Why would COVID/lockdowns have “changed the way people drive?” Any proposed mechanism?
Seems more likely you had a lot of shifting around of people’s driving (e.g. city dwellers moving to suburbs)
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?
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.
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.
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.