About half of Americans (49%) say people in their area are driving more dangerously than before the coronavirus pandemic, while only 9% say people are driving more safely, according to a new Pew Research Center survey. What publicly available data there is on the subject suggests that those perceptions may be right, at least in part.
There’s no one definitive data source for how common “dangerous driving” is, or even necessarily agreement on what specific behaviors that involves. Most data on people’s actual (as opposed to self-reported) driving habits comes from encounters with law enforcement – arrests, citations, accident reports and the like. Thus, the resulting data can’t be representative of the entire driving population.
Nonetheless, there’s a fair amount of data indicating that Americans’ driving habits have worsened over the past five years, at least in some ways.
If you ride a bicycle and hang out with cycling people that have been in the scene for a while, this is a fairly common topic of conversation. Drivers seem to have gotten more careless (phone use I’m guessing), more reckless (lowered concern and empathy for others), and more angry (this one seems obvious) over the last five years or so. Especially towards cyclists. I would say before five years ago, I would have someone throw something at me or be purposefully aggressive like, maybe once a year. Now it’s a monthly occurrence.
I avoid huge swaths of my city now, and most rural roads. After being buzzed (once by less than a foot) three separate times by three different trucks in three consecutive weeks on rural paved roads with assholes yelling at me and throwing a can at me out of the window, I traded in my road bike and bought a gravel bike. Now I stick to gravel for long rides. I’ve got more options to bail off the road, traffic is extremely infrequent, and I know if someone is coming behind me very easily. If it’s a lifted truck, I pull off and wait until they pass. Annoys the shit out of me to have to do it, but it’s not worth dying.
The frequency at which people illegally and unsafely pass me in order to run red lights that I stopped at has definitely increased in the last two years.
Before the pandemic 10 over the limit was normalized in my area, now it seems 20 over is acceptable, even in school zones. It genuinely feels unsafe when I do the limit on some roads because of the agressive passes and tailgating. We’ve got some speed cameras but they are only effective near the camera, you can literally see the wave of traffic speed up once past it.
What bothers me most is it used to be usual suspects speeding like this, the fancier cars, lifted trucks, and modified shitboxs. Now everyone drives fast and speeds inlcuding the minivans and soccer mom SUVs. It really highlights how ignoring speeding for so long has made a hive mentality of its okay to speed now because everyone does it.
The light rail here in Seattle, going both North and South, was just interrupted because some idiot driver decided to try to beat the trains as they both were passing each other at an intersection. One idiot driver managed to take down two trains (remarkably, the driver seems to have been fine).
“We gotta rip out the rail, clearly this is a danger to the public” or " is there any way we can give cars the prioirty at a train crossing?"
To be fair, the intersection that this happened at is in fact really obnoxious for anyone trying to cross the tracks. As they should, the trains have priority. The downside is that this means that if you’re trying to cross the street (driving or walking or biking, doesn’t matter), you can end up waiting there for a really long time. I don’t know why that particular intersection is so much worse than all the others.
Most of Seattle’s light rail is either underground or on a raised platform, but this stretch of road has the tracks at grade with the rest of traffic. Terrible decision.
Still, maybe don’t try to beat any train, let alone two of them at once.
In PA it’s legal to pass right if the person in front is turning left and I hate it, but recently I’ve noticed people not slowing down or rolling through grassy shoulders on the right just to stop and get a soda down the road. People walk these roads at night for jobs but folks don’t care. :(
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is it just me or is this graph saddam hussein?
Nonetheless, there’s a fair amount of data indicating that Americans’ driving habits have worsened over the past five years, at least in some ways.
I wager there is also a fair amount of data indicating pedestrian, scooter, and bicyclists habits have worsened over the past 5 years too. Look up from phones, stop running stop signs, obay traffic control devices, etc.
Two-ton death machine, pedestrians, and bicycles. Hmm. One of these seems different than the others.
Guy’s only post is in a car enthusiast community, comes to FuckCars, “BuT WhAt ABouT mY ‘BoTH SIdEs’ ARguMeNt!”
Yup. Not hiding that the slightest.
Fuckcars brought me here when this echo chamber spilled into other communities.
Just keeping things grounded by pointing out the obvious. 🙂 Things tend to run away when y’all get hive mind on Lemmy.
🙄
Edit: I do like that we’re two people that don’t downvote others just because we find them annoying, so we’ve got that going for us, which is nice.
Ha yeah. I’m not here to troll, pick on folks, or be mean. I may not agree with stuff posted here, and I’m not afraid to speak my mind but there are a couple things I do agree with.
There was a time this community was running on emotions; exaggerating and name calling. It’s gotten a lot better I’ll give fuckcars credit for that.
Upvote because we’re humans here for community.
I hear you. I’ve definitely read some eye-rolly hyperbole in this community. I walk a fair bit. I ride a bicycle. I also drive a car. I’m not subscribed to this community, I just visit it when it pops up on the feed.
That said, of the places I’ve lived, the ones that had good pedestrian and cycling infrastructure and good public transit tended to be more pleasant places to live, but I’m not saying that’s directly causal. I think probably it’s more that communities that try to support more walkable/rideable places to live also tend to have city and state governments more invested (or at least interested) in creating more enjoyable communities overall. Who knows, though. Definitely the level of baseline anger and aggression from your average person differs pretty wildly depending on where you are in this country.
My city definitely fits that description. We spend $150 million annually to build/reallocate infrastructure to bikes. I drive by miles of empty bike lanes every day to work. (Blue collar labor with tools kind)
I do get frustrated when congestion is engineered into roads in the name of safety for those who don’t exist. We have a new “bike box” that prohibits right turns on red and I’ve never seen anyone ever use it.
It wouldn’t sting so bad if the money we wasted were actually used. Empty lanes as far as the eye can see …
We had a neat thing happen in my city recently.
A bridge was closed for repairs for 4 months. During that time, no one used the road approaching the bridge on either side! That’s a ton of lane that nobody was using, but we decided to not take it out.
Shockingly, once the bridge was replaced, drivers started using those two sections of road again.
I’m sure you’re right but as someone who’s been hit by all of these except the scooter only the car really hurts
I doubt it. Where’s the data?
