This is exactly what was predicted as the result of corporate surveillance and targeted ads. They are part of schemes to extract more revenue from you. Another example is the rising premium for health insurance. But people apparently had “nothing to hide”!
Ugh. That reminds me of a time probably around 2012. I was working for a pretty large company, and they had our health insurance provider come in. The insurance provider was offering $100 to any employees that came in and gave a sample of blood. This was not a blood drive, they wanted samples. There was a line going down the hallway of people excited to get a benjamin. I encouraged them to get off the line because they were just going to use the data from the blood tests to raise our rates. Everybody laughed at me.
Couple months later all of our insurance rates got jacked up. Like how did people not see what was going on? Did they really think the insurance company was there to give away free money and not somehow turn a profit? Fucking bananas.
100% against everything being monitored and data sold like it is…… but part of me wishes there was a way to work towards getting bad drivers off of the roads.
This is not the way to do that as the insurance companies only have one goal and that is to raise profits.
But when you stand on any random street corner and 30-60 % of every driver driving by is looking down at their cell phone, it is very scary.
People don’t use turn signals, speed through residential neighborhoods, change lanes in the middle of intersections, it’s insane. We need to make our world less car reliant, it’s unacceptable.
You get rid of cars and you stop designing society to accommodate the one edge case where someone lives 100miles away from a city that they have to commute by car to everyday for some reason.
That’s not why most people drive cars. I’ve lived in cities with public transport all my life. But when I got my driving license, my life quality increased enormously. It’s like night and day. Not only can I drive where I want when I want, I can avoid other commuters that are very often loud or annoying. I don’t have to stand at bus stops or train stations and seeing them being delayed or canceled either.
I agree that some people drive poorly though. But the solution is to train them better, not to get rid of cars. You can hardly have an adult life with family without a car.
That sounds like a mix of public transportation sucking and people needing to travel too far to me
Driving sucks… But compared to not having a reliable way to get around? It’s total freedom
But better yet is being able to have a nice walk where you need to go, and frequent/plentiful options to go further. You just have to mix everything up and cut down on the parking lots. Low cost housing with full homes tucked here and there, smaller grocery and hardware stores every few blocks, gyms and parks a few blocks away - and all centered around a main street with offices and lower cost housing a few blocks away, so the main street can have a bus running by every 5 minutes
My time working in Paris for a bit really blew my mind - only one guy at my office wasn’t walking distance to work. I passed several grocery stores and bakeries on my 20 minute walk back if I wanted to grab something, there was a big park a couple blocks up if I wanted a scenic walk back.
And if I was feeling lazy, you could just start walking until you saw a bus coming up behind you - there was a bus stop like every quarter mile just going up and down that main street
Almost as good as all that is the fact that if you did have to drive, there was so much less traffic. You could park on side streets, but those spots were limited and needed specific permits. They had parking garages at the edge of the suburb area near the highway entrance and near the metro station, so while you could drive up to wherever to load/unload, it discouraged it and kept the cars mostly on the bigger roads in between areas.
Granted, it’s only amazing when the pieces all fit together like that - a lot of the designed communities in the US are nowhere close to as good because they don’t commit far with. I later moved to a designed community in the States which had most of the same aspects, but I never walked to the grocery store. It was across the street from the town center and a 10 minute walk, but it involved crossing 2 much higher speed/busy roads and walking across a huge parking lot. It was just a little island in a world still built for cars
But when it works, it’s amazing
Edge case
Thank you for your well educated and nuanced opinion that takes people who can’t afford to live in a city into account, very cool!
People can’t afford to live in the city precisely because so much of it is designed to cater to cars. For example, adding parking requirements to an apartment can easily increase the effective square footage by 50% (800 ft2 2-bedroom apartment + 2 parking spaces = 1200 ft2). Then the price goes up even more than that because parking deck is more expensive per unit area to construct than actual living space.
I live 100 miles away because I never want to deal with city slickers like you.
You will never be able to take away someone’s license for bad driving if doing so basically makes them unemployable and incapable of taking care of themselves. We need cheap, practical alternatives to cars in order to reduce the impact of bad drivers.
Yup. There’s a cause-and-effect chain that the anti-car crowd likes to ignore. The reality is that we need widely available alternative transport before restricting cars. If you start by restricting cars, all you’re doing is making it impossible for struggling people to get and keep a job. And that’s not good for anyone.
Give us cities that are walkable, with no point less than a 10 minute walk away from a train station.
