https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FzU9P7iX0AARi1F?format=jpg
What happened in 2014 was Ferguson, followed by the Ferguson Report, and the initial stages of changes in enforcement. Then in 2020 we had Floyd and an even larger pullback.
Roads did not change. Phones had been around for years by 2016. SUVs had been gaining in popularity for literally decades. It's not dispositive, but the only thing that fits the timing perfectly are the changes in policing after 2014 and 2020.
Police in some cities have almost completely stopped doing traffic enforcement. San Francisco, for example, used to issue something like 12k citations per month. Now they issue just a couple hundred. The change started right after the Ferguson Report was released:
https://www.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/10lkdhk/traff...
Other cities have done the same. Police didn't just back off. They practically stopped enforcement altogether. We're talking about 95% drops in enforcement in some places.
Cars are getting bigger everywhere and have been for decades, so that fails both tests. COVID only happened in 2020 and it happened everywhere, so that fails both tests. Smart phones were introduced in 2007 and they're available everywhere, so that fails both tests.
But "U.S. police departments drastically reduced both the number of traffic stops performed and the total number of citations issued starting just after the Ferguson Report in 2015" is practically slapping you in the face.
As I said, it's not dispositive, but I can't see any reason to reject it (that's not political in nature).
You miss everything that disproves your opinion. The graph does not support your argumentation at all, there is too much noise. You need to explain how citations affect accidents. We fired most of our traffic cops in the eighties here, the number of citations plumeted. The number of deaths are on a steady decline.
No, I don't. You're plainly demanding a standard of evidence that you wouldn't in any other domain, especially if you were inclined to prefer the explanation. I'm going to take "citations affect driver behavior" as axiomatic, unless you can disprove it. I'm not going to wait until we have 100 studies to confirm that a commonsense mechanism does indeed function in the most parsimoniously explained way.
We have to act in the world.
We don't have 100 years to figure out if ticketing drivers affects their behavior to some ridiculous standard of evidence you invented just now because you would prefer that explanation weren't true.
People really need to stop allowing themselves to be held hostage to this kind of special pleading.
[1] https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/yearl... [2] https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/yearl...
Somewhere on the way, people have become more misanthropic, close-minded, and angry. I’m not sure why.
I think it is social media and the enshittification of all these services? Also, the rise of authoritarianism in America and abroad may contribute to this? Regardless, more and more I see people living in a fantasy world where people both “suck immeasurably” and (strangely) have no freewill or agency and are just meat robots.
I think these two things together are really pernicious.
If you are progressive, you think the world is warming up and imminent horrors are on the horizon, you see a class structure designed to keep you poor, you will never own anything more expensive than a cup of coffee, you see your friends and loved ones being physically harmed by individuals, and structurally harmed by the state itself for the way they were born, for no clear reason. You see women quite literally dying because doctors cannot legally protect them from a dead fetus. A few rich people have strong say on basically everything that happens in your life, and they are all bitching and moaning that their life is so hard. Meanwhile, all your conservative relatives are screaming that this is a liberal hoax, basic science is a liberal hoax, trans people are a threat, and that democrats deserve death.
People are living in two entirely separate realities and it doesn't matter that only one is closer to actual reality if the people in the other just don't care.
Just because some (potentially most) of these people are delusional doesn’t mean that reality is different for them, just the framework they’re living in doesn’t match objective reality.
And part of all this delusion is a belief that a great many people are idiots, assholes, and irredeemable. That propaganda atomizes us.
The general state of the global economy, late-stage capitalism fucking everyone who isn't a literal millionaire over, climate change, general political instability, the mentioned rise of authoritarianism, etc. All of those are vastly more influential than "social media, enshittification thereof".
It used to just be home-bodies and elderly people who sat in front of news programs all day, but now it's all of us. Bad news generates clicks, and there's plenty to be found.
Seems more likely you had a lot of shifting around of people’s driving (e.g. city dwellers moving to suburbs)
One thing that I've noticed is people moved to a suburb or took a new job that was a reasonable commute at the time. Now that traffic came back, it's not a reasonable commute anymore so they're trying to drive like crazy to get back and forth.
Very surreal this discussion, very US specific too. Here in Europe, in past 3 years tons of new cycling infrastructure, either wider roads or parts of roads taken from cars and given to cyclists (ie 1 lane instead of 2 lane roads). The goal isn't to move traffic asap, but rather make coming into cities as annoying as possible, so key intersections have in incoming directions green light ie for 10 seconds.
And no, not seeing any increase in aggression neither. But then again Europe is massive and culturally extremely diverse, and I haven't visited more than 10 countries in past 3 years so somewhere this may be valid, but its not an overall trend.
Frequency of driving was reduced but when you did drive, the roads were empty. The people who did continue to drive daily was not insignificant (maybe 10-30% of people, guessing IDK) and may be the ones creating the problems. Eg. in heavy traffic if 5% of vehicles are driving reckless, it's bad.
Sorry, paywalled, but Matthew Yglesias has made it a personal priority of his to work on these issues: https://www.slowboring.com/p/we-cant-tolerate-fake-expired-a...
Also, many cities have a "no chase" rule for police now because of high-profile crashes which killed people. Guessing the lawsuit payouts were large and contributed to the decisions.
