If we had a comprehensive public transit network, then only the people who need to drive would do so. Then you could raise the licensing requirements.
More importantly however you probably want to separate out roads from streets in American towns, cities, and suburbs to reduce the number of accident prone interactions. As it is now, streets and roads are treated basically the same way and you get the abomination that are "stroads". By keeping them separate you remove all pedestrian and bike traffic from roads and you massively slow down car traffic on streets (along with removing traffic lights on streets).
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).
"If we had a comprehensive public transit network, then only the people who need to drive would do so. Then you could raise the licensing requirements."
That's not a prerequisite for raising licensing requirements. In fact, claims tend to be highest in major cities that do have public transportation networks. So the people most likely to lose their license are more likely to have access to public transit.
Pedestrian and bike deaths are an extremely small percentage of road fatalities and injuries. If you want to make an impact on insurance cost through reduced claims, you need to take another action. Higher quality drivers through more stringent education and testing is the most comprehensive way to do that with the lowest infrastructure cost.
Note that not everyone would lose thier license. Many of the people involved in accidents today are ignorant and could be brought up to a possible level with better training.
That's not the issue. The issue is that in the regions where you do have good public transit, most of the drivers are commuting from places that don't. So until those areas have at least decent access to public transit, you risk excluding people from those areas from economic opportunities in the city.
So you still need a comprehensive public transit system. It doesn't need to be super regular or blazing fast but it needs to be viable enough that commuters can still commute if they can't get a license.
I'm not sure where you are, but most larger cities have public transit extending quite far from the city proper. Sure, the super commuters might be left out, but there's no reasonable solution for that use case.
More importantly however you probably want to separate out roads from streets in American towns, cities, and suburbs to reduce the number of accident prone interactions. As it is now, streets and roads are treated basically the same way and you get the abomination that are "stroads". By keeping them separate you remove all pedestrian and bike traffic from roads and you massively slow down car traffic on streets (along with removing traffic lights on streets).