Maybe the root cause is the laughably easy barrier of entry to have a license to drive a death missile?
It's a multi faceted issue of course, but to me, getting better educated drivers on the road is by far the easiest problem to solve around driving.
I would say almost everyone knows not to text and drive, or run red lights or to speed. Yet these are all frequent occurrences. Even proposals to add speed or red light cameras (with strict rules to prevent municipal abuse) face heavy opposition. I don’t think education alone will fix traffic safety.
People don't know the basics of changing lanes, passing slower vehicles, u-turns, planning for their exits, etc etc etc. People text and drive due to the most basic misunderstanding of how dangerous driving is and how much damage they can cause to others.
Taking devil’s advocate here, but people claim that automated enforcement has equity concerns, privacy concerns and immigration concerns. Again, these aren’t my arguments, but:
There’s concern that automated enforcement is a regressive punishment that unduly burdens low-income motorists. There’s a belief that these cameras will be concentrated in low-income or minority neighborhoods.
The privacy concerns are fairly obvious, people are concerned the government is building a database of vehicle locations.
And the immigration concerns are that information could be fed back to ICE to detain undocumented immigrants.
However if you read the enabling legislation, a lot of these concerns are addressed through data retention, data sharing and safety standards (i.e. tickets can only be issued at 9 MPH over the limit and there must be a warning sign.)
I also think an unspoken part of the opposition is some people feel they can talk a cop out of writing a ticket, but they can’t argue with a machine.
>> Per miles driven the US has an average number of traffic deaths.
> Maybe the root cause is the laughably easy barrier of entry to have a license to drive a death missile?
You're saying we should make driver's licenses punitively difficult to get in order to shift American population structure in the direction of dense settlements?
The reason America isn't densely settled is much simpler than that; there aren't very many people in America.
I'll copy paste what i said in another comment:People don't know the basics of changing lanes, passing slower vehicles, u-turns, planning for their exits, etc etc etc.
The DMV test is a joke. The 15 minute test in a quiet neighborhood does not prepare you to be a proper participant on the road.
> You're saying we should make driver's licenses punitively difficult to get in order to shift American population structure in the direction of dense settlements?
I don't think there's anything punitive about proportionately strict regulation for something that kills so many people.
It kills a lot of people. Whether the mechanism for it killing a lot of people is a large number of miles driven rather than a high rate of deaths per mile is neither here nor there.
It does not kill a large number of people in relative terms. In absolute terms, it kills an extremely tiny number of people; the death rate from traffic accidents in the US in 2018 was 0.01%.
It's one of the biggest killers of young people (e.g. looks like it's at least 25% of deaths of people aged 20-24?), so in terms of years of life lost it has a big impact.
