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Comment by slow_typist | Hacker News Reader

That is a utilitarian argument, but did you really think it through?

If you drive a car, you increase the risk of cyclists and pedestrians to get hurt or killed. Hurting or killing pedestrians also harms the society in several ways. Tax the car sales appropriately to the risk imposed on individuals and the society and you have enough money for bollards.

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It depends on cost. If the tax required to place bollards everywhere possible amounted to 1M$ per car, would that be a reasonable tax?

If the harm to society is 1M$ per car, should we be driving them at all?

No, we shouldn't. But the cost of installing bollards and the "harm to society" are two distinct costs. There are about 2.37 pedestrian deaths per billion vehicle miles traveled in America. Even if we assign a generous cost of 5M$ per life lost, that only amounts to a 0.01$ per mile driven, which is probably not enough to cover the cost of installing bollards all over the place.

How about 10 bollards per sold car, you can probably get away with $ 1k per bollard (including installation), most cars cost a multiple of 10k. Let‘s see how far that gets you. You can of course modify the bollard tax by car weight or by price.

So $10K extra per car? Assuming we're talking the US here where the average price of a new car is under $50K, that's more than a 20% bollard tax.

The average price is really that low? Do you have any pointers/data?

This Fortune article[0] lists an average as of January of $47,338, I believe based on Kelley Blue Book.

[0] https://fortune.com/2024/02/28/how-expensive-new-used-cars-o...

If you can't afford to protect people from cars, then you can't afford cars.

Protecting people from cars could be done by enforcing existing laws regarding unsafe driving habits and increasing the penalties to a point where the worst drivers are simply priced out of the equation.

Accidents happen, even to safe drivers. But you could make the roads virtually fatality-free by lowering speed limits and shared roads to 30km/h (20mph) and enforcing that speed limit.

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