I realize how integral cars are to most Americans, unless you’re living in a city with great mass transit like NYC. But traffic deaths, accidents, and injuries are a huge cost to the economy and families who lose loved ones. Anyone who has been on the road, or even walked near a road, for more than a few minutes has probably seen someone do something utterly moronic while behind the wheel.
Would there be merit for states to do “car control” in much the same way some are pursuing gun control? Modern gun control efforts are less about taking away whole classes of guns than making sure that only qualified people can have access to them, as in non-felons and people who are mentally stable. We don’t have exactly the same problem with drivers, but it is pretty easy to tell who the menaces are, and who doesn’t know what they are doing.
Driving tests are easy. Because they are easy, DL issuance is nearly universal. So universal that when you go anywhere and they ask for ID, they don’t say “ID” most of the time, they ask for your DL. It’s just assumed that every adult has one and if you don’t, something is off. To me, that’s the first problem. Driving a car safely is not something everyone has the ability or patience to do.
So would these solutions make sense?
Make driving testing harder so that we weed out the bottom 10% or so of drivers.
Make it easier to lose your license for serious violations. Do not allow people to just go to driving classes which tell drivers what they already know but don’t pay any attention to. Most violations do not seem to be from ignorance, but from willfulness. Put the points on their license and when they get enough, take it away
Recklessness that causes injury to others should result in automatic suspension. Recklessnes that takes a life should mean permanent revocation of driving privileges. For life.
Terrible idea, and terrible comparison to gun control.
If you disallow someone from having a car, you severely limit their employment choices. And you limit the experiences their children can have. Neither of which is affected by gun ownership.
If you seriously want to propose this, the first thing you’d have to do is make Public Transportation just about as good as being able to drive whether you wanted to go.
Should have done it decades ago before our entire civilization was designed around access to cars. Now it would take so long and be so expensive to fix that, we’re better off waiting for self-driving cars and integrating that concept into licensing.
Hah! If car control were like gun control any road test, waiting more than 15 minutes for your license, and the state looking to see if you were wanted for driving offenses elsewhere would be considered infringements on your liberty.
Beyond that, a bad idea. It is not at all clear that obnoxious drivers would be obnoxious on their road tests. Plus, you’d have to cover the economic damage from not letting 10% of the population get to work easily. Or at all. I might be able to get to work without a car, but it would take twice as long and I’d not have the freedom to stay late when work needs to get done. What’s the cost of that?
Anyhow, in 15 years the problem goes away when cars drive themselves. It would take that long to get this idea implemented.
I agree with John, let’s leave the gun control out of this, it’s an absurd comparison that is just going to lead to hijacks.
The title is misleading. There is no public interest in “reducing the number of drivers”, let alone the number of “qualified drivers”. The public interest is in getting unqualified, incompetent, and irresponsible drivers off the road.
Stricter driver testing is NOT the way to do it. Testing in general, and especially something like a driver’s test, tends to be inaccurate and often weights all the wrong things. The system might fail a driver because he made a small mistake parallel parking, but it will pass some dude who did all the right things in his daddy’s Buick and then hits the road in his souped-up jalopy with the tin-can muffler as the world’s most aggressive, dangerous, irresponsible asshole.
The key is enforcement on the road. Sadly, that tends to get bungled, too. Lots of tendency to set up easy-pickings speed traps on stretches of road where the posted speed limit is way lower than the “natural” speed limit, and moderate speeding isn’t usually even a particular danger compared to most other infractions. If only we could train and incentivize cops to go after the real dangers on the road – the swerving lane-hoppers, the yellow- and red-light runners, the careless and drunk drivers. But that stuff is hard, and there’s so much low-hanging fruit for them to munch on. So the cops are happy, city’s happy, and roads are as dangerous as ever.
One would think it would be both. There’s the use case you’re worried about - the capable driver who is unwilling to drive safely - but there’s also the use case of drivers who are past their prime and no longer possess the vision or reaction time to drive safely. One might reasonably want those drivers off the roads before they cause accidents.
Agreed, but that doesn’t argue for stricter driver testing – which I don’t think would be helpful – but just for a basic test of competence as it exists today in most places, which I agree with. And I have no problem with periodic basic health and vision checks for the elderly beyond a certain age as a condition of license. The crux of my argument is that the major determinant of the right to stay on the road should be a person’s driving record, and for that to be meaningful, it should be meaningfully enforced – meaning that police should be going after dangerous drivers instead of meeting their ticket quotas by having Sunday afternoon picnics gathered around a radar trap on a long straight stretch of country road with a posted limit of 15 mph.
And my point is that the reason that elderly or just plain poor drivers are able to keep their licenses is because the bar that the test sets is too low. I’m not sure what the right way to test is, exactly, but some sort of simulated driving experience with actual (simulated) emergencies testing reaction time seems reasonable.
