The cause was easy enough to identify: Data parsed by Kuhls and her colleagues showed that drivers were speeding more, on highways and on surface streets, and plowing through intersections with an alarming frequency. Conversely, seatbelt use was down, resulting in thousands of injuries to unrestrained drivers and passengers. After a decade of steady decline, intoxicated-driving arrests had rebounded to near historic highs.
… The relationship between car size and injury rates is still being studied, but early research on the American appetite for horizon-blotting machinery points in precisely the direction you’d expect: The bigger the vehicle, the less visibility it affords, and the more destruction it can wreak.
Just my own experience and maybe due to frequency bias, but holy shit everyone seemed to lose their goddamn minds behind the wheel after Covid.
People seem to have gone “feral”.
Animals in the store?
No shoes/shirt?
Waiting your turn?
Treating other people (especially service workers)?
Nope. Just a feral return to “mine mine mine, me me me”
Yup. Everyone realized social norms/good behavior, was just a social shared agreement. If you opt out, and shit on the floor, it’s the other person’s fault for caring
People are the same as they have ever been, the US is just genuinely entering a state of collapse and people are more desperate and less able to cope with side quests in life that demand them to be kind and patient.
And I swear SOOOO many fucking people on their phones. Bitch, you aren’t that important. Put it the fuck down and drive.
Former firefighter: COVID didn’t start that.
That is not new tho. People now watching tv shows while driving is pretty new. And i assume people who do that are also on their phones at the same time.
We just got phone enforcement cameras, they’re cantilevered over the lanes
Yes! A TON of people have brain damage from COVID and have no idea they have brain damage from COVID.
https://twitter.com/yash25571056/status/1745048307335119358Yes. Covid unleashed a lot of people’s inner narcissism. Bunch of fucking me-mes.
A lot of people only go the speed limit because there are cars in the way
Some of them really really don’t like that at all
It works though
Apparently i’m a lot of people
I dunno but can we turn down the brightness on some of these fucking headlights
They need to mandate that headlights cannot be installed > 2-2.5 feet off the ground. Putting them higher than that does not benefit you in any way, it just fucks with other drivers.
If an 18 wheeled transport truck can have lights mounted at a reasonable height and brightness, so can your f150 or chevy Suburban.
Exactly, practically every semi has its headlights mounted just above the bumper. People saying “it’s the angle that matters” don’t understand that if you’re in a small car you’re getting blinded from both directions regardless of how the lights are angled.
The height doesn’t matter nearly as much as the angle they are pointing.
There are already rules about where they may point (for road legal lights, anyway) you shouldn’t get dipped headlights in your mirror or from oncoming traffic except briefly as they crest hills
The height is a problem as when a large vehicle is tailgating you the angle doesn’t matter much
I have a small car and even without being tailgated, excessively high headlights nearly blind me as they are as high or higher than my side mirrors or rear view mirror. Its so bad I’m tempted to wear sunglasses at times.
If the headlights are higher than another driver’s eyes, the light will go straight and downward into their eyes. There’s just no way to highlight the ground without blinding drivers in front of you if the headlights are so high.
If the head lights are angled properly then they won’t be shining straight down. They should be offset so they are pointing down and to the right. If you’re in front and you’re being blinded it’s because they aren’t angled.
The key word is “proper” installation. A lot of idiots don’t know how to do this.
These aren’t people that want to hear logic, they want to whine about people that can afford these stupid trucks.
It absolutely does improve visibility, but obviously impacts others
No joke, my MIL hit a dear the other day because she couldn’t see it due to a truck blinding her as it drove the opposite direction. Luckily she was only going 30 so the damage was minimal but it’s crazy they are allowed to blind drivers like that.
With you on that.
I live in a rural area with no street lights, and a lot of these redneck asshole trucks have two sets of headlights vertically, guaranteeing that you will be blinded
In my city, police have pretty much given up on doing any traffic enforcement.
same, why? i didnt see any cops during xmas new year, then this morning i see 3 highway patrols, probably on their way to an accident
Quiet quitting after Floyd protests hurt their feelings.
in nsw australia… yeah man sure
Same in mine, in Canberra, Australia. Maybe I’m just not driving at the times they’re doing drink driving enforcement. I recall when I was a youth the breathalyzers were set up randomly midnight to 4am
We do have camera enforcement of speed, red lights, and mobile phones
I’d prefer breathalyzers between 6 and midnight
My city definitely did breath testers for people coming home from work in the past
And the place does them well when they do them out of peak hour — they stop all traffic on a major road, test people, arrest them or let them continue
In peak hour they pull over cars they’re suspicious of. Driving badly, young drivers, etc
Hell yeah brother
Usual boot licking blah blah blah “They do so well, checking people with no sign of anything wrong happening”. goes hand in hand with a BAC level so low you can’t tell without a machine, because they are not intoxicated.
