> we can't even eliminate tangible, clear-cut physical-reality problems like murder?
Call me a pessimist, but I don't think it's possible to eliminate murder so I think that is an unreachably high bar.
That being said, I think that there is lots of low hanging fruit that we absolutely could do something about. Traffic fatalities and injuries are an obvious one. In the US, if we collectively decided that it is unacceptable to have tens of thousands of people die every year in auto incidents and scores more seriously injured, we could rework our road infrastructure and impose regulations that would drive these numbers down dramatically, even if not to zero.
The biggest challenge to enacting the types of reforms that would improve most people's quality of life is that advocates have mostly done a poor job of communicating their positive vision for how such changes would improve most people's lives. The story progressive transit advocates (myself included) tend to tell sounds like it's about taking away the rights and freedoms of drivers. This is undeniably true. Freedoms and rights are always in tension. Progressives will always lose though if they aren't able to tell a compelling story about the benefits of the changes they wish to impose. Otherwise the other side will be able to successfully hammer them on whatever is being taken away.
In our current regime in the US, we have essentially legalized murder if you are driving a car. If someone runs me over with their SUV while I am legally crossing the street because "they didn't see me," they are extremely unlikely to face any consequences unless they were drunk. But at the same time, if I'm driving a car a lot, I also face the risk of killing or harming someone else even if I am always doing my best. This would be devastating even if I wasn't legally at fault. In other words, the freedom to kill someone with no accountability is no freedom at all.
The point is not that I want people to go to jail for killing people with their cars. I want to live in an environment where people are not killed by cars. There are many things like this where I think there is a more positive vision for society that is not that hard to imagine but that does require letting go of some of our past ways of looking at things. In this particular case, a century of marketing and pr by auto/oil companies has warped our perspective that we can't even see how anti-human the industry and our infrastructure has become. That doesn't mean we have to get rid of cars entirely, but we should rethink our relationship with them. There are many things like this.
Many good points in your post. I'm a car enthusiast and I agree with almost everything you've stated.....because I live in Japan, and have seen how a country can integrate a variety of transportation mediums, balancing the freedoms of car ownership with fairly strict training, enforcement, and just cultural habits that largely reduce fatalities. Automotive taxes in Japan are pretty much the only form of taxation that I'm comfortable paying, and feel like I genuinely get my money's worth for what it costs me (Japanese healthcare is a distant second but deserves a mention).
Call me a pessimist, but I don't think it's possible to eliminate murder so I think that is an unreachably high bar.
That being said, I think that there is lots of low hanging fruit that we absolutely could do something about. Traffic fatalities and injuries are an obvious one. In the US, if we collectively decided that it is unacceptable to have tens of thousands of people die every year in auto incidents and scores more seriously injured, we could rework our road infrastructure and impose regulations that would drive these numbers down dramatically, even if not to zero.
The biggest challenge to enacting the types of reforms that would improve most people's quality of life is that advocates have mostly done a poor job of communicating their positive vision for how such changes would improve most people's lives. The story progressive transit advocates (myself included) tend to tell sounds like it's about taking away the rights and freedoms of drivers. This is undeniably true. Freedoms and rights are always in tension. Progressives will always lose though if they aren't able to tell a compelling story about the benefits of the changes they wish to impose. Otherwise the other side will be able to successfully hammer them on whatever is being taken away.
In our current regime in the US, we have essentially legalized murder if you are driving a car. If someone runs me over with their SUV while I am legally crossing the street because "they didn't see me," they are extremely unlikely to face any consequences unless they were drunk. But at the same time, if I'm driving a car a lot, I also face the risk of killing or harming someone else even if I am always doing my best. This would be devastating even if I wasn't legally at fault. In other words, the freedom to kill someone with no accountability is no freedom at all.
The point is not that I want people to go to jail for killing people with their cars. I want to live in an environment where people are not killed by cars. There are many things like this where I think there is a more positive vision for society that is not that hard to imagine but that does require letting go of some of our past ways of looking at things. In this particular case, a century of marketing and pr by auto/oil companies has warped our perspective that we can't even see how anti-human the industry and our infrastructure has become. That doesn't mean we have to get rid of cars entirely, but we should rethink our relationship with them. There are many things like this.