Comment by SOLAR_FIELDS
3 days ago
All the fines in the world won’t save you from getting mowed down by a distracted driver on their phone. Drinking and driving has heavy fine deterrents, yet people still do it anyway. You know what stops a drunk or distracted driver from killing someone? A cement barrier
That's the wrong way to look at it. People still drink and drive because the deterrents aren't heavy. It's a bit tautological but if they were heavy enough then by definition they would be deterrents, but they aren't, so they aren't.
The correct solution to this kind of problems and others is to fix the obviously broken fine system. The first fine for anything should sting and it should make anyone who gets it think twice about doing the thing that they did to get the fine. subsequent reoffenses should make it uneconomical for anyone to reoffend.
Fine should be scaled to your income and have an escalating multiplier for reoffense within the same category of offense with a cool down period of a few years if they don't break the law.
add to that, a class of drivers that believe two wheel vehicles have no place on public thoroughfares, openly hostile to non cars.
And police that is sympathetic to those drivers.
> a distracted driver on their phone
Waymos don’t get distracted. Grade separation, ticketing and increasingly favoring AVs in cities is a simpler solution than erecting physical barriers, which have the downside of making cities less walkable.
That would be relevant if we had mass adoption of autonomous vehicles. Unfortunately last I checked actual autonomy was still stuck in the perpetual R&D phase.
> last I checked actual autonomy was still stuck in the perpetual R&D phase
I know plenty of people in Phoenix for whom it’s their main mode of transport. When I’m there or in San Francisco, it’s certainly mine. (And now, increasingly, in Miami, too.)
Waymo is here and it’s real and it’s so much better than Uber or taxis.
3 replies →
Grade separation IS building physical barriers lmao what are you even saying