Ultimately no impactful regulation of cars/drivers is possible because it's impossible to survive in most of the US without driving. You can take someone's license or mandate they have $10 million of insurance but at the end of the day they'll just have to drive without a license and drive without insurance because in most places there's no alternative.
The solution is to stop building out our infrastructure in ways that make cars a requirement for survival. Give people an alternative and maybe then you can start enforcing stricter automobile regulations.
As a benefit you'd reduce all the other horrible impacts cars have on our society (health, pollution, costs, anti-social behavior)
It's pretty much an unfixable problem at this point given that we also have lost the ability to do infrastructure projects with anything resembling a sane budget or time table.
It's really not. Florida for all its wrongs is actually showing this to be feasible. Decades of attempts at building rail in the state floundered and failed over and over again but Brightline is finally actually making good stable progress.
And this isn't just some new company that popped up out of nowhere. This is more or less the same group that had been attempting passenger rail in the state for the last 15 years or so. What changed is they stopped trying to sell it as a public infrastructure project and instead sold it as a purely private project that is funded by bonds which only come out at a loss to the government when the project succeeds (and the companies have to pay back with interest if it fails).
But now that Brightline has been shown to be viable, politicians in the state are bending over backwards to allocate land for routes (for example republican politicians allocated a route along I-4 from Orlando to Tampa in near record time). They are pursuing their next sets of routes in the state including the aforementioned Orlando-Tampa route, an east coast up to JAX route, and numerous local commuter rail routes from the surrounding counties into Miami.
All it takes is one good success and everyone who was otherwise staunchly against it starts moving heaven and earth to spread the boon to their constituents.
Adding a few intercity links is good, but it's far easier than restructuring metro areas to facilitate public transit and pedestrians rather than cars.
I agree but however Miami already has decent transit for the city itself. It isn't comprehensive by any means but it's enough to make leaving your car at the local train station and commuting in viable for a lot of people.
What is missing in the area however are fast, cheap intercity links (until now) and more importantly fast, reliable commuter rail. Brightline (and hopefully soon to follow Tri-rail) rolling out fast, regular commuter rail to the lower third of the Florida peninsula would mean that south Florida would have rail transit viability (and range) comparable to the NYC metro area (which is probably the best "no car" metro in the US at the moment).
Ultimately no impactful regulation of cars/drivers is possible because it's impossible to survive in most of the US without driving. You can take someone's license or mandate they have $10 million of insurance but at the end of the day they'll just have to drive without a license and drive without insurance because in most places there's no alternative.
The solution is to stop building out our infrastructure in ways that make cars a requirement for survival. Give people an alternative and maybe then you can start enforcing stricter automobile regulations.
As a benefit you'd reduce all the other horrible impacts cars have on our society (health, pollution, costs, anti-social behavior)