I saw a police pulling radar in a school zone right around when the kids get let out. Everyone still did 15 over the limit and the officer didn’t pull anyone. I’m sure they pulled people speeding faster than that but it seems they can’t just ticket the entire town when 10-15 over the limit is so normalized. People still tell me all the time a cop isn’t even allowed to pull you for just 10 over (which is false).
… Don’t you guys have speeding cameras? As in, you drive by too fast, it snaps a pic of your license plate and after a couple of weeks you get mail saying “surprise, bitch! Here’s a picture of you speeding. That’ll be $400 or you’re going to jail :)”?
Im just starting to see some of them but they all have warning signs before hand. We have a similar thing where your speed flashes on a lighted sign if it clocks you too fast, but since they aren’t enforced by anything the act more like a high score meter.
That’s wild imho. Where i’m at, there’s speeding cameras at fixed locations AND mobile speeding cameras that are hidden and moved around. And the only warning you get is the sign with the speed limit.
Those street speedometers we have aswell within towns. But the fact that you don’t know wether there is a speeding camera next to it makes it more effective i guess…
I have seen mobile speed cameras and cops with radar guns in school zones in wealthier parts of my town, and they pull over anyone more than 2kph over the limit
Wish I could say I’ve seen the same. I find it rare for people to do any less than 5 over in a school zone. The particular instance above was also influenced by the fact there is a highway entrance/exit about 1 km up the road from the school zone.
I’m not saying it’s the reason, but as soon as they do and the perp wrecks and kills themselves they have dipshits online whingeing about how the poor kid of only 24 didn’t deserve to die for simply speeding.
So its better to just let them keep speeding and wait until they kill or injure someone else rather than themselves? Does that really sound more fair? Many police departments will stop the chase if traffic is too heavy to safely pursue. The cops shouldn’t shoot the speeder but it’s defintely not on the cops if the speeder disobeys traffic laws, refuses to pull over, and attempts to evade police resulting in a collision/personal injury.
I agree with you.
It’s because we have so many entitled morons on the road, and we’re all stressed over the worsening human condition.
And because the roads are not designed to keep traffic at safe speeds, and don’t separate traffic from pedestrians and cyclists sufficiently, when those morons do something moronic they kill someone
Infrastructure can fix a lot of this problem - Australia is like mini-America in so many ways, but we allow speed cameras and red light cameras which reduce speeding marvelously, though I have been tailgated by someone offended I was only going 80km/h* in the 80 zone. They passed me illegally and unsafely
Even the fixed cameras do good work, even when everyone knows where they are as it’s hard to speed right after them as slow cars move into the fast lane to pass glacial traffic
I point at the bike I ride as a reason cars give me space, it’s a carbon fibre recumbent. Since it looks odd, people see it. But the bike lane is protected by paint on the route I mostly ride, and one driver was so busy looking at my odd bike that they went out of their lane into the bike lane. Luckily there was no cyclist just that distance in front of me - that’s a pretty regular person, driving mostly safely, but screwing up. If the bike lane was protected by a kerb the car would’ve been deflected.
*I calibrate my speedometer to GPS speed, so it’s accurate
Here in Canada I’ve noticed we are starting to use cameras as well, the only issue is there are lots of signs before it is installed and lots of signs when it is installed. That way you know where you can speed and where you can’t speed, which is usually just 1 or 2 intersections of cameras… It seems like a small improvement but they are too easy to avoid, especially for locals. Imagine if a traffic cop had to walk down the road and put a little sign up that says “radar trap ahead” before doing any radar.
My town has mitigated that problem by putting a mobile camera just after the fixed camera. The sign for the mobile camera is hidden by the slow traffic, but they catch all the people who speed up just after the fixed camera
People are now afraid of speeding anywhere around the cameras
I’ve also heard of arrays of cameras being used along an entire street. So even if you aren’t speeding at one camera, it will know your average speed across the whole street and if you were speeding between cameras.
Yep. Average speed cameras. They work great on roads with no exits or turns for a while. They detect your time entering the zone, and the time exiting and work out your average speed
They don’t work on city streets as 1 minute at a red light, or even 15 seconds traversing a roundabout, messes up the average
We also have aerial speed checks - a plane circling above a highway identifies speeding cars and radios to police ahead.
I’m taking this graph from wikimedia. It’s super weird, no?
In some other developed countries, you can even see how lockdowns brought down traffic deaths. It especially saved children. The US just… loses it?
People just went batshit over the pandemic for some reason. I don’t know if it was a nihilistic embrace of the void in the face of plague and death, or what, but in addition to garden-variety street racing and dangerous driving ballooning while the roads were lightly used, there’s been a huge increase in sideshows shutting down intersections, people just deciding not to pay for license plates or annual inspections, and generally making the roads more dangerous for everybody else.
