Is it too much to ask for a car that doesn't spy on me, is reasonably comfortable, is efficient, and maybe has a few extra "smart" features to help me not run into other people? I guess my bike will do for now.
... you think they don't? You need to read the fine print again. It's not proven where it's going, but they absolutely have the right to sell your genetic information and already do.
This is exactly what was predicted as the result of corporate surveillance and targeted ads. They are part of schemes to extract more revenue from you. Another example is the rising premium for health insurance. But people apparently had "nothing to hide"!
The problem is that in the past you would have your rates increased because you get into accidents because of bad drivers like this or the kind of car you drive being more popular with bad drivers. Driving slower will cause you to get into more accidents. Now they can do a root cause analysis and find the true reason for accidents. Unfortunately if you can afford higher rates then this doesn't help anyone. States should have stepped in a long time ago to make getting a license more difficult and making testing more frequent.
100% against everything being monitored and data sold like it is….. but part of me wishes there was a way to work towards getting bad drivers off of the roads.
This is not the way to do that as the insurance companies only have one goal and that is to raise profits.
But when you stand on any random street corner and 30-60 % of every driver driving by is looking down at their cell phone, it is very scary.
People don’t use turn signals, speed through residential neighborhoods, change lanes in the middle of intersections, it’s insane. We need to make our world less car reliant, it’s unacceptable.
You get rid of cars and you stop designing society to accommodate the one edge case where someone lives 100miles away from a city that they have to commute by car to everyday for some reason.
That's not why most people drive cars. I've lived in cities with public transport all my life. But when I got my driving license, my life quality increased enormously. It's like night and day. Not only can I drive where I want when I want, I can avoid other commuters that are very often loud or annoying. I don't have to stand at bus stops or train stations and seeing them being delayed or canceled either.
I agree that some people drive poorly though. But the solution is to train them better, not to get rid of cars. You can hardly have an adult life with family without a car.
That sounds like a mix of public transportation sucking and people needing to travel too far to me
Driving sucks... But compared to not having a reliable way to get around? It's total freedom
But better yet is being able to have a nice walk where you need to go, and frequent/plentiful options to go further. You just have to mix everything up and cut down on the parking lots. Low cost housing with full homes tucked here and there, smaller grocery and hardware stores every few blocks, gyms and parks a few blocks away - and all centered around a main street with offices and lower cost housing a few blocks away, so the main street can have a bus running by every 5 minutes
My time working in Paris for a bit really blew my mind - only one guy at my office wasn't walking distance to work. I passed several grocery stores and bakeries on my 20 minute walk back if I wanted to grab something, there was a big park a couple blocks up if I wanted a scenic walk back.
And if I was feeling lazy, you could just start walking until you saw a bus coming up behind you - there was a bus stop like every quarter mile just going up and down that main street
Almost as good as all that is the fact that if you did have to drive, there was so much less traffic. You could park on side streets, but those spots were limited and needed specific permits. They had parking garages at the edge of the suburb area near the highway entrance and near the metro station, so while you could drive up to wherever to load/unload, it discouraged it and kept the cars mostly on the bigger roads in between areas.
Granted, it's only amazing when the pieces all fit together like that - a lot of the designed communities in the US are nowhere close to as good because they don't commit far with. I later moved to a designed community in the States which had most of the same aspects, but I never walked to the grocery store. It was across the street from the town center and a 10 minute walk, but it involved crossing 2 much higher speed/busy roads and walking across a huge parking lot. It was just a little island in a world still built for cars
Yeah it sounds extreamly unusual that people in Paris live so close to their home. But I think the French culture is about enjoying life as much as possible. They may choose a job nearby to avoid having to deal with shitty transports every day.
Reliable public transport with a robust interstate passenger railway system coupled with a well designed intracity bus system, along with well maintained biking paths everywhere else would go a long way to getting bad drivers off the road.
We can't get bad drivers off the road when basic everyday living requires driving. There are cost effective alternatives in use across the world. America just has to learn to accept good ideas that others have pioneered.
Obligatory US, I think the better way of filtering bad drivers is more stringent and frequent testing through the DMV (or your state's equivalent). Look at Germany, they don't mess around when it comes to licensing. I'm mid 30s, and haven't had to retest or do any form of continuing driver's education or retesting since I was 16.
It's a little trickier here in the US due to our cities being built for cars, and being without one can be a huge detriment, especially with most public transit being a shitshow. But I agree, we definitely need some mechanisms to weed out bad drivers.
You will never be able to take away someone's license for bad driving if doing so basically makes them unemployable and incapable of taking care of themselves. We need cheap, practical alternatives to cars in order to reduce the impact of bad drivers.
