[ds_opseeker]

> Driving a car uninsured should have some extremely stiff penalties.

I want to agree with you, but wonder if you have ever been poor? When you need the car to get to work so you can feed your kids, but you can't afford all of

- feed kids - rent - insurance

because you got hit by a surprise medical bill (kid got sick, maybe?)

I'm strongly in favor of your end goal (less car-dependent life), I'm just cautious about using punishment as a way to get there.

Unless we made the fine proportional to income?

[8note]

Rather than subsidize the poor person being poor via insurance, we can subsidize them by say, building public housing nearby their place of work, or direct payments.

[vel0city]

Let's expand that. Let's name your hypothetical person, Bob. He's living on the edge financially, and decides to go without insurance.

Let's bring in another person, Alice. Alice is also not in great financial shape. But Alice is able to pay for insurance and follows all the rules. Alice has a small amount of savings, go Alice!

One day, Bob hits Alice. It causes medical issues for Alice. Alice might have insurance, but it's potentially still expensive for Alice. Because of her injuries she can't work for a few weeks. She works hourly, so now loses wages. Luckily with FMLA she won't necessarily lose her job, but she needed every paycheck. But it doesn't really matter, because her car is now gone. She can't drive to work anymore. She can't drive to groceries. She can't afford a car, as a huge chunk her savings went to cover those medical bills and missed paychecks. She's pretty SOL huh.

Sounds like we need to let Bob off the hook for inflicting all this on Alice. After all, he needed to drive without insurance.

No. We should just make it possible so Bob didn't need to drive in the first place instead of excusing his choice to still drive when he couldn't really afford it. We should structure the incentives so Bob doesn't want to drive if he can't afford it.

People driving without insurance ruin lives like Alice's all the time.

[Draiken]

That scenario is completely missing the point. Bob has to drive because of the lack of good public transportation and the fact that he can't afford a house near his work. Not to mention if he can't afford a car with insurance it's because his job simply doesn't pay enough.

It's much more likely that external factors put him in that situation, rather than himself. Yet you propose we should punish him personally and paint only Alice as a victim. That's naive. Both are victims.

These are systemic problems and trying to solve them with individual punishments is only going to hurt individuals while not fixing the underlying issues that really matter.

[vel0city]

I'm fully aware Bob is the victim. That's why I'm saying the solution is to make it so Bob didn't get in a car. He is a victim of car dependency. Subsidizing insurance to make sure Bob could always afford it isn't solving that. Ensuring he can always afford insurance just furthers his victimhood.

[Draiken]

I see your point now. Yeah, I agree.

But the only question that really matters in the end is: is that profitable?

If we really cared about safety many people would not be allowed to drive in the first place. Tests would be much more strict and rightly so. But it's way more profitable to let those people spend money on cars (and eventually kill people) than it is to provide good public transportation.

Especially with the auto industry, they have basically won the lobbying game. Most people can't even imagine a world where cars aren't in the center of it, so we keep moving the goalpost...