the problem is that our urban planning is so F@#$ed that taking away someone's ability to drive is tantamount to sentencing someone to poverty. In most of the country, you are completely dependent on a car to hold down a job, get groceries and pretty much anything else. In most other countries, not having a car is a mild to moderate inconvenience you can work around.

The problem is how do you enforce that though.

The modern world is so cat centric people would rather drive without a license than accept to live without a car. And until you can reliably catch and jail license-less drivers, the bet is worth it for them.

I’m strongly in favor of exponential punishment with very light punishments for first offences. It allows fluke infractions or bad luck to go without being punished too hard, but severely punish the small anti-social group that brings the rest of society down with it. So maybe if you accidentally run a red light once it is a $10 ticket, but next time it is $100, and then $1000, and then $10000, and then $100000.

I'm in favor of escalating punishment, but it doesn't reset, it decays. Say 3 years with not tickets and it goes down one level.

I have noticed this going between Switzerland and Italy in particular—all of the cars going incredibly fast on the autostrada seem to have Swiss plates!

Some countries have a points system, where every infraction gets points in addition to the fine. At a certain amount of points you lose your license. Pretty effective dissuade serial petty infringers!

"In Germany the Swiss have no problem speeding, because the fines are laughable. "

That is because in germany, cars are a religion substitute and just like there can be no speed limit on the Autobahn in general, there can be no real enforcement of speeding.

The fines actually increased a lot in recent years. Still cheap, though. And if there are radar cameras, they are often in places where speeding is quite safe to make money from fines vs places where speeding is actually dangerous (close to schools etc)

It is basically a archaic thing, the bigger the man, the bigger and louder his car and the faster he goes. It shows status.

So I imagine in New York City it works just the same. When the big guys like speeding and the big guys control the state .. then how can there be meaningful regulation of that?

(To confess, I like to drive fast, too. But not in places where kids can jump or fall anytime on the road)

When New York State authorized the NYC speed camera program they explicitly precluded it from reporting to insurance, and made it not part of the “points” system that triggers license suspension if you accumulate too many infractions, so all that happens is that you get a $50 ticket each time.

If you don’t pay the tickets, your car is at risk of being booted, but if you don’t park on the street or choose to obscure your license plate when you do (how did that leaf get stuck there!?), there aren’t many repercussions.

There was an attempt at a program to actually seize these cars, originally it would have kicked in at 5 tickets/year for immediate towing, but it was watered down to 15 tickets a year triggering a required safe driving class. They sort of half-assed the execution of that, then pointed at the limited results and cancelled it altogether. There’s an effort to pass a state law about this, we’ll see if it makes progress.

Unless you live in NYC or a handful of other places, an adult in the US who can't drive (or afford to pay someone to drive for them) is in the equivalent of economic-social prison. Almost all personal transportation infrastructure is designed around car travel, anything else is at best an afterthought and at worst impossible.

Don't get it twisted, I agree with you. The US is far too tolerant of dangerous driving. We are too dependent on cars for travel, and this is a consequence of it.

It's simple. People drive without a license. Having a license doesn't preclude someone from driving a vehicle

Perhaps they don’t have either.

New York actually does have a points system, but since they're tied to the driver's license rather than the car itself, you only get them if you're actually pulled over, not from cameras. Within NYC there's a fair amount of camera enforcement, but comparatively very little by the police directly, so drivers whose licenses might otherwise be suspended via points are still driving around.

The mechanisms for keeping people off the road are also just weaker in the US—I believe the penalties for driving with a suspended license are comparatively lighter, plus if your license is suspended you can often still get a "restricted" license that still lets you drive to work.