this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2025
309 points (93.8% liked)
Fuck Cars
15761 readers
296 users here now
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
Rules
1. Be Civil
You may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.
2. No hate speech
Don't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.
3. Don't harass people
Don't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.
4. Stay on topic
This community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.
5. No reposts
Do not repost content that has already been posted in this community.
Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.
Posting Guidelines
In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:
- [meta] for discussions/suggestions about this community itself
- [article] for news articles
- [blog] for any blog-style content
- [video] for video resources
- [academic] for academic studies and sources
- [discussion] for text post questions, rants, and/or discussions
- [meme] for memes
- [image] for any non-meme images
- [misc] for anything that doesn’t fall cleanly into any of the other categories
Recommended communities:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Not defending cars at all but plane accidents usually have higher casualties. The total number is still way higher with cars but planes are more shocking because they have way stricter regulations.
so...
maybe cars also need stricter regulations?
They do. Especially in the US where cars that are barely held together are allowed on the roads and getting a driver licence is easy as cake.
I would happily resubmit to the driver exam every five years if that were the norm. It would remove or reform sooo many dangerous drivers. I think regular retesting is also superior to only retesting elderly drivers, because it's a level mechanism for everyone that avoids ageism. Lots of younger and middle age drivers are menaces, too. It's less about prohibiting them from vehicle use, more about making sure they're actually ready for that use.
I'd be up for a 10 year resubmit and then after you are older than 70 it keeps decreasing. No issue retaking it as long as it's just like a theory and maybe an hour or 2 on the road with a driving instructor and it's not as expensive as doing it the first time. (20+ mandatory instructor hours don't come cheap).
Considering how many people don't know the basics in regards to driving law (e.g. under what circumstances you are allowed to use the horn, driving only so fast that you can stop before any danger that you can presently not see, parking rules, ...), I'd say 5 years is even too long of an interval, not too short of one.
The issue with it being less than 5 year IMO is that you would not have the capacity to test so many people so often.
Tbh, I don't really see that as an issue.
There's four potential parts to a license renewal:
In any civilized country, people have a yearly medical check (for health purposes) regardless, so you could just add the driver's license check to that.
Theory tests can be done on a PC, so you don't need a lot of humans to supervise. One should be enough for dozens of parallel tests just to make sure nobody is cheating.
The photo and printing part hardly takes any personell and can be outsourced super easily.
Leaves the actual driving test. In most countries the training required to become a driving examiner is really easy, often just a 1-3 month course. So it should be rather trivial to increase the capacity there. In my country there aren't even any full-time employees doing driving exams, they are all part-time, because the amount of required employees for that job is so low.
Agree to the first arguments but the last one not so much. We have fuckall capacity here and you can wait up to 3 months to even get a free date to take your driving test because there is so few people doing the grading.
But still, that's a really easy thing to fix. People pay for their own exams, so if there's more demand, more people will get into this super easy to train job.
The safety testing is a problem because they often test vehicles solely against other vehicles in their class. Meaning a 5 star safety rating on a small car is only 5 stars against another small car. Against the suburban down the street it'd be illegal to produce them for the safety violations.
There's a perceptional issue at work. Individual people aren't in control of an airplane. They're stuck in a metal tube going 500+ mph at 30k ft. They don't have any agency over what happens. The industry combats this by having really, really tight regulations (well, they do until someone in the C-suite tries to fuck with it).
With a car, you're in control. There's a heavier emphasis on "personal responsibility". When the truck with a 5' hood hits a kid crossing the street, it's the kid's fault for not looking both ways. We have a bunch of stuff that tries to make things safer (mostly for the occupants), and a lot of it has made cars heavier, more expensive, and sometimes more dangerous for people outside the car.
This deserves a more in-depth writeup on the evolution of car safety equipment than I'm willing to do right now, but the conclusion should be that you can't make cars work as a primary mass transit method. We're over a century into cars being mass transit, and we haven't really solved it, because we can't.
Yeah, this is definitely not a good comparison, I agree. One argument maybe is that because planes are more regulated it works out at lower accident rate and that's what we should bring to the car world. But there are also much much more cars than planes around.
And what metric you check: accidents per km or accidents per trip. Per trip airplanes are much higher, per km cars are higher.
I think it's shocking how little regulations cars have