Two days ago I was cycling along a rural road; slightly before an intersection (a road to the left, like this: -|) a guy behind me started to pass me on the left lane and a woman on the intersecting road tried turning right.
After he passed me, in what seemed like a few seconds I realized that they would surely crash - the woman wasn’t looking in front of her (looking to the left to see if she can enter), and the guy wouldn’t be able to go to the right lane in time. And so they did. A frontal crash, but no major injuries as far as I could see (they both walked out of their cars).
What’s interesting about this is that both are at fault: the woman should not just check her left, but also look where she’s driving. The guy shouldn’t have tried to pass me before an intersection - that’s illegal. But both made those simple mistakes and it resulted in major damage to their vehicles and endangered their lives. But as tempting as it would be to call them bad drivers and move on, this made me think a bit about safety and cars.
Is it really a good idea for so many people to be driving, from a basic safety standpoint? We require people to have a certain skillset to operate heavy machinery and exhaustive training in every other instance except for cars - where standards are so low even your average Joe Blow can pass the test. And this is in Europe, btw. Cars are just fundamentally unsafe for a general user. The deaths from car crashes are treated as an inevitable reality, when in other modes of transportation things were done to make them safer and it worked, similar things happened in many industries with industrial machinery. Only with cars do we accept this lack of safety and shitty outcomes.
The problem is we give a heavy, fast piece of machinery to people who are a wide cross-section of society and may be unqualified, or at times tired or distracted, and make mistakes. This can happen even to professionals, but if there were far less cars on the roads, the potential consequences of those mistakes would be far less severe. It takes small moments of distraction for a tragedy to happen, and it would be difficult to expect from people as a group to never make mistakes - but this isn’t accounted for when crafting traffic laws. Those don’t seem to effectively stop people from making mistakes, they just infrequently penalize them.
I’m not a good driver, I don’t want to drive. Please let me not drive.
I believe that good driving requires empathy. Empathy for other road users - pedestrians, horses, bikes, cars, whatever - makes you a calm, courteous and safe driver.
Empathy requires a lot of brain power - you need to be able to analyse your surroundings and anticipate your needs and the needs of others, in real time and at speed . I reckon most people lack the discipline to free up the head space required to be empathetic. A proportion will lack the head space to do much more than just drive the car, but that might be my cynical misanthropy creeping in.
Absolutely.
I’ve always gotten around by bicycle as where I’ve lived it’s always been the easiest form of transport and I never felt that I wanted to have a car. Around 30 I was thinking it might be nice to move to the countryside, and for that I’d probably need to be able to drive, so I learned to drive. Some of the things I learned at driving school made me feel a lot more empathy for motorists actually, since I realised that sometimes I ride in their blind spot, or make drastic manoeuvres that could perhaps be alarming to them, so I think it improved my ability to cycle safely. Conversely, as I walk and cycle nearly all the time, as a driver I’m very careful around pedestrians and cyclists and always give cyclists plenty of space when overtaking.
To be honest, here in Kyoto, most people are not total assholes, and they probably still ride bicycles around their neighbourhood, so it’s not considered an elitist or hipster mode of transport. I think this really helps everyone consider other road users as humans, regardless of the mode of transport. There are definitely still complete wankers around, of course, but I don’t sense much aggression from any road users most of the time.
Your last paragraph including something that resonated with me. I do think some have come to view cycling as something that is elitist/hipster, at least as a distinct subculture away from the mainstream - with its own lingo and uniform.
I think it’s that in the US, UK and many other countries, cycling is just not convenient for normal people as a form of everyday travel due to the way many cities are designed, resulting in the type of cyclists you see generally being younger, braver people commuting, and those who cycle as a hobby or for fitness. In countries where cycling is a convenient means of transport, such as the Netherlands and parts of Asia, there is a much wider variety of people on bikes, including mothers with children, old men riding with their pet dog in the basket, and even motorists will probably spend some time on a bicycle, as it might be a convenient way to get around their neighbourhood or pick up some groceries.
I think that this makes it a lot easier to create a stereotype of cyclists in places like the UK, where the mainstream rightwing press writes regular hit pieces of cyclists, as the image of “the cyclist” is easier to imagine as “the other” for a larger portion of the population.
Yeah people act like squirrels behind the wheel its terrifying. Big part of why I stopped riding my motorcycle. There was this one intersection where everyday, without fail, a car would go through the light, get up to speed, look at there phone and drift onto the wrong side of the road. Everyday.
