America's roads are more dangerous, as police pull over fewer drivers
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Policing is most certainly one of the contributing reasons to danger on our streets and highways, but I'm surprised they did not mention the change in traffic patterns after the pandemic.
Prior to the pandemic, 6 lane highways would be backed up because traffic volumes were very high, resulting in slower speeds. Slower speeds are safer for everyone when a crash does happen to take place.
Post-pandemic, or whatever you want to call current times, have different traffic patterns, and there is less congestion on these expansive highways, allowing people to feel safer while moving at more dangerous speeds. Even if the same number of crashes occur, higher speeds increases the risk of danger for everyone.
This is also a contributing reason to why a lot US roads are more dangerous than other western countries. We have a lot more roads that are designed to carry many more cars, and when they aren't carrying that many cars, they become very easy to speed on.
We need to look further at the cause, which is highway and road design, in addition to the symptoms, which are dangerous driver behaviors. You can address the symptoms, but as long as the cause is still relevant, the symptoms will persist.
I watch a lot of dash cam footage and probably the most common cause of crashes related to poor road design are poorly timed traffic light changes when dealing with an unprotected green.
Imagine a typical 4-way intersection with traffic lights. All lanes coming from east/west are red. Lanes going north/south are green, with the left turns having an unprotected green.
A car is traveling north and is turning left. They've entered the intersection, but are waiting for cars traveling straight south. Then, ALL AT ONCE, the green lights turn yellow.
What happens so often? A southbound car guns it to beat their yellow. Meanwhile, the person that was turning left guns it as well to beat THEIR yellow. Boom, you've got a crash.
If they were to change the traffic light cycle so that the lanes going straight went yellow and then red FIRST, wait a second, and THEN make the left-turn lanes go yellow and then red, these types of crashes could be significantly reduced.
The first one is the utter shit that's allowed to legally drive on US roads. Self-built contraptions galore, not to mention many US states seem to not require a regular technical inspection beyond making sure the exhaust system passes limits. Meanwhile here, you have to have your car checked over every two to five years to make sure it's road worthy. If you ignore that long enough, you can actually get hit with a criminal charge.
The second one is driver's education. Like, we have dozens of hours theoretical and practical education by accredited institutions ans educators, and exams for both. No such things as self-learned or learned by parents.
Germany's roads are very safe, and that despite not much police being on the road - it's rare to get pulled over.
Other inputs of note are the de facto requirement that nearly everyone has to drive, including people with lots of free time, disposable income (or both) on their hands, which means for the most part young single men addicted to adrenaline rush of speed and prioritize making the car go fast (or appear to go fast), above all else. or old empty nesters finally able to spend their weekends amateur wrenching on some old iron block beast they never could afford to properly maintain as a teen.
Yeah, it leads to massive gaps in people's knowledge about driving.
Passing lane hogs are a huge problem in the USA. And nobody knows how to properly drive through a roundabout.
Such systems are highly effective and also cost effective. Even if people know where they are located they will slow down and not run red lights.
> [2] Over the past two-and-a-half years, the city of Seattle said over 400 police officers have left the department through retirement or resignation. The number of trained and deployable officers in 2022 is 954
Oh geez, losing 1/3 of your police force is quite a lot. Although this is through attrition as opposed to Seattle intentionally firing 1/3 of the force. (and also a metric about Seattle while the traffic metric is country wide).
> [1] Seattle, too, has instructed officers not to pull cars over for certain non-moving violations, such as expired license tags and obstructions hanging from the rear-view mirror.
Seems reasonable to me. Police cars have a dozen scanners on them nowendays anyways can just catch an expired tag in a parking lot when it's not moving. IIRC, you don't need a rear-view mirror to drive (honestly take a look at a truck, it would be obstructed anyways...) so that seems pointless to pull somebody over for anyways.
> [1] As these new policies reduce "contacts" between police and citizens, some wonder if that has also reduced drivers' impression that they'll be stopped for more serious violations, such as running red lights.
I'm not convinced 2020 changed anything on this. I've seen plenty of people run red lights in front of a cop car and get away with it. Cops love to blame Floyd but I've seen laziness for a long time before then.
Like the article overly focuses on things like expired tags. I couldn't care less if a driver has an expired tag. I care significantly move if they can stay in their lane and that they don't run a red light / stop sign.
