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Comment by standardUser | Hacker News Reader

I wish more people took road safety seriously. I was driving around California a lot over the holidays and was appalled (as usual) by how few drivers bother to use turn signals on the freeway. It's such a mind-bogglingly simple thing to do that any person who can't manage it should probably be denied a license.

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I have been laughed at by passengers in my car before for using my turn signals when no other cars were around. That really blew my mind the first time. Why anyone would try shaming someone else for adhering to safe driving practices is beyond me.

If you just use them all the time, you don't have to remember to use them in the right situation. That was a concept more than one person I know couldn't understand.

This was in California with other licensed drivers.

Indeed. Beyond that, it's also entirely possible there's someone -- a pedestrian on the sidewalk ahead, a driver about to exit their driveway... -- that you don't see but who is interested in what you're planning to do. (This happens to me commonly as a pedestrian.)

That implies poor training. It sounds like the people involved do not know why they are supposed to signal in the first place.

It's not training: they 100% know that you're supposed to signal, stop at red lights or stop signs, park in the middle of a traffic lane, not cross a solid double yellow to pass someone going the speed limit, etc. The people who do that are choosing to do it because they feel whatever they're doing is more important and they know that most police departments stopped doing traffic enforcement years ago because it's beneath post-9/11 warrior cops unless they're looking for an excuse to search someone's car.

But do they know why they are supposed to do those things? You might try asking someone sometime. The result could be surprising.

The ever-so-slight flicking of the wrist is apparently an arduous task for some people.

> I have been laughed at by passengers in my car before for using my turn signals when no other cars were around

The times when I think "no one is around me" are the times using my turn signal has been MOST useful. Same thing in parking lots. If I see all the other cars on the road then I can drive defensively and avoid them. The turn signal is important for the cars that I DON'T see because it gives them a better chance of avoiding ME.

That's exactly it. Because I think I'm alone doesn't mean I am.

My blind spot indicator in my car has 100% prevented me from merging when I shouldn't, though I can't say with certainty how often. I'm a little embarrassed to say, too, that I've been honked at in the past for merging when I shouldn't. I think twice in 20 years, but still. I have no reason to think those incidents couldn't have been severe.

No one is 100% sure what's surrounding them at any time, plain and simple.

This is one argument I see for autonomous driving which actually seems valid to me. Those vehicles will be able to see far more than a human facing forward with a few mirrors. At the moment I think the problem is that the human can make far more sense from what they see, though.

Don't rely on your blind spot indicator, it's there to help, not replace a blind spot check. They often don't pick up motorcycles and especially not bikes. I have seen them not light up many many times when I'm passing through someone's blind spot on my motorcycle, when the car in front of me does set it off...

If the sideview mirrors are set properly, there shouldn't be a blindspot.

If you can see the side of your own vehicle in your side view mirrors, they are set improperly.

When set properly, cars in the lane next you on either side should transition from your rearview mirror to your sideview mirror to your driver or passenger window without any gap in coverage.

The sideview mirrors are to see other cars, not your own car. You're in your own car, so there is no reason to set it to see the side of your own car. If you can see the side of your own car, then angle the mirrors out until you can't. Next time someone passes, check to make sure you see them transition your mirrors properly, it they don't tweak your mirrors a little more.

You're not wrong, but as a motorcyclist, I'd prefer everyone look back regardless of how correctly their mirrors are adjusted.

I definitely don't rely on it, I agree with you. I think what happens is I have moments of thinking I should be able to merge, then checking the indicator and realizing I was wrong. In those cases it's very likely I'd do a thorough check, but it's a great reminder otherwise that my gut sense of my surrounding is incorrect, and I do need to check thoroughly and, for lack of a better explanation, assume I'm always wrong until I've fully checked my surroundings.

It's even more silly when you figure that consciously deciding whether or not you are going to use them takes a lot more effort than just doing it for every turn automatically. We only have so much of our attention to parcel out, and using it for pointless things while driving is negligence.

You reminded me about a situation with my father: basically he uses signals for overtaking/turning, not before it to signal the intent. There are many people who do it this way. He would look around forever in the mirrors etc. trying to start the manoeuvre but won't let anyone know his intent until it's already happening.

Incidentally, last week we were installing a fridge, and while cutting the packaging with a sharp knife, he told me, without looking, "be careful!" (without saying "yo, I'm cutting stuff with the sharp knife"), around 0.1s before cutting my hand ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

This made me realize how prevalent and dangerous are poor communication skills.

