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adamzerner comments on Open Thread, Feb. 2 - Feb 8, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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If cars were just invented yesterday, knowing what you know about humans, would you think that it'd be sane to let people drive the way they currently do (speeds, traffic, conditions...)? I wouldn't.
I would people to drive cars unrestricted. If I find that people are using cars significantly more dangerously than they should, I'd require insurance. If there is public outcry regardless of insurance (perhaps due to people considering life to be a sacred value, and there being lives lost), I'd put a price floor on insurance.
Probably not the way it's done in the USA (from what I gather, drivers' licences are basically being handed out like candy), but the way it's handled in most European countries - requiring comprehensive education, practical exercise and independent examination on trafic laws, behaving in traffic and operating a car. The one thing we can learn from the US, though, is the absolute stigma against drunk driving, which is just not present to that extent. If cars were invented today, that's the one thing that'd probably change mechanically - a simple suite of sensors and a switch that shuts the engine down and engages the parking brake if the driver is drunk, fatigued or otherwise impaired.
In the USA you also need to pass a test that includes both an exam on traffic laws and a road test. As far as, handing them out "like candy", true you generally don't hear of people who couldn't pass the test, but do Europeans regularly have problems passing the exam?
I'm in the UK. I know a handful of people who've taken 8 tries or more to pass the practical test. They're not the norm, but I'd say passing it on your first go is regarded as mildly surprising! I'd guess two attempts is possibly the mode? It's an expensive undertaking, too, so most people aren't just throwing themselves at the test well before they're ready in the hope of getting lucky.
(On the other hand, the theory test (a prerequisite for attempting the practical) is widely regarded as a bit of a joke. I don't know whether this is because I have a social circle that is good at passing written exams, though. Maybe it's more challenging for the less academically inclined?)
The particulars of the exam will vary from country to country, but Belgium supposedly has one of the more lax ones and even here you routinely hear of people failing their driving exam. I actually looked it up because of your question and according to wikipedia:
In many European countries getting the driver's license is very expensive -- we're talking hundreds and thousands of euros.
I don't have appropriate statistics at hand, but from personal experience making driver's licenses really expensive and inconvenient to get does not result in better drivers.
That's been tried, but there's been no uptake. You could say, ok, have the government require it and that will solve the problem. We have seat belt laws, and breathalysers, why not mandatory automated breath testing before letting a car start? Well, here's something that various governments once tried, but it didn't last.
You don't have to be any sort of libertarian to understand that making people do what they ought isn't a magic wand. In democracies, the people who are making the people do what the people ought are, in the end, the people themselves. In the other parts of the world, you don't get to say what the government should make people do.
And yet, Americans have fewer accidents per mile than Europeans. This was true even 30 years ago, before the push against drunk driving.
Added: Actually, according to this (p 22), most of Europe has, over the course of the 21st century, overtaken America. Much of that is catching up to the American approach to drunk driving, but there are other things going on, since (as the chart says) America was ahead in 1970, before it became concerned with drunk driving. Anyhow, I doubt that rigorous license standards are new.
(I haven't verified that that statistic is correct; I'm taking it on trust.)
The US is much less densely populated than Europe. Are more of those miles that Americans drive on nice straight wide near-deserted roads?
Europe and the US are both big varied places. I bet those accident rates are highly variable. What do you see if you break them down by population density, urban versus rural, rich versus poor, etc.?
Europeans are more likely to live in cities. City traffic produces more accidents per mile.
We should probably concern ourselves with fatality rates (serious disability rates probably tracks this). Because of differences in average speed, I expect the typical rural accident to be much more severe.
It would depend on how bad travel was without cars yesterday. Historically, it was horses which must have been really bad. I think if they knew back then about speeds, traffic, and conditions they still would have done it. Parts of China and India have proved it quite recently (last 50 years).
Now if we had most people in high density housing, good transport (both public and private), and online ordering/delivery then maybe cars would be very restricted.