this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2024
46 points (97.9% liked)

Fuck Cars

9791 readers
285 users here now

A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!

Rules

1. Be CivilYou may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.

2. No hate speechDon't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.

3. Don't harass peopleDon't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.

4. Stay on topicThis community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.

5. No repostsDo not repost content that has already been posted in this community.

Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.

Posting Guidelines

In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:

Recommended communities:

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 18 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago)

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.