Give us trains that are affordable and run regularly, not $10 per ride and only run every 45-60 minutes.
Give us actual separated sidewalks and prioritized pedestrian traffic, instead of roads without sidewalks and intersections that make pedestrians wait 2-4 cycles before giving them a crossing signal. Give us busses that actually run on time and run regularly.
Give us public transport that doesn’t shut down at 2AM, when all of the drunks are leaving the bars and are pushed into driving home because there is no public transport available after the bars close.
My daily commute by car is 13 minutes. Via public transport, it is nearly three hours. Without a car, I need to go 20 miles north to a connecting city, wait roughly hour for the next train, then go 20 miles south to get near my work. Then it’s another 20-30 minutes of waiting for the bus (if it’s even running on time) for another 5 miles. Or I can just fucking drive the 10 miles and be there in 13 minutes. No, I can’t walk because it’s nearly all highway driving and there are no sidewalks. No, I can’t ride a bike because no bikes are allowed on the highway.
Fix public transport. Make it usable. And then start restricting cars. If my commute was a 13 minute drive or a 15 minute train ride, I’d pick the train ride every time. But it’s not.
Obligatory US, I think the better way of filtering bad drivers is more stringent and frequent testing through the DMV (or your state’s equivalent). Look at Germany, they don’t mess around when it comes to licensing. I’m mid 30s, and haven’t had to retest or do any form of continuing driver’s education or retesting since I was 16.
It’s a little trickier here in the US due to our cities being built for cars, and being without one can be a huge detriment, especially with most public transit being a shitshow. But I agree, we definitely need some mechanisms to weed out bad drivers.
Well GM and Goodyear lobbied against public transit when they wanted everyone to buy a car, and probably still do , is why public transit is so awful.
That, plus GM literally bought up streetcar companies and shut them down or converted them to running buses.
Either way, the bottom line is that it’s pretty difficult to go without a car in the US outside select major cities. Still, per the original comment I responded to, something needs to give in regards to the excess amount of bad drivers on the roads here.
Licensing is also harder here in Belgium.
The drivers and in the netherlands are still some of the shittiest drivers outside of Italy.
80%+ of bmw and range rover drivers (of which a huge percentage of cars are) never ever use their turn signals, people literally stand still in the middle of intersections in a 5 car pileup combined with the fact that a huge percentage of people blatantly run red lights so when the light turns green in the opposite direction during a busy period, hundreds of intersections are completely blocked causing immense traffic. This comes from the rule where you generally pass behind the car turning opposite of you. When you have a 5 car pileup in both directions, nobody can pass behind.
Not to mention the rampant “Belgian exit” where cars speed up over the speed limit to go from the right lane, passing a few cars on the left, only to re-enter the right lane past a solid line to screech into the exit a second or two faster. I see this one multiple times every time I drive.
Strict requirements don’t mean much if your driving culture is completely fucked. But culture is also the hardest thing to change.
While licensing is definitely harder in Germany you also do not have to retest or do anything else to keep your license. It’s actually a problem that it’s pretty hard to take away the license from old unfit people (and the German government actually blocked EU legislation improving that).
Reliable public transport with a robust interstate passenger railway system coupled with a well designed intracity bus system, along with well maintained biking paths everywhere else would go a long way to getting bad drivers off the road.
We can’t get bad drivers off the road when basic everyday living requires driving. There are cost effective alternatives in use across the world. America just has to learn to accept good ideas that others have pioneered.
part of me wishes there was a way to work towards getting bad drivers off of the roads.
There is: it’s called zoning reform.
I have seen some cool videos about this, although they are kind of boring I guess…. Using infrastructure to bring the speed limit down naturally and force drivers to keep their hands on the wheel
Traffic calming is a thing, but not what I’m talking about.
I’m talking about repealing zoning restrictions in order to allow traditional development again, which (since property owners aren’t forced by law to cater to cars), tends to have walkable density that discourages driving.
In other words, you don’t have to worry about bad drivers if almost nobody’s driving to begin with.
but part of me wishes there was a way to work towards getting bad drivers off of the roads.
More stringent requirements for drivers license? Actually punishing people for texting and driving?
Culturally you can help too. I personally lay on the horn when someone is texting and driving.
Make the passing grade for a driving test 20% higher than it currently is, and make everyone take a driving test every five years. You get one re-test if you fail.
And once you hit 70, driving tests every year.
Anyone who fails under the new regulations would have been causing a lot of problems on the roads.
