Hacker News Reader

Comment by trollbridge | Hacker News Reader

Lower income people, in the U.S., tend to live in cheap areas and use a car to access employment in an hour+ radius. Making driving expensive for them simply means limiting their employment or cutting them off from it entirely.

Driving should not be a privilege exclusively for rich people. Poor people cannot afford to pay an Uber to drive them around and can’t afford to buy some Tesla with FSD either. Waymo would be grossly unaffordable for a 120 mile daily round trip commute.

In Australia I met people with even longer commutes - going 150km to get to a job, mostly due to how unaffordable housing has become.

If you want to take away people’s cars, you need to make sure they can access employment and have affordable, safe housing. Remember that half the population makes less than the median income.

View on HN

Driving is not a right, it is a privilege.

Someone's individual economic circumstances are irrelevant. You can either drive safely or you can't.

No one said it isn’t a privilege.

I don’t agree with making driving something only the wealthy do, though.

False equivalency. Even taken to extreme ends nothing here can be construed as suggesting "only the wealthy" should be allowed or able to drive.

The moment someone suggests enforcement of a law someone comes running in yelling about how it's regressive and will disproportionately affect the poor, and by extension "only the wealthy" will be able to do whatever.

Everything disproportionately affects the poor because it's very hard to be poor.

And the moment you say we shouldn't enforce laws because it will make poor peoples' lives harder you are saying that something is no longer a privilege. That poor people should be able to break the law with lesser or no consequence because they are poor.

I wonder if there should be a two-tiered structure to replace the traditional drivers license. In flying, you can get a Private Pilot License, or you can get a Sport Pilot Certificate, which is easier to get but has fewer privileges. It would be interesting to see a state replace a drivers license with the Sport level license, which would only let you drive a vehicle up to 6,000 pounds (Cadillac Escalade), have other restrictions, and have a higher insurance rate. Then the higher level license would require additional training (somewhere between current DL requirements and the monthlong requirement for a CDL) and let you drive the full limit of 26,000 pounds and you'd get discounted insurance.

If you stop one person then maybe it becomes impossible to get from their give to their job. If you stop all the poor people from doing it then what happens? The jobs don't evaporate. Maybe it becomes economical to run a bus, or open more businesses outside the CBD.

In the vast majority of cases, being a bad driver is a lifestyle choice, not an incurable condition. No-one should be granted a right to present a significant danger to other people as a consequence of making bad and avoidable lifestyle choices.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com