should have a right to prove that they deserve the privilege, and the privilege should be revoked a lot more than it is today.
Driving is a privilege, not a right. Or so im told.
Freedom is a right, but you can still get put in jail.
Or vote or have kids sigh
Congratulations, you've just reinvented the Electoral College!
I mean, really, representative democracy.
Voting is pretty harmless. That one isn't hooked up to anything important without s lot of failsafes.
Driving isn't a right.
Equal rights means you are given equal access to the tools that will allow you to learn to drive. If you’re too stupid to drive that’s an entirely different matter.
Meanwhile, "Here, have a gun!"
Driving is not a right, it's a privilege.
Driving isn’t a right, it’s a privilege.
In a city without public transit, denying someone the right to drive is denying them personal autonomy.
A vehicle is a 3000lb bullet. If you’re not competent, or irresponsible with chemicals, then everyone on the road is at risk.
No one likes picking up body parts on a road or extracting what is basically meat from a vehicle. Or meeting people who should’ve had a normal.life and are now paralyzed from the neck down. Or, alternatively, a TBI. Broken neuro wiring like someone took an egg beater to sections of their brain, leaving them just sane enough to know they’re fucked up.
That isn’t a privilege. Competency should be required with 3000lb bullets.
I don’t disagree that better mass transit is needed in some cities, but that doesn’t mean we hand drivers licenses to incompetent or irresponsible people.
Judging by the way people drive in my city, that's exactly what it means :(
How fast do you think bullets move?
You could make the same argument about train derailments or plane crashes.
That's not what is at issue. Virtually nobody is seriously suggesting we de-industrialize transit.
The problem at hand is profit motive. Personal vehicles force people into debt, both directly through purchase and through secondary demands - parking, gasoline, maintenance. That's what generates the economic pressure that keeps them in place.
If we were fixated on safety, we could make cars smaller and slower and we could shield pedestrians from them with infrastructure. You'd save far more lives by lowering the speed limit than raising the DMV licensing standards.
People aren't consistently competent or responsible. So you either install some kind of panopticon for drivers (the private insurance model) and try to price people you suspect are high risk out of your personal risk pool. Or you get people out of cars entirely, knowing anyone can have a day that makes them highly prone to driving mistakes.
This is what they’re doing. New cars will use cameras and sensors to determine impairment and then refuse to start.
You’re being pedantic. We call them 3000lb bullets to describe what they are when not controlled well, not because of their speed. As a driver, it’s good to think of your vehicle in those terms too.
As for monitoring, check out Loyal Moses. His vid on what tech Ford just patented.
you’re right, but the solution is not to give everyone the inalienable right to drive, it’s to redesign the city such that people who can’t drive can still live in it fully (i.e. build public transit and walkable/cyclable path of ways)
It's not a question of "solution" writ large. It's a recognition of existing infrastructure and the consequences of denying a subset of the population its use.
Sure. Love that idea.
But, in the meantime, if you've dropped 40 miles of concrete through my neighborhood, such that I need a vehicle to get across it...
"We should build more pedestrian friendly infrastructure" is very different than "ban a subset of bad drivers and let them pound sand about it"
Yesterday on the way home I thought I was going to be affluenza’d by some crazy kid in a green glittery wrapped Beamer. They were so close to my bumper and making so many jerking, erratic movements that I was too worried to merge lest they did at the same time and sent us all rolling. Traffic was dense enough that I couldn’t speed up and really couldn’t safely merge initially. They ended up driving down the middle of the two lane highway and nearly ran a few people into the ditch. At least my demise would have been on the dash cam I guess.
In a civilised country, driving would be reserved for those capable of doing so safely and efficiently (the qualifications would be on a par with certifications for operating similarly powerful industrial machinery, and would not be graded on a curve to ensure a car-dependent society can function), but infrastructure would be designed so that one could live a full life without driving.
In the immortal words of George Carlin: "Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?"
You may like : « Traffic management » with Michael Douglas (Falling Down,1990)
The golf course scene was good too.
I’m gonna be real with yall, the only person that should ever have even allowed to drive is Dale fucking Earnhardt, I include myself in that but the only time I hate humanity more as a whole than on the road is in a busy Costco
The guy known for aggressive driving and died in a crash is who you think should be allowed to drive? Not sure I follow that one.
