Reading these comments, a common through-line seems to be cars. Hit and runs, drive by shootings, cars without plates, cars speeding, breaking into cars, etc. But the concept of disincentivizing cars never seems to be brought up. Close down urban roads to private car traffic. Increase public transportation. Remove subsidies on gas. Build bike lanes.

Cars are weapons. They kill people quickly with momentum, and slowly with pollution and a sedentary lifestyle. We need to start treating them as such

Sounds great -- if you're an urbanite and not the ~half of the population [in the US] who doesn't live anywhere near an urban center.

I do everything I can to avoid public transportation. It's not worth the risk or the annoyances with aggressive and dangerous people. If I lived in Asia (which I did before), I'd love to use public transportation because the people are not aggressive, won't attack or kill me. That's not the case in the USA

There's an asymmetry with cars and traffic calming. You can spend a few thousand on putting in speed bumps (well, when you can; most municipalities put in obnoxious restrictions to "justify" a speed bump), road diets, buffered bike lanes, etc. But you only need one car to run a red light and hit a pedestrian crossing the street to kill them.

The rise in enthusiasm for ALPR is mostly a consequence of this asymmetry. Previously you'd have law enforcement go around patrolling to keep safety but the number of drivers in the US is growing faster than the number of LEOs and LEOs are expensive and controversial in certain areas.

I advocate for traffic calming all the time. But the asymmetry is real and, honestly, quite frustrating. A single distracted driver can cause you to panic brake on your bike and fall off and hurt yourself.

They could also be easily tracked without cameras.

People bring up the concept of disincentivizing cars all the time. Many activists in local politics in urban areas have ideological problems with mass car use, and try to advocate for and enact anti-car, pro-public-transit policies.

The problem is, cars are extremely useful to most people in the US, public transit has very real inherent downsides, and local policies that disincentivize car use are very unpopular when actually implemented. Voting citizens get mad when the price of gas goes up and demand that their elected officials do something about it (also electrification of cars, which is proceeding apace, makes gasoline prices less important for ordinary people and also reduces some of the real negative externalities of cars).

I have used both urban public transit and cars regularly to get around, I'm personally familiar with the upsides and downsides of both, and while I definitely do want public transit infrastructure to be good, I frankly do not trust the motives of anti-car urbanist activists. I think they are willing to make the lives of most people on aggregate worse because they think private car ownership is in some sense immoral and so overweight the downsides of cars and underweight the downsides of public transit.

Also using drive-by shootings and car-break-ins as an anti-car argument is pretty disingenuous. This is a problem with criminals committing directly-violent crime or property crime against ordinary people, not with cars per se. Criminals absolutely commit crimes against people using public transit, and indeed one of the major problems with public transit is that it puts you in a closed space with random members of the public who might commit crimes against you (e.g. the Jordan_Neely incident, the random stabbing of Iryna_Zarutska, the less-widely-reported random crime incidents that happen regularly on urban public transit systems). One of the most important public policy measures that could be enacted to make public transit better is severe and consistent policing of public order crimes on transit - and of course more severe policing is also a potential solution to car drive-bys and break-ins.