I think people realized there are no consequences so decided to do what the heck they wanted.
Here in Florida the cops are complete dead weight, they used to enforce DUIs religiously Friday / Saturday night. Now you will barely see anyone pulled over and definitely a marked increase in suspected DUI drivers in the early hours (2-4am).
We literally have people planning open street races and shut downs on Facebook groups, and the cops do absolutely nothing.
How? That movement failed and police have more funding now. If you're paying them more and they're doing less that's a problem between y'all. You got what you wanted you don't also get to blame us.
The "risk their life for" thing I don't even want to get into but here we go. Most of the risk is the normal health damage and accident risk of being in a car all day, and it's comparably dangerous to other jobs where you're in a car all day. Statistically in a police encounter, the lives most at risk are any but the officers'. And were you not here for Uvalde or what?
Ideally because they are paid to do so, and voluntarily sel-selected into a job that requires such. Nobody is forcing anybody to be a cop. But every citizen has a responsibility to hold their public servants accountable for their (again, self-selected) responsibilities.
Come back to me when I can just refuse to do my literal, contractual job and have the supreme court rule that it's fine, and I won't even get a negative mark on my record.
There's definitely a lot of people reporting a change in driving attitudes. During covid, people went fucking nuts. There for a while, it was a source of local news articles.
Running red lights and almost hitting someone, cutting people off, swerving in traffic erratically to be faster. Its honestly scary some days.
I hesitate to speculate as to what caused it, but the difference was as clear as night and day.
Speed limits and traffic enforcement had been fully suspended, and people drove however they wanted to. It also felt like there was some griping about being part of the unlucky few who had to risk their lives for the sake of those who got to stay home in safety and comfort with all their necessities delivered.
My brother-in-law's laughing response to my description of my service call drive is etched in my memory. He'd been massively busy delivering pizzas, and after hearing about how I'd had my doors blown off, he said "Welcome to the apocalypse, we drive fast now!"
It seems like it's a combo of impatience + lapses in attention more than anything else, but something has to be fueling it because it is consistently worse now than it has ever been in my 15 years of biking for transport. Pre-emptive braking with the right of way has saved my ass more times that I can count.
Just look at the pedestrians you pass on your next drive. Count how many of them are looking at their phone while walking. I just did this and it was 4/10. I think Pedestrian behavior and awareness *might be a little different than it was 40 years ago as well.
There's no corresponding responsibility inherent in walking. In fact many people who walk also have other statuses or impairments that prevent them from fully perceiving the world they are walking through, such as blindness or being a child.
It is the driver's obligation to ensure the safety of the people around which they choose to operate their vehicle, regardless of their awareness or behavior.
But just like there aren't many drivers who would stare intently at their phone while driving through a busy intersection, there aren't many pedestrians that will stare intently at a phone while crossing a busy street. It's simple self-perservation.
Also, phones have been around for ages now. Pedestrians are being hit and killed at a higher rate since the pandemic started, not since the wide adoption of cellphone technology.
Edit: My point isn't to argue about all the studies listed, this is just why I think brain damage is a plausible reason for the population-wide decrease in car driving skill.
https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/criminal-ju...
This is an interesting and maybe even plausible hypothesis, but it lacks any data whatsoever for the final claim.
COVID lockdowns saw a rise in home delivery services. The drivers in this gig economy are financially incentivized to go fast. Lockdowns initially enabled them to go fast, and, once the expectation was in place, it's hard to roll back.
(just my opinion, I don't have data point to back it up, curious if anyone who participate as a delivery driver could confirm/deny).
Congestion generally works to keep vehicle speeds slower and therefore safer.
Can you cite a source on this I've never heard anything like this.
Our covid response forced us to make explicit some parts of our social agreement that were not usually stated outright before. Covid deaths also concentrated among exactly those groups.
We established outright that harms to these groups are an acceptable cost for convenience to the rest. It's not a large leap for people to apply this to their driving behavior, even unconsciously.
There is also the fact that covid isn't the only thing that happened in 2020. Since that summer's protests the police in my city have been on open but unacknowledged soft strike. They only take actions that are personally fulfilling to them individually, which certainly isn't traffic enforcement.
Some people are just really bad at this :/
We had a pretty large step-back in traffic enforcement [1][2] starting in 2019. Since the pandemic, traffic around the city has taken on a decidedly Mad-Max vibe. _Every_ time I drive, I see red lights get run. Most times I get on the interstate I see people passing on the shoulder. _Every_ time I get on the interstate I see people driving recklessly fast. Not high-speed flow-of-traffic fast, but 20-30 mph faster than traffic, weaving in and out of traffic without using indicators. Uptown residents have been complaining about the regular street-racing incidents since 2020.
I'm confident there are other factors, and I know not every city has the same problems as Charlotte. But for sure the fact that the police have just stopped enforcing most of the traffic laws has played a part.
[1] - https://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/state/north-carolina/...
[2] - https://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/local/crime/article26...
https://transpomaps.org/san-francisco/ca/sfpd-traffic-enforc...
I personally don't think its "police enforcement" but I would wager a large % of deaths (at least in New Mexico, the state with the highest rate) are from panhandlers in the street. IIRC, they're trying to make new laws to prevent ppl from standing in the middle of the road.