Less new drivers a year, selection of the best, many hours of practice, no easy passing, hell, this sounds like a dream!
They have half the rate of traffic accident as US or my country (Poland), so here's one obvious gain. I'm curious about the public and private transport infrastructure there - there seems to be an economic incentive to develop it.
I see the obvious injustices described in the article, but overall, this time it seems to have a positive effect. What the world needs is definitely not easier ways for people to get driving licenses.
> I'm curious about the public and private transport infrastructure
If you live near Paris(or a big city), you dont need a car.
If you live anywhere else you absolutely need a car! (or a motorbike, scooter ... ).
The infrastructure is good,but the train is extremly expensive today,(wasnt the case 10 years ago) and railways are crumbling.
Up unti recently you couldnt cross regions by bus in France,it was forbidden to preserve the train monopoly.Today people use ridesharing a lot,because taking the train is such a ripoff.
If you take your tickets in advance train is cheaper. Also it always seems so unnecessary to take the plane for such short distances (take the transport to the airport, check-in, walk to gate, wait, embark, wait, take-off, wait, landing, wait, find luggage, wait, take transport, you have arrived!)
I know right,it has become ridiculous. I'm happy the french people are "revolting" against it and are trying ridesharing. SNCF is just organized racket.
> If you live anywhere else you absolutely need a car!
Well, at least in Nantes, Lille, Lyon or Toulouse, you can live just fine without a car (and I have done so for years). I suppose it's the same in most cities with decent public transport. It makes holidays in the countryside complicated, though.
> Artificially making things hard for people is never positive.
As opposed to what? Letting free market and anarchy solve everything?
We already have tons of rules and mechanisms preventing people for killing themselves and others in numerous of idiotic ways. Do you advocate dropping them because they inconvenience people who really believe it's their privilege to dump toxic waste into river or put cancerogenic stuff into food because it's cheaper this way?
Cars are weapons. The only reason people don't respect it as such is a cultural mishap in a way cars were introduced into society.
I'm not talking about ideal world of counterfactuals and what-could-bes. I'm talking about the world we live in, where cars kills millions of people a year, while axes don't. So in real world, relaxing those "unfair" rules will cause death of many people. I'm all in favor of "clean, well defined and fair rules" - as long as they go in the direction of reducing traffic-related deaths, not the other way.
I believe the sentence you quoted actually has a lot of semantic meaning. Let's go counterfactual and imagine a world in which humanity stuck to trains and mass transit. If you went and told people of that world you want to give a car to everyone, they'd say you're nuts - general population can't be trusted with such a dangerous machine! But we don't live in this world, because cars were introduced gradually and we didn't notice the problems of "democratized transportation" until it was too late.
People have proven time and again that they are responsible enough to use axes. They have also proven time and again that they are not responsible enough to use cars.
> So in real world, relaxing those "unfair" rules will cause death of many people. I'm all in favor of "clean, well defined and fair rules" - as long as
"As long as" ? Really?
No, you don't get to limit yourself this way.
Either you are in favor of fair rules or you are not.
Sounds like you couldn't care less about fairness, you just want less driving. Your goal "less deaths" is laudable, your method "make people miserable" is not. Not only is it unfair, it's also infective.
And thus you have proven my claim against you: You do not care how much misery you cause, in your quest for your personal version of utopia.
> So in real world, relaxing those "unfair" rules will cause death of many people.
No, actually it doesn't. Compare death rate of France vs US. Basically identical. Yet one has stupid rules (only the rich can drive) one does not.
> they'd say you're nuts - general population can't be trusted with such a dangerous machine!
No, I would not say that at all. Can you name any useful tools are are restricted to professionals only in the US? The only restrictions are in commerce, you can't sell your services. But I can't think of a single one that is restricted for personal use. Not even explosives.
Some examples: Nail gun (explosive or air powered). Bench press. Milling lathe. Heavy machinery. Digging equipment. Chain saw. Fire. Knives. Slicing mandolin.
> People have proven time and again that they are responsible enough to use axes.
You suffer from recentisim. Back when axes were used routinely by everyone there were tons of deaths and injuries.
Every single tool ever can, and has, caused death and injury. Some tools are used by a lot of people, some by only a few.
You seem to want the world to be like a nursery - no one can use anything dangerous ever. There is nothing special about cars in this, they are just the thing you happened to notice.
> No, you don't get to limit yourself this way. Either you are in favor of fair rules or you are not.
I disagree. Let me rephrase my sentence. I'm in favor of clean, well defined and fair rules as long as they make sense and actually benefit the society. Rules can be well-defined and fair, and still be bad. For instance, let's look at the post 9/11 fluid limits in air travel. The rule is clear, well-defined (you can have max 100ml of fluid per container) and fair (you don't get to bring a 1L bottle on the same plane as everyone else who can't, just because you're rich) and still completely idiotic and harmful [0].
> You do not care how much misery you cause, in your quest for your personal version of utopia.
I do. I just happen to believe that millions of people dying (many of them due to no fault of their own) and resources being wasted on a terribly suboptimal way of transportation (especially in big cities) is more misery than those millions of people not dying and resources not being wasted.
> No, actually it doesn't. Compare death rate of France vs US. Basically identical. Yet one has stupid rules (only the rich can drive) one does not.
I read that as drivers in France are as bad as drivers in US, but because France has less of them, the rate of deaths per 100k people is less than half of the US.
> Some examples: Nail gun (explosive or air powered). Bench press. Milling lathe. Heavy machinery. Digging equipment. Chain saw. Fire. Knives. Slicing mandolin.
Well those are all tools that you use very rarely, in isolated environment and it is hard for them to hurt anyone else than their operator. Even so, people who use those tools very often (i.e. in a factory) have special security measures and training (or else their workshop gets shut down by EHS department).
Imagine if every other person were to use a nail gun for hours a day while working next to hundreds others. You couldn't possibly say that this wouldn't get regulated quickly, and if people were dying in accidents on a mass scale, the security wouldn't be improving until people would stop dying.
You say fire, explosives - but as far as I can tell, if you make anything more explosive than baking soda and water in a city, you'll quickly get arrested.
Basically, people are free to hurt themselves however they like, as long as they don't pose danger to others. That's the difference between an axe accident and a car accident.
> Every single tool ever can, and has, caused death and injury. Some tools are used by a lot of people, some by only a few.
Yes. And we care more about those that cause more injury than those that cause less injury.
> You seem to want the world to be like a nursery - no one can use anything dangerous ever. There is nothing special about cars in this, they are just the thing you happened to notice.
No, I just don't want to become a vegetable thanks to a random idiot who thinks speed limits are arbitrary numbers put in place to earn moeny for the police. And I don't like when people unnecessarily die (again, often due to no fault of their own) when they could not. I also pick on cars every now and then because drivers are making lives worse for us, people who live in big cities, and hell, we have some rights too.
[0] - annoys people, along with the rest of security theatre is responsible for deaths of many of those, who decided to travel by cars, and if the rule is to prevent someone from bringing significant amounts of liquid explosives, then why all bottles get thrown to the same container next to a line of 200 people?
They have half the rate of traffic accident as US or my country (Poland), so here's one obvious gain. I'm curious about the public and private transport infrastructure there - there seems to be an economic incentive to develop it.
I see the obvious injustices described in the article, but overall, this time it seems to have a positive effect. What the world needs is definitely not easier ways for people to get driving licenses.