So one day I’m sitting waiting to make a left and I can see the person across from me looking at their phone. Light doesn’t recognize my bike so I just gotta let it cycle before I go. Guy gets a green and starts driving without looking up. Just slowly drifting straight towards me. Eventually I hop off and just try to put the bike between me and the car and brace for impact. Guy looks up at the last second gives a little “teehee you caught me” smirk as he veers back into his lane.
I have seen that exact smirk so many times. Its the exact same on everyone
It would be a huge contribution to safety if cars weren’t ridiciulusly big, like SUVs. Where I’m from, Germany, once you pass the driving exam, your driver’s licence ist valid for life. There are neither, at least for cars, additional check-ups regarding medical conditions (as pointed out by @piper11), nor any mandatory refreshing lessons regarding changes in traffic rules or the overall ability to operate a vehicle.
The driver’s license is handed out with a leap of faith. If traffic safety would really matter that much, a general psychological test should have to be performed before obtaining a license. And that’s where the car lobby comes into the game: If people would have to pass a psychological exam, probably half of the drivers would not be deemed fit to be on the road.
Unfortunately, it’s the reckless drivers who are seen by the auto-lobby as potential customers for new cars. Those who are buying overly motorized cars are more prone to buy a newer model after a couple of years. Police will handle these kind of drivers with kid gloves. You have to be driving *really *recklessy when you would to be stopped by police. On the other hand, drivers of small cars are not to be considered good customers by the auto-lobby - as they are satisfied with what they have. They don’t replace their vehicle often. That’s why overly motorized cars and also SUVs exist: Asshole cars are marketed to asshole people.
I don’t think people should drive for the simple reason that for most of history, we never experienced traveling at such high speeds. We don’t have the reaction time required to handle that, especially when the stakes are so high.
There are also medical conditions that happen so slowly, people don’t notice them. Here in Germany, no medical examinations are required for older drivers. You are 80, can’t walk properly anymore? The car lobby will fight for your right to still drive your SUV. Or else we would have to think about rural public transportation.
Before I had a cataract surgery, I thought my vision was not good but acceptable, just need new glasses. Only after the surgery I realized how bad it was (there are some weeks between left and right eye surgery, so one has a side by side comparison). Good thing that I stopped driving cars in 1995.
When there were first murmurs of self-driving cars, I used to think I wanted nothing to do with it and I didn’t want it to come to pass.
Now that I’ve been driving for a long time… Two things: I try to be careful af but I’ve certainly made mistakes while driving so I acknowledge I am imperfect myself. But… The number of crazy things I’ve witnessed or read about in the news? I can’t wait for the cars to reliably drive themselves!
I trigger the record function on my dash cam when I worry that I could have done things better. Watching the footage has helped me find opportunities for learning and development.
Reminder that a covid symptom is seemingly permanent terrible spatial reasoning, people were already terrible drivers but they’re worse than ever now.
If you haven’t seen his article please look it’s SO much worse than you are imagining.
Most drivers like to think they are the best driver on the road because it’s the one task they’ve done the most in their lifetime. The reality is that they’re all still terrible at it and they’re still allowed to continue doing it.
Car safety got a lot better though, but I agree it is still bad.
Worth noting that only counts for car vs car safety, it has only gotten worse from the cyclist/pedestrian point of view.
Maybe in the US. The smaller cars in Europe also got a lot safer for pedestrians and cyclists.
I am absolutely not defending cars, but the accident statistics clearly show that it was much worse 30-40 years ago.
Your achievements in Europe are temporary. Station wagons are rapidly being replaced by SUVs and small cars are being replaced by crossovers. No country is safe until we push back and educate the general public.
This is exactly right. Cars are insanely heavy, and carry an unfathomable (for the average person) amount of energy with them, oftentimes to move 1 FUCKING PERSON. Simply because of how many people are on the road, it is quite dangerous to drive.
I agee but also… They are just waaay too handy and unreplacable for many folks. So many peoples lives rely on these machines and taking them away would need dramatic change for those people.
People shouldn’t have to rely on them. Cities shouldn’t be designed in a way that forces everyone to have to drive to get anywhere and do the things that people need to do.
no one said to take them away. many people drive because they have no other option. creating those other options means less people will think they need to drive, meaning less traffic and shite drivers
Cities don’t just spontaneously exist. There are people that made the decisions causing people to “need” cars. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxykI30fS54