[1]: The article
[2]: https://www.king5.com/article/news/local/seattle/mayor-bruce....
The argument is basically a restatement of Cesare Beccaria's [1]. His theory was that the certainty and swiftness of punishment is a greater deterrent than the severity of punishment.
The idea is essentially that if people are immediately caught and given a small fine for minor infractions (like expired tags), then they will believe they'll be caught equally quickly for something more major (like running a red light) with greater punishment. They would be less likely to commit a serious infraction because of their experience with smaller infractions.
There's probably some truth to it. I know a fair few drivers who drive terribly, but they've never gotten a ticket so they keep doing it. They might stop accelerating into yellow lights if they got a small ticket for something minor like failing to signal a lane change. Just as a reminder that there are actually people watching.
Cars that self-report for minor traffic infractions. Many new cars already phone home various information useful for profit. You'd get a debrief every time you stopped your car and an email with the bill. Could be eased in with a forgiveness threshold for the first N offenses.
I would expect this to be effective, and very... unamerican.
My guess is that it wouldn't work if people were aware of which infractions could be automatically enforced. That's just a wild guess, though, I have nothing to back that up.
One data point we do have is the "Broken windows theory" which NYC pursued. It's not exactly the same idea, but the implementation bears some similarities. It might be interesting to look at. I'm not going to speculate on it, because it's a contentious topic (disproportionately impacted poor people and minorities) and I'm frankly not well-versed enough to have a strong opinion either way.
I think the theory breaks down completely though when they're not given a punishment for something major.
Drivers know they can go 10~15 mph over the speed limit on a highway without getting pulled over so they do so. Drivers know they can run the first second of a red light so they will do so. You can pull people over for as many expired tags as you want but drivers know that running a red light won't get them pulled over so the expired tags won't scare them into thinking running a red light will.
Trucks, vans and other similar vehicles have bigger (and possibly even multiple) side mirrors to compensate for the lack of a rear-view mirror. With regular cars, for minimising the blind spots to the left and right it's preferable to cover the rear area mainly with the rear-view mirror, so that the side mirrors can be focussed more to the sides instead of also having to cover the rear area.
(Possibly all the more so in North America, where convex or aspheric mirrors with a bigger field of view are mostly forbidden, especially on the driver's side.)
Hassling someone over something hanging from a rear view mirror seems like the epitome of arbitrary nanny state nonsense that undermines respect for law enforcement in general. Similar to unreasonably low speed limits that criminalize most every driver, and let police think that doing their job means sitting on the side of the road playing Candy Crush until the radar gun makes a noise, rather than doing the work of catching actual road hazards like semi trucks that block the left lane trying to pass while going uphill.
Maybe there's a strong correlation? Similar to the broken window theory[0]
"one un-repaired broken window is a signal that no one cares, and so breaking more windows costs nothing."
Because in the post you're writing this in response to explicitly called out running red lights as something that should be but isn't enforced. Running a red light is more of a broken window than expired tags are.
As I've said here a few times, I've lived across the country, often moving 8 hours or more away every year or two. The difference in driving behavior should be alarming to anyone who routinely drives longhaul or road trips.
Post 2021, I saw way, way more road rage. More tit for tat 'payback'. More people driving in medians and shoulders.
I'm not sure if people broke, or people are stressed, or due to being told to stay away from people during covid we now see others as enemies, but something huge happened.
I'm just curious if it's a permanent effect.
Compounding that, there's also just less police presence, which I'm not sure is COVID related or not. When I started driving, there were cops everywhere, and every day you'd see at least a couple people pulled over. I even got multiple tickets myself.
FF to today, and I think I've seen a total of three people pulled over in the past 2 years.
For example a well understood engineering concept is that narrow roads produce slower speeds and wider and more lanes produce faster speeds. Instead of putting up a sign that says "Maximum 30mph", which "requires" police to enforce, you could make the road so narrow that drivers only feel safe driving at 30mph.
We have an older bridge connecting Louisville, KY and Jeffersonville, IN. The speed limit is 35, the lanes are very narrow, and yet people still regularly go 50. I was hit while stopped at the end of that bridge in 2021 by a distracted driver, likely on her phone, who was going so fast, she wrecked into me and the 2 cars in front of me and her car did a 180 and ended up facing the opposite direction in opposing traffic.
