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.
Thereās no one definitive data source for how common ādangerous drivingā is, or even necessarily agreement on what specific behaviors that involves. Most data on peopleās actual (as opposed to self-reported) driving habits comes from encounters with law enforcement ā arrests, citations, accident reports and the like. Thus, the resulting data canāt be representative of the entire driving population.
Nonetheless, thereās a fair amount of data indicating that Americansā driving habits have worsened over the past five years, at least in some ways.
Two-ton death machine, pedestrians, and bicycles. Hmm. One of these seems different than the others.
Guyās only post is in a car enthusiast community, comes to FuckCars, āBuT WhAt ABouT mY āBoTH SIdEsā ARguMeNt!ā
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. š Things tend to run away when yāall get hive mind on Lemmy.
š
Edit: I do like that weāre two people that donāt downvote others just because we find them annoying, so weāve got that going for us, which is nice.
Ha yeah. Iām not here to troll, pick on folks, or be mean. I may not agree with stuff posted here, and Iām 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. Itās gotten a lot better Iāll give fuckcars credit for that.
Upvote because weāre humans here for community.
I hear you. Iāve definitely read some eye-rolly hyperbole in this community. I walk a fair bit. I ride a bicycle. I also drive a car. Iām not subscribed to this community, I just visit it when it pops up on the feed.
That said, of the places Iāve lived, the ones that had good pedestrian and cycling infrastructure and good public transit tended to be more pleasant places to live, but Iām not saying thatās directly causal. I think probably itās 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 donāt exist. We have a new ābike boxā that prohibits right turns on red and Iāve never seen anyone ever use it.
It wouldnāt sting so bad if the money we wasted were actually used. Empty lanes as far as the eye can see ā¦
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! Thatās 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.