> he uses signals for overtaking/turning, not before it to signal the intent.

This is the real reason. People aren’t incapable or put out by having to use the turn signals, they are choosing not to signal precisely because it reveals intent, and they are afraid of revealing intent. (Same is often true in many other social situations and at work!) I know I’ve done this myself in the past, and I know other people who will admit it. Fear of being cut off, fear of having someone not let you in, general fear of someone using your intent against you rather than accommodate you.

I think we need to figure out how to teach not just that signaling intent is safer, but that it works and people will accommodate a signal far more often than not. We also need to learn as drivers to respect other’s intent, that when a signal is on and it’s close but they have room, it doesn’t mean accelerate to close the gap, but that we should let them. Being nice is how we get others to be nice back.

"using your intent against you rather than accommodate you"

The Chicago way

I was about to say it’s probably everywhere in the US (world?), but then I remembered the only physical vehicle collision I’ve ever had in my life while moving was in Chicago, someone so determined to prevent me from merging they crashed into the back of my vehicle.

My wife laughs and prods at me constantly for reflexively putting on my seat belt when I get into parked cars, using my turn signal when there are no other vehicles (or I'm indicating that I'm leaving a roundabout), cleaning my windows/mirrors at the gas station if a long highway drive in bad weather is reducing visibility with salt/mud/etc, carrying a belt cutter, safety kit and air/booster/tools in the trunk, refusing to drive after having a drink, you name it.

She's an intelligent person, accomplished in her own scientific career and a stimulating person to talk to, all great signals about her brain, but dumb driving sense pervades all intellectual capacities I think. I sincerely worry she will die in a car accident. She is positive it would be me, though - she thinks I'm "overthinking" driving and driving safety, which introduces far more danger.

I've been in two car accidents. Maybe that helps. In one case my friend backed us up into a street light really fast because he seemingly didn't realize the accelerator was the brake. The other time I was crawling down a steep driveway in bad weather and my car slid off the driveway, down a hill, and ended up in the ditch below. It looked like a severe accident at a glance, haha. It was actually very slow and boring as it happened.

At any rate, these events instilled in me that small errors can have large consequences. The feeling of your car not doing what you want it to, then being in a situation out of your control, really sucks. I'm not interested in the slightest in finding out how badly that can go. Whether it's because I left my seat belt off, I had a beer, I couldn't see out of my rear window properly, I got stranded in the cold - these are all enormously bad reasons to get hurt or die.

A lot of people have never faced consequences or witnessed the disproportionate result of minor errors, so perhaps driving is one of those things were (unfortunately) many of us learn the hard way, often bringing innocent bystanders with us.

same here. a nice example is the repair stuff including inner tubes I tend to carry around on bike tours (like 10km and more). she also made fun of me for being so well equipped. and then one day she had a flat tire. good thing I had that stuff with me. because otherwise we'd have had to walk it for quite some time.

Ha, likewise - I used to tour really far (300-600km in a day sort of things) and sometimes I'd make the whole trip without a hitch, other times I'd get several flats in a day. It became second nature to assume my bike was going to get a flat soon, so I still carry it in a saddle bag everywhere I go.

Of course she thought it was silly too, but yeah, we cycle everywhere and I've fixed a lot of flats now.

In their defense, I only figured out why you should bring kit everywhere because I've been stranded badly, totally unprepared. I was finishing a 400km ride, around 40km to go at 1am, and my tire went. It was cold, raining, low/no traffic, no cell service for most of the trek back, etc. I got home as the sun was rising, haha.

600km per day by bike? that's an average of 25km/h for every single hour of a day ...

You're right, what I should say is per continuous riding session - I used to take more like 38 hours for 600s (just under the cutoff, haha). There are breaks, usually 30m max, but I tended to average more like 18kph over complete ride. I wanted to reach 20kph, but had a kid instead – that kind of threw a stick in taking long rides.

Here's more info if you're curious, it's a fun sport called randonneuring: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randonneuring

Here's an example 400km route from an area near me run by the BC Randonneurs: https://ridewithgps.com/routes/33536016

It's a great way to get to know areas better. Very meditative, challenging, and rewarding.

To me, your behavior seems like basic and uncontroversial common sense, while her behavior is absolutely crazy and hard to understand.

