>>>Maybe the free-car carrot would help, though. How best to protect the public?
>>>
>>
>>"public" is a wide-ranging term.
>>
>>I grew up in Queens, NY where cars were scarce then.
>>I learned to drive in the service - I could drive a 2 1/2 ton 6X6 before I could drive a car.
>>I was taught by guys from farms in the south and mid west who drove tractors before learning to ride a bike.
>>I can only imagine the accidents that occur on those farms, that we never hear about.
>>
>>Queens, Brooklyn and Manhattan have solved the car problem pretty simply- either there's no parking at all or it costs more to park a car than it does to use Uber. Except for the very rich, cars have become obsolete there.
>
> I was one of those guys from farms in the south. When I was 10 I wasn't strong enough to work watermelons except on the very far end of the picking line. But, I did have some advantages - I had legs long enough to reach the pedals on a tractor, I could read, write, count and most importantly I had already learned to do exactly as I was told. I started off driving the tractor in the field at walking speed while the trailer was being loaded. After 2 days of extensive training I was promoted to delivery driver. As delivery driver I drove that 8N Ford tractor with an overloaded trailer of 2-3 tons of watermelons about 8 miles over dirt roads with 2 shaky wooden bridges to the rail siding. At the rail siding I had to count the watermelons as the buyer's crew loaded the melons and make sure that any cull melons were reloaded on the trailer - some buyers were known to cull melons and if you didn't take the culls with you they would load them on the freight car as soon as you left (at $.25 each this adds up). Finally, always get a signed receipt! The great thing about this job was that I got paid a full man's wages of $3.00 a day (12-14 hour days).
> As for the bicycle riding, I could do that by age 6. My grandfather would give me a dollar and tell me to run up to the store and "fetch me a 6 pack of Miller". Can you imagine an 8 year old going into a store these days and telling a clerk you were buying beer for your grandfather and walking out with a 6 pack?
> A couple of your fellow New Yorkers were part of my first college experiences. During freshman week a guy from Tennessee, two guys from NY City and I went for a ride "in the country"(now nearly downtown Nashville, TN). I learned several things on that drive. Before the ride I didn’t know any boys my age that couldn't swim (one knew and the other was going to learn), neither knew how to drive and the only cows they had ever seen were in the Bronx zoo. We actually stopped so they could walk up to a fence and look at the cows in a pasture (and no "you can't tell the bulls because they are the ones with horns"). I'm sure they found a lot of the things I did were "quaint". Except for a train trip to Washington DC and now to Nashville I had never been north of Plains, GA or west of Ozark, AL.

Thanks for recounting that, Sammie.
One of my regrets is that I didn't spend more time with the guys from the farms while I was in the service. They tended to group together and so did the city guys.
We might not have been able to get a 6 pack when we were kids, but a kid walking home with a "schooner" of beer was a familiar sight.
By the time I was old enough to drink beer, schooners had gone the way of the hand crank for cars.