If people were rational you'd be right, but from happiness surveys we know that people underestimate the (negative) effects of a long commute by car. So it's entirely possible that when a new road is built, a family might move out of the city centre to a larger house in the suburbs, expecting this to make them happier, when in fact it makes them less happy.
> there's no need to punish people for driving. There happen to be some bad externalities to driving (exhaust, traffic accidents), but those problems are being worked on (electric zero-emission cars, self driving cars, etc)
They're being worked on, but they're not solved yet, and in the meantime US road taxes don't come close to covering those costs, and the way we treat road deaths as "accidents" (despite a larger, more predictable death toll than e.g. environmental pollution) means the compensation payouts are disproportionately low.
When you kill yourself because of a predictable risk it's on you. When you kill someone else because of a predictable risk that should qualify as negligent homicide, at least (and lower-risk things than driving do).
Okay, that applies to pedestrian deaths. But the vast majority of driving deaths are based on mutual choice to drive. As long as nobody's drunk it's rarely a 'kill someone else' situation, rather it's a 'two drivers interacted in a way that went wrong' situation.
Negligent homicide should not apply if the negligence was mutual.
> there's no need to punish people for driving. There happen to be some bad externalities to driving (exhaust, traffic accidents), but those problems are being worked on (electric zero-emission cars, self driving cars, etc)
They're being worked on, but they're not solved yet, and in the meantime US road taxes don't come close to covering those costs, and the way we treat road deaths as "accidents" (despite a larger, more predictable death toll than e.g. environmental pollution) means the compensation payouts are disproportionately low.