IMO a key safety measure would be "if you are in an accident while on your phone, you lose your license for 12 months times the percent at fault.
Will this stop drivers from using cell phones? This is a post event solution. This solution might work but requires police, judges, witnesses, cameras, and many components to properly implement.
One way that Amsterdam or Copenhagen would fix this is to reduce the number of lanes. They purposely remove lanes (even when the street can accommodate extra ones).
They also introduce shrubbery on the side of the road that blocks human vision. This is because if you can't see past the corner you slow down as you approach.
Another solution is changing the texture of the road. We naturally drive slower on cobblestone versus smooth asphalt.
I've also seen speed bumps or even just a slightly raised smoother bump on a highway/road in honolulu and in colombia to slow drivers down.
There are many well understood road engineering solutions to use.
People simply don't work like that.
This seems like a great idea until you see past the smoke to the hole in your foot.
The main focus has been speed. Speed increases force geometrically! Speed does not however, significantly increase the likelihood of a traffic collision.
The reality is that speed limits describe how a road is shaped. They provide drivers with a reference for how they can expect their vehicle to perform on that road. They don't tell drivers anything about their vehicle, or their own skill level.
It's painfully obvious that the effect on behavior will be for drivers to find a comfortable threshold relative to a speed limit, their vehicle, and their driving ability. None of this can be measured or enforced by police.
But speeding is illegal! You just have to drive the speed limit, or you are dangerous, and need to be stopped!
What a damned lie. Either you accept this narrative, or you realize it has no basis in reality.
A small, but significant, percentage of drivers have accepted it. Everyone else is now their sworn enemy, and vice versa.
The resulting behavior is conflict. Guess what that gets us? More collisions.
We need law enforcement to take a diplomatic role. Focus on resolving conflict, and we should be able to make driving safer for everyone, and even strengthen relations between police and citizens.
This is because the United States is very car-centric and not being able to drive can limit your opportunities greatly. I’m all for setting the bar higher to get a drivers license but there needs to be alternatives put in place first.
For example, a person who grows up in a poor neighborhood has less access to opportunities and if they can’t drive, their opportunities are vastly limited even more because of how spread out things are especially in a lot of poor neighborhoods. They would also have trouble doing things like getting groceries, picking up kids from school, etc.
Driver education can be reviewed and improved within years if not less.
We don't need perfection we need to do something now.
But while the upfront license cost is higher, lifetime license cost is low: no French person has had to ever renew their driver’s license. Lots of tattered pieces of valid paper out there. But renewals will start in 2032 (I think).
Bill: "Wow! Sounds like that class really helped you learn about statistics"
Bob: "Maybe..."
It is very difficult to see a driver using a cellphone from a long distance. It is somewhat easy to determine the speed of a vehicle at distance. It is also easy to see drunk driving at a distance. But eyes glancing down at a phone held in a lap? Hard.
It would be prohibitively expensive to field a force large enough to issue enough citations for distracted driving to make a difference due to a fear of getting caught. People can drive "normally", in a straight line at a set, reasonable, speed for long periods of time while looking at their phones--until it is too late. So officers would need some method of getting close to many vehicles to peer inside as they are driving.
The report the article links to shows that fatalities are up, but crashes where speed was a factor are down by 2%. Alcohol involvement was flat.
Age is a factor in fatalities not because older drivers are more dangerous but because they are more physically vulnerable to fatal injury in the fewer crashes they are involved in.
Until age 85 drivers are involved in many fewer crashes than 16-24 year olds.
>in the <16 age group (down 10%), the 16-24 age group (down 8%), the 25-34 age group (down 3%), the 35-44 age group (up 3%), the 45-54 age group (up 1%), the 55-64 age group (up 4%), and the 65 and older age group (up 8%);
So deaths will naturally increase as the US population ages.
Other increases are pedestrian, cyclist, and motorcyclist deaths-- which I wager are due to being distracted by cellphones more than speeding.
The largest increase is rural/suburban "local/collector" (low-speed) roads. This is almost certainly due to the epidemic of phone usage: not noticing cars slowing down for turns, stop signs, sharp turns, pedestrians.
Last month my firetruck was hit by a distracted driver who was looking at his cellphone. A miles-long straight road on a clear night with no traffic and the driver had been staring at his cellphone for so long that he didn't start braking until the entire cabin of his car was bathed in red flashing light.