Not so fun fact: a friend of mine was trying to get me into watching racing with him. To this day that's the only NASCAR race I've seen and caught it live when I was a kid.
Ain’t 3’s fault no one else was qualified to do it right! Raise hell praise Dale!
everyone should have the right to fail a driving test...
There are no rights in traffic, only obligations.
two wrongs don't make a right.. but three lefts do
Eaaasy, buddy. No matter what did you do, next to normal consequences your driving license goes buh-buy for a year. Hit someone's car? Fine + License buhbye for a year. Hit a lamp post? Same. Hit a kid? Jail for manslaughter or whatever it's called...plus licence buhbuye for a year. If they also take your license, then that also qualifies.
Speeding ticket? Guess what. Fine plus license buhbye.
No buy backs, no slippin, fuck your status. Can't drive? Ride public. Can't afford to be so poor? Pay someone to drive you. If they hit something tho, you better start walkin'. xD
If you succumb to road rage, then YOU are in the half that shouldn't be allowed to drive.
You can recognize people around you are driving like an idiot and probably shouldn't have a license without succumbing to road rage.
If you don't pay attention to other drivers, then you won't get road rage, but since you're not paying attention, you shouldn't be driving.
But once you start paying attention to other drivers, you're bound to notice what bad drivers they are, at which point, you will likely feel road rage, and you shouldn't be driving.
To get past that, you need to change the way you drive to compensate for the terrible driving around you. This way, at least the bad drivers won't interact with you too much. The easiest ways to identify the worst drivers are that they follow close, brake hard, and change lanes frequently.
You can minimize their interaction with you by driving better. And the number one thing you can do is to significantly increase your follow distance. Note that you're not driving slower. You're just following further behind. Don't get upset when people get in front of you. That's actually part of the point. People drive badly when they can't get into the lane they need to get into.
If you can change this one thing and follow further behind, you're well on the way to becoming a person who should be allowed to drive.
Following distance is the most common way I see people drive badly. On major roads I'd say 90% or more are driving too close. My car has automatic cruise control which makes keeping a safe distance require zero effort, though I have no idea how close it follows if you decrease the distance setting - I always have it 1 off max.
I feel like I should have paid attention to this comment. Or maybe not...
road rage is a pathway to many abilities some consider to be… unnatural
Takes the bus, next stop : Narkina 5
Driving isn't a right, it's a privilege
everyone should have equal rights but me. i deserve special rights (a personal hole in the ground to crawl into for crying)
Per the Ontario driver's handbook: Driving is a privilege, not a right.
Ah yes, the right to drive a car.
Cars are weapons; the second amendment makes my rights very clear.
This but chuds with voting.
my metronome take is: everyone should have a livable wage / bigots deserve to be houseless
Eliminating homelessness goes a long way towards curbing bigotry. It's far easier to exploit and abuse folks with no permanent place to live. And our propaganda machine loves to pin problems produced by structural failures on the victims.
Once you house the homeless, a lot of the low hanging fruit of fascist agitation fades away. And a significant pool of young, uneducated, easily exploitable people are no longer in easy reach to radicalize.
I agree with the right side
✨fuck cars✨
Who decides who can drive? The cops and the prosecutors and the city governments and County officials? Fuck that.
I’m fine with the DMV deciding who can drive.
The DMV is working off the information of the police. You are fine with the police telling you what is. Seemingly unaware that the police lie as they speak.
If the tester at the DMV thinks it’s dangerous for you to drive, it probably is.
My driving test was pulling out of a parking spot, driving once around the lot, then pulling back into the same spot.
Now imagine how badly you’d have to do it for them to fail you…
One is not incompatible with the other.
We can have equal rights, even as many rights as possible (as equal rights could include no one having any rights) and not be allowed to harm or endanger each other, or by extension the environment.
This alone takes care of practically everyone who shouldn't be allowed to drive, without giving them any less rights.
More importantly, though, the fact that you're experiencing road rage and thus driving while impaired by it means that you shouldn't be allowed to drive, because you're evidently a threat to everyone else on or about the road.