But, for the reasons Chief Pedant points out, we’re unlikely to see such a thing, at least until automated cars become widely available.
Enforcement is part of the problem. It seems to me that traffic enforcement is more about revenue than public safety. But still, we should at least get repeat reckless offenders off the road. I think that states currently do a really bad job of it. And driving school does nothing. Put the points on the license.
Taking away the license is no guarantee you’re keeping someone off the road. You read about DUI drivers who lost their licenses getting into crashes all the time. I hit a guy with no license or insurance as he pulled out of a driveway in front of me without looking. The cop chewed him out but good, but he was still driving.
So enforcement is going to be 90% of the job, and maybe fining these clowns enough so that bad driving is really painful. But it isn’t working with texting today.
Well, I think the crux of the problem is that people feel like they need to drive to have anything approximating the life they want to have, so they’ll drive whether it’s legal or not. I wish we had a society where driving was optional rather than mandatory (and we do, though only inside dense parts of cities), but that ship sailed long ago.
If more people were denied licenses to the point where driving was actually a privilege rather than a nearly universal thing, I think you’d find voter support for better mass transit to go way up.
And if people drive without licenses, treat it as you would someone driving a taxi without a license.
How about testing more often. I took my driver’s test at 16, and the BMV has not required me to take a test or review the laws since (I drove for a utility for a few years a while back, so I did take a fairly extensive driving course for them, but BMV has not required anything). I know many people my age or older who will actually argue about traffic laws, because it’s been so long since they needed to know them for the test.
Having colored license plates based on the grades and driving abilities of the primary driver would be nice too. That way, I know that someone is just a really bad driver, and I should avoid them, rather than a jerk who knows better, and is just driving like an asshole( though I should avoid them too.)
Too much of a chicken-and-egg problem. With current technology and settlement patterns, you’ll never be able to deny enough people licenses, politically speaking.
The self driving cars might be what bails us out. Require everyone to have a self driving car once they are proven safer than human drivers, unless they can pass a hard test and maintain a near perfect driving record.
I can see this being implemented in cities and high traffic congested areas first. Driverless cars should handle traffic better than humans if they are networked and communicate. They can all control their acceleration and speed so that more cars can flow through an area in a given amount of time, rather than allowing the “every driver for themselves” situation, which requires traffic control and regulation.
Rural and lower density suburbs can keep their manually controlled cars for a bit longer, but it seems they wouldn’t want to for long.
[QUOTE=wolfpup;18441216There is no public interest in “reducing the number of drivers”, let alone the number of “qualified drivers”. The public interest is in getting unqualified, incompetent, and irresponsible drivers off the road.[/QUOTE]
I’ll play devil’s advocate (because I don’t believe any of this), but there could be a compelling public interest in reducing drivers. It’s expensive to use public coffers to expand our infrastructure to allow a growing number of cars, therefore eliminating a portion of the current driving population would prevent the requirement for these expensive expenditures.
There are people who propose we should all live an urban existence, and if you subscribe to these beliefs then the public interest of reducing the number of drivers will cause a number of people to give up their suburban and exurban ways, and move to the city where they can survive without a car.
There’s public interest in reducing automotive emissions (including indirect emissions from power plants) to prevent our atmosphere from becoming Venus-like, and limiting the number of drivers can contribute toward this goal.
Of course, “public interest” largely depends on who’s running the show on the behalf of us proles.
Come to think of it, there is a practical first step - banning cars from city centers. Transit already exists, high density reduces the average trip length, and reclaiming parking places would be great. You could allow buses, of course, and maybe clean cabs and Uber cars, but that is about it. You’d also clean up the air a lot, and make it easier for delivery vehicles to move around, reducing business costs.
Doesn’t quite eliminate drivers (except for those who live in the city) but it would help reduce the number of trips.
What if there was a much finer set of graduations in driver’s licensing? E.g. we could have a minimal driver’s license that almost anyone with a reasonably functioning brain and basic driving skills could get but that limited one to slow subcompacts that are jam-packed with safety bumpers and then establish a series of license upgrades that are progressively harder to get. E.g. most people could probably make it to Level 2 and qualify to drive most ordinary family cars, many could reach Level 3 and qualify to drive sportier performance-oriented cars, and a smaller, highly skilled, and very well behaved minority could get the Level 4 and 5 licenses that allow them to drive sports cars and whatnot. Level 6 and 7 licenses could represent the elite of the elite in skill and behavior and be used as screening criteria for, say, hiring taxi drivers or chauffeurs for the rich.
For example, you could have a law providing that in order to keep a Level 4 License, you can’t have more than one traffic ticket a year. If you get two in a year, you drop down to at most a Level 3 until you go a year with only one additional ticket. If this is your first Level 4 to Level 3 drop in the past ten years, you can get your Level 4 license back by completing rigorous skill exams and a thesis at the College of Traffic Science as long as you don’t get a third traffic ticket that year.