We were parked, lights on, in the right hand lane of a roadway as we were responding to a driver who had run off the road, hit a barrier, and spun to a stop in the roadway-- because he was distracted by his cellphone: https://imgur.com/a/3qFWNaE
Maybe, but I see more speeding than I see phone use. I've noticed on the narrow and windy rural/suburban roads near me that some cars are going so fast that they have difficulty managing the turns and go into the oncoming lane. There is a reason the speed limit is 25 or 35mph - factoring in the width of the road, the curves, the driveways, and side streets, that is the safe traveling speed.
Helps make the roads safer while requiring no labour.
So, please, "Average safety cameras" and they don't help when someone's not paying attention
https://m.youtube.com/c/wheres981/videos
https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCoQXV8_LVYJeW3OvIHrdUog
These punks shamelessly endanger the lives of countless New Yorkers, daily, and the NYPD does nothing about it, except fail to catch them. They run from cops on a weekly basis. Often times, their friends that they ‘swim’ with crash and nearly kill innocent people, flipping over their vehicles etc.
That isn't even an answer! You asked what the motivation was, and answered that there isn't constraint. So what is the motivation?
Do people believe they aren't driving dangerously? Do people drive dangerously despite knowing better?
We need more information. First of all, we need to define "dangerous" at least three times:
1. Dangerous in the eyes of law enforcement.
2. Dangerous in the eyes of an aggressive driver.
3. Dangerous in the eyes of a defensive driver.
4. Dangerous in the eyes of a passive driver.
Even I am inventing these categories from experience and not evidence; but I think they can provide a lot of insight into the behavior of drivers.
1. Law enforcement uses law itself to determine what behavior is "unsafe". Law enforcement is also motivated to focus on the laws that are more easily enforced than others. There is also the reality that people change their behavior when driving near police: so the more "dangerous" a behavior is colloquially agreed to be, the less likely law enforcement is to see it happen.
2. Aggressive drivers feel confident that they will "get away with it". That means they believe they won't be "caught doing wrong" by police, but more importantly, it means they believe they will succeed in their aggressive driving without incident. I think it would make the most sense to categorize "aggressive driving" as any behavior that minimizes the threshold of safety in order to maximize the utility of driving. That pursuit often feels justifiable, which makes it a common motivator for behavior.
3. Defensive driving is a category of strategy. It's the most explicitly defined of the four: driving behaviors that maximize the threshold of safety by compromising the utility of driving. Some defensive driving behaviors are identical to passive driving, and some are identical to aggressive driving.
4. Passive driving is all about minimizing engagement. That usually means maximizing the safety threshold so you have extra room for mistakes. The important distinction is that passive drivers minimize the amount of engagement in driving. This is the most unsafe thing a person can do behind the wheel, and it's nearly impossible for law enforcement to change.
5. That's right, there's a 5th category: aggressively passive driving. This is the result of both law and state propaganda that tend to focus on specific behaviors like speeding, to the detriment of other safety factors. Some drivers don't only feel justified driving passively: for them, it has become a crusade against whatever they see to be "aggressive" (and therefore categorically unsafe) driving. This is why any 2+ lane (same direction) highway is practically guaranteed to have drivers going the same speed in the passing lane add the traffic next to them.
I see aggressively passive driving behavior almost every single time I drive more than a mile from my home. Two cars drive near the speed limit next to each other, and the car in the left lane is being tailgated by a line of cars who want to pass. Everyone here feels like they are justified, and the other is unsafe. There are only two ways for law enforcement to resolve this behavior:
1. Pull over every car that intends to drive above the speed limit. This is obviously not possible.
2. Pull over the driver who is blocking traffic. I have never once even heard of this happening, despite the law being clearly written (and even posted on signs), "keep right except to pass."
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Just like the war on drugs, traffic enforcement in the US is an epic failure to understand (and respond to) the system of motivations that drive social behavior. We need a fundamental change in the way traffic law is structured, so that law enforcement is motivated to resolve problems instead of focusing the entire narrative of enforcement around vain black-and-white statutes like speed limits.
Drivers in France have learned to be always on the lookout for those. They are everywhere. Hard to avoid. So you end up not going above the limit.