I finally bought a new & modern car a few years ago, and one of my favorite features is that it beeps at me when I turn on my signal and someone’s in my blind spot. At this point I can no longer count the number of times I was unaware someone was there and I even started moving into their space but got a beep notification and avoided turning into them. Using my signal is becoming absolutely reflexive now, because it helps me “feel” my surroundings and avoid doing things that surprise other drivers when I can’t see them.

"Integrity is doing the right thing, even when no one is watching." — C. S. Lewis, allegedly.

The one time I was nearly in a serious accident was when I was in the fast lane on a nearly empty motorway - apart from a line of lorries in the slow lane, moved from the fast lane into the middle line without indicating... but one of the lorry drivers also moved into that lane nearly clipping my rear.

Yeah I was pretty shaken up about that one, because if he had clipped me, I would have ended up being crushed by a line of lorries.

Moral of the story: always indicate even if you don't think you need to.

> If you just use them all the time, you don't have to remember to use them in the right situation.

I know of dead cave divers who followed protocols only when they really needed to and then one day made a category error and didn't follow the protocol when they really needed to.

I've gotten crap for following through the motions of protocols when they I "didn't need to" but if you do it all the time then you never make those kinds of category errors. There's no downside to always following protocols, there's high downside for making category errors that you wouldn't make if you just always followed protocols.

Similarly you should always use your parking brake, even if you are on flat ground so that you never make a category error there (or just get hit by someone when you're on flat ground and have a rollaway).

Similarly, signal your intentions every single time. You're doing it for the pedestrian you didn't see, or even just some idiot flying up the shoulder of the highway who shouldn't be there, but signal your intentions to take the exit so you move predictably.

See also the normalization of deviance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ljzj9Msli5o

I once stopped and asked my passenger to get out, in random part of the city, after big argument about seatbelts.

Not using a turn signal is probably the least offensive thing that I see while driving around SoCal, to be perfectly honest with you. Not a day goes by that I don't see people blowing through stop signs and even red lights now. I don't even drive that much, really... Under 10 miles a day during the week, all local traffic. But I still see people every single day being extremely dangerous and acting without any regard for themselves or the people around them.

Just being on or near the roads stresses me out now. Even if I'm just on the sidewalk, I can detect a higher level of background anxiety happening. I've lost any degree of trust I ever had in other drivers.

My observations have led me to believe that the lack of accountability in cars is owed to a lack of enforcement. If the rules aren't enforced then they cease to be rules.

edit/ Words are hard.

I doubt enforcement has changed significantly. I'm more willing to believe that this is part of the slow unraveling of the social contract in the United States. Everyone hates each other, and now people are driving like it too.

That may very well be. Especially in California.

Where I grew up in Ohio, there was a lot of traffic enforcement. Conversations with family leads me to believe there is still some degree of enforcement happening in that area, But I've seen little or none in California, outside of I-5 speed traps.

Traffic enforcement using police officers is just not very effective. People are bad at judging the risk of driving, especially as environment changes (highway to city) and as such do not very well self enforce. Speed traps only slow drivers immediately after the police officers (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/245559162_Study_of_.... The only enforcement that will actually move the needle in my opinion is automated enforcement such as speed governors and cameras.

Who's taking about speeding? I'm talking about people who treat red arrows like stop signs or worse. People that don't stop for stop signs. People that don't yield to pedestrians. People that turn right on red in no right in red zones. People that stop their cars in the middle of the street in 55 mph zones for $REASONS, like when it sprinkles in SoCal. Speeding is a fact of life around here. I moved out here in the 2000s. Myself, and the people that I know that live here and who I've bothered to talk to about this, do not recall seeing anyone run red lights or stop signs on a regular basis. Today it's feeling like a routine occurrence.

"people that treat red arrows like stop signs..." I'm not sure what you mean here. Are you saying people stop at the red arrow then turn? In some cases that is legal. A right red arrow out a left on a one way street.

I mean people stopping at a red arrow for a left turn, looking around, getting impatient, and then taking the left anyway.

Is it hate thou? Or some variant of FOMO?

- Politicians are regularly lining their pockets

- (Big) business is stretching the law beyond reasonable doubt

- those influencers get a bigger house|car|pool|party just from looking

I am not sure if this is not "everyone is breaking the rules for their benefit, why shouldn't I do the same?"

I live on a busy street and we can see into cars at the stoplight.

The majority of drivers have their phones in their hands while waiting at the light and always take an extra second or two to get going when the light turns green.

People don't realize the gravity of operating two-ton deathmachines and would prefer to do anything but pay attention to the road and their surroundings.

> The majority of drivers have their phones in their hands while waiting at the light and always take an extra second or two to get going when the light turns green.