I suspect that the anomaly in the US might be reflective of the way that social cohesion has corroded in the last decade or so. The pandemic broke us, but adhesion to the social contract has been getting weaker for a long time. People suddenly driving like maniacs is, in a sense, just a symptom of that breakdown.
Another hypothesis: American stroads are an unusually deadly design. Before the pandemic, though, rush hour limited speeds and artificially made the roads look safer than they were - it’s hard to kill people in stop and go traffic. The increase in hybrid and remote work since the pandemic means rush hour still isn’t back to pre pandemic levels.
But its happening on all road tupes, not just ‘stroads’
Is the increase in accidents even across all road types?
The data is not broken down by road type.
Injecting the anti stroad agenda helps nothing. Its not relevant here. It mutes whatever truths the anti stroad people have and thier advocates get categorized into annoying wackjob category.
The cause was easy enough to identify: Data parsed by Kuhls and her colleagues showed that drivers were speeding more, on highways and on surface streets, and plowing through intersections with an alarming frequency. Conversely, seatbelt use was down, resulting in thousands of injuries to unrestrained drivers and passengers. After a decade of steady decline, intoxicated-driving arrests had rebounded to near historic highs.
“Drivers were frustrated,” says Kuhls, now a professor of surgery at the Kirk Kerkorian School of Medicine at U.N.L.V. and chief of trauma at an affiliated public hospital. “My own theory is that whatever personal conflicts they had were exacerbated because they’d been sheltering in place during Covid. So they’d get on the road having self-medicated with drugs or alcohol, or they’d just be incredibly reckless.”
US has a very opportunistic culture, to an irrational degree apparently. If there’s less cars on the road people take it as an excuse to drive more recklessly.
Car sizes are getting larger in america to meet the fule efficiency requirements imposed by the government.
Car manufacturers could not meet these requirements, but they figured out that if they increase the weight of the car they could meet the fule efficiency.
Here is a video that explains it better then my ape brain could.
You don’t need to make the cars bigger to meet fuel economy requirements; it’s a decision by vehicle makers to make them bigger rather than take advantage of the more efficient engine designs available to produce a vehicle which uses less fuel.
It’s partly that, but the other aspect is the absurd “light truck” exemption where SUVs and pickup trucks have less stringent emissions standards. So there is less incentive to go the downsizing route, and instead make bigger and bigger cars because if you’re a car company, you make more money per vehicle this way.
No, it’s about fleet distribution, and classification.
Cars also got a lot faster than they used to be. Mostly due to many more gears in the transmission as well as much higher horsepower compared to cars even 15 years ago.
But also much safer and way more stopping power. But the best car is useless when the driver is browsing tiktok
stopping power
Yep. A single vehicle can take down a hopped up man, or a bear
(Really though I translated that to braking power)
Because our requirements for getting a license are basically nothing. You answer 20 is super basic questions half of which have fucking nothing to do with driving or have insanely retarded answers like “how many feet exactly should you turn off your high beams if there’s another car approaching” YOU TURN THEM OFF FUCKING IMMEDIATELY WHEN YOU SEE ANOTHER CAR!! Oh sorry I blinded you I was pretty sure that was about 500 ft my bad
And then the Practical test the vast majority of places do a quick little jaunt around the block on some insanely basic streets have you parallel park real quick and then you’re good to go. The drivers in America are more deadly because they learn literally fucking nothing from the process of acquiring a license
I looked into similar data from the NHTSA regarding accidents during lock down on the hypothesis the insurance companies would have an interest in WFH. I was stunned to see accidents did not decrease. Anecdotally i was working in field service during this period, and observed what seemed like less traffic, and yet the data disagreed with my impressions during the time.
Sure there were less cars on the street but the ones that WERE there were faaaar more likely to be the same kind of karen/kyle that shouts at mask wearers for somehow violating their ‘freedoms’.
Constantly angry people make terrible driving choices.
Yeah…usually the statistical methodology has changed to suit someone’s agenda, when you read shit like this.
If that is your experience, you should urgently review what news sources you rely on.
I have, for decades. This is the conclusion.
We’re practically a trustless country at this point. Lack of trust in others as well as government is highly correlated with aggressive shit driving.
In addition, as an often aggressive driver, boy is it irritating to be driving amongst the zombies that are all going 45 on the highway in the middle lane because they’re all staring at their phones.
It’s Mobile phones
We’ve had those for a minute. It’s not new.
While I agree 99% of people are fucking morons I am curious about something. I’ve been driving for awhile now and I’ve noticed that since 2019 it has gotten SIGNIFICANTLY worse. I’m curious if the increase in awful drivers is in anyway related to the current economy. We have nearly everyone working multiple jobs to stay afloat. Could this be causing people to be more reckless from a mix of exhaustion and the fact they feel forced to take risks and drive in order to maintain their relationships since they don’t have time to do it any other way? I am in no way justifying this behavior I’m merely just interested in if this is in anyway related. I really can’t express just how bad drivers have gotten in such a short span of time.