You had me until only 1 chance to fail; instead, you should temporarily get your license reduced back to the level 2 learners license. Then another chance to fail and retest before you get bumped down to a level 1 learners license.
Also, every year for 70+ is excessive. Passing a cog screen should be sufficient. Retesting every 5 years is already pretty good.
Autonomous vehicles are the only achievable solution to distracted driving. Individuals can be nice but people as a whole are lazy and selfish pieces of shit. You’ll never get anywhere close to even 90% doing the right thing just by relying on people’s good intentions.
Full autonomous vehicles, and particularly significant levels of adoption of them are decades away. It’s taken roughly 20 years for hybrid vehicles to become “big”, and that’s after the tech already existed. We still don’t even have anywhere close to reliable full autonomous driving.
It usually is much more effective to make plans and changes based off what currently exists rather than anything that isn’t absolute immediate future. No reason to say no to the good because you’re busy waiting for “perfect”.
Full autonomous vehicles, and particularly significant levels of adoption of them are decades away
the only way fully-autonomous vehicles will truly work and work as envisioned, is if user-operated ones are taken off the roads entirely. and yes, that is at least ‘decades away’
Could public transit be considered to reduce the need for everyone to drive?
Definitely but there’s practical limitations to implementing large scale public transit in the US even if the desire to build it existed, which I would argue it doesn’t at a large enough scale to make it happen.
People don’t use turn signals, speed through residential neighborhoods, change lanes in the middle of intersections, it’s insane.
It’s been like that since I was a kid in the 80’s.
One part of the answer is enforcement. Ticket the shit out of dangerous behavior and people will do it less. I literally never see anyone pulled over for traffic violations anymore, whereas it was common 10-20 years ago. What happened to traffic cops, and why don’t we have cameras that detect this shit? In Colorado people don’t even bother to renew their tags and there are no repercussions. It’s like fucking Mad Max out there, I hate it so much. Obviously making the world less car reliant is critical, but the lack of any visible enforcement is absurd too.
OK but why is my state mandated minimum insurance nearly $90 a month for a Toyota Prius that I only drive like 30 miles per week?
My liability only plan was $55 in 2018.
I’m over 30 years old with no tickets or accidents on my record.
Maybe the whole data farming thing is being used as an excuse also, but this is bullshit all up and down.
I have never driven a car that tracks me, and I pay approx $50 a month for two cars.
I have an 11 year old vehicle, no tickets, no points, never had a claim. In Michigan I’m paying nearly 700 every six months for the cheapest no coverage insurance. I absolutely hate insurance, I would rather just take my chances than throw so much money into a hole that is on fire but the government says I can’t.
I used to think this way. My car was totaled last month when my partner was hit by an unlicensed driver. The other driver stuck around to exchange info, but literally disappeared after that; unreachable by her insurance company or ours since then. I couldn’t imagine the financial and emotional ruin we’d be in right now without car insurance, trying to track down this person to sue her for the money to replace our vehicle.
Instead, we already got our payout and have a brand new model year of the car we already had. It really only cost us some time, and money already spent on interest and registration fees. Insurance is unfortunately a critical load-bearing beam in our society as it is.
Sooo… shop around? Existing customers who show no indication that they will leave are prime candidates for reaming.
Mr PoopyButthole lives in a state with a mandated minimum price. Can’t you read?
I doubt it’s the price that’s mandated, they probably mean the state mandated minimum coverage.
My vehicle is not trackable but my insurance tripled in two years so there is more going on than data harvesting
The article alleges, though without evidence, that the tracking is just an excuse to raise rates.
A quick search didn’t turn up quite the right statistics, but traffic fatalities have been seriously on the rise in the US. That probably implies higher payouts. (WP)
But also, when trackable unsafe drivers have to pay more (and trackable safe driver less), then the unsafe drivers will prefer to be untrackable. You may be on the receiving end of the recalculated actuary tables.
Untrackable might mean you get lumped with the worst actuary table in terms of risk as an unknown quantity or as a form of pressure to let them track you or as a way to create a defence moat of people (your rates will go up like these untrackable vehicles) if the government tries to intervene to stop them from basing rates to tracking.
“Cost of living”. Sure people will start getting inflation beating payrises soon.
Is it too much to ask for a car that doesn’t spy on me, is reasonably comfortable, is efficient, and maybe has a few extra “smart” features to help me not run into other people? I guess my bike will do for now.
