Sounds like a good reason to create protected “no turn on red” crosswalks.
The state’s monopoly on violence should be used judiciously and sparingly to secure our individual rights, not as a catch-all tool for coercing (or outright forcing) people into making the choices you want them to.
Yes, first and foremost the right to bodily integrity, since rights are no good if you are dead. The two biggest killers of people in the US who are otherwise many many years from dying are guns and cars, and in both cases a large number of those dead had neither a gun nor a car in the moment. If the state is going to use its monopoly on anything, it should obviously be those two.
They can also enforce existing laws better. Don't forget that most states have had truck laws for a very long time. We know there is a direct linkage between vehicle weight and road maintenance costs. We've had laws that required vehicles to be weighed. We've had laws that taxed vehicles that exceeded certain weights on given roads. We've had laws banning vehicles of certain weights from certain roads. We could turn those laws "back on", get back to enforcing them better, adjust their fines and penalties to match a decade or three of inflation.
(For instance, Hummers are allegedly already technically illegal by weight on California residential streets. When was the last time that was enforced? When was the last time an owner paid fines on that?)
This old article mentions a lot of advantages of electric velomobiles vs cars like doing average commutes in roughly the same time, dramatic increase in road capacity, tiny power consumption if everyone was to switch etc etc
But write-ups hardly ever mention how hard it is to damage a pedestrian with it. Crashes involving just velomobiles usually leave little more than a scratch.
I live in a state with many “no right turn on red” intersections, and I can tell you for sure that people very often ignore those signs and do it anyway.
> The state’s monopoly on violence should be used judiciously and sparingly to secure our individual rights, not as a catch-all tool for coercing (or outright forcing) people into making the choices you want them to.
May I steal this, please? I know a few people who don't get my political philosophy, and I want to help them understand.
The state's monopoly, qua Max Weber, is on the legitimate use of violence.
That is, the right and legitimacy of that right, is restricted to the state.
Absent this, one of three conditions exist;
1. There is no monopoly. In which case violence is widespread, and there is no state.
2. There is no legitimacy. In which case violence is capricious. This is your condition of tyranny (unaccountable power).
3. Some non-state power or agent assumes the monopoly on legitimate violence. In which case it becomes, by definition the State.
The state's claim is to legitimacy. A capricious exercise would be an abrogation of legitimacy
Weber, Max (1978). Roth, Guenther; Wittich, Claus (eds.). Economy and Society. Berkeley: U. California P. p. 54.
The state’s monopoly on violence should be used judiciously and sparingly to secure our individual rights, not as a catch-all tool for coercing (or outright forcing) people into making the choices you want them to.