> People don't realize the gravity of operating two-ton deathmachines and would prefer to do anything but pay attention to the road and their surroundings.

I agree with your latter statement but I don't think that overdramatizing helps. Someone looking at their phone while the car is stopped at a light is not creating much of a hazard, even if it does take them an extra second or two to get going.

Yes, agreed, we should not exaggerate. But guaranteed that more problems are caused by drivers who are looking at their phones while stopped than those that continue to pay attention to traffic. Because some amount of the distracted ones will suddenly start moving again when something has happened in the meantime to make that dangerous or inappropriate.

They're still active participants in traffic. Someone who is waiting for the signal without the distraction of a smartphone will have seen the flows of traffic commence and stop in the other lanes and the roads that meet at the crossing, and will go into the crossing more relaxed and with better situational awareness than the person who just got jarred from chatting with someone about whether to get take out, and “oh, could you drive past the supermarket to get some wine?” into moving because of the honking behind them. They are also much more likely to notice irregular or otherwise unsafe behaviour by others around them (like a kid on a BMX dashing across at the pedestrian crossing too late to beat the lights).

Collectively, these moments of reduced attention cause way more harm than they should, all because so many people can't leave their damn phone alone while operating a vehicle in traffic.

Distracted driving is absolutely not an over-dramatization. We're not talking about a "second or two" as you so blithely put it; sure the action might only take a few seconds (let's be reasonable and say it takes 5 seconds to reach out, grab your phone, rotate it to the correct orientation, open it, read the notification, parse the information, return your phone to its holder, return your hands to the wheel, return your eyes to the road), but the context rebuilding _after_ the distraction is brutal.

We're taking 10 to 20 seconds of complete context loss. Your mind is no longer on "I'm driving" it's on "I guess I can swing by Cub and grab some milk, wait, did I already pass the Cub? Maybe Rainbow is open.."

You will have outdated information on the location of every object around you. Is the old lady still waiting to cross on the other side of the intersection? Is the cyclist still blitzing the red or did he make it? Is that SUV that was coming up still behind me, or has it merged into the turn lane? That batch of 3 cars crossing in front is gone, what was behind them?

To rebuild this context you need to do quite a lot. Basically you need a full cycle of the attentive, aware "I'm driving" brain loop we all use when driving to get caught back up. When you put your phone back are you doing a full 360 degree update? Check left, right, left? Lean out and see what the oncoming traffic looks like? Check all your mirrors, glance over your left and right shoulders to check the blind spots? Lean your head forward and back to glance around your A-pillar support blind spots?

Check your phone quick, put it down and take the right-hand turn you were waiting for? Bet you just checked traffic on the left and then gunned it, good chance to run over the pedestrian on your right who just determined that you were yielding, and stepped into the intersection.

Glance at your phone right as the lights turn green, pull ahead into the intersection and take your protected left-hand turn? Whoops you got T-Boned, turns out the green light didn't come with a green arrow as well, and you were supposed to yield to oncoming traffic. You lost that context when you glanced at the phone and all your brain remembers was Green means Go.

Distracted Driving is multiple times more dangerous than Drunk Driving. "I was at an intersection and stopped" doesn't mean distraction won't happen.

The sibling posters have covered it, but the stop-and-go phone driver already has greatly reduced situational awareness because they missed out on the 3-5 seconds of events before the light turns green.

When I'm stopped at a light, I will check my rear view and side mirrors just for any cyclists, motorcyclists splitting lanes, or even for distracted drivers who might rear end me. I may pull forward a few extra inches to let the occasional car behind me make their right turn. Drivers focused on their phones can't extend this courtesy.

I let them know with a gentle, three-second horn blare. Seems to help.

Because enforcement and deterrence is too light

Denying a license won't prevent people from driving. The whole driver license thing is honestly a joke due to the entire country's survival being 100% reliant on cars.

Fines/jail time is needed instead.

Wouldn't that naturally happen once you make mistakes without a license?

Yes. But a mistake implies a likelihood of some damage. Better to do it earlier if practical. I'm not sure if it is though. (practical)

No--society is ridiculously lenient towards any driving offense.

The problem in California is I've seen countless times were other cars speed up to block me when I use my turn signal to change lanes.

I still use them, but I can understand why that deters some people.

I once visited Istanbul and sat in a bus during rush hour. Cars seemed to just go wherever they'd like, but only when a car wasn't using the turn signal everybody started honking.

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