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Comment by throwaway914 | Hacker News Reader

My counterpoint to this is there have always been a ton of bad drivers. The most important skill to have is to be a predictable driver. Bad drivers will always exist. You cannot change them, and the great number of them is not likely to drop to 0 overnight.

The best thing you can do is drive in a way that even bad drivers expect. Be a speed-limited, blinker-indicating, cautious log in the river. They will parkour around you and you will be fine. Greatly limit your reactions to things. If you freak out, others around you will freak out. Bad drivers cause okay drivers to perform worse. Herd mentality.

(Obvious disclaimer: The best defensive driving in the world won't prevent all accidents)

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Both you and the parent post are correct. There have always been bad drivers, a lot of them, and defensive driving is the best thing for that. But at the same time, I have anecdotally been observing a serious breakdown in people following the rules. All the things the parent mentioned have become more frequent in my experience -- the number of times I see blatant bad and malicious driving behaviours has increased significantly in the last few years, except I drive maybe a 3rd of the miles per year that I used to 5 years ago. The density of terrible/self-absorbed drivers has significantly increased.

It's gotten to the point where even defensive driving doesn't do much. How do you defensively drive against someone just blasting through a red light 15 seconds after it turned red and cross traffic is moving steadily? Or the guy in a lifted truck who decides to force you into the shoulder because he thinks it's funny?

"How do you defensively drive against someone just blasting through a red light 15 seconds after it turned red and cross traffic is moving steadily? Or the guy in a lifted truck who decides to force you into the shoulder because he thinks it's funny?"

Probably upgrading to a tank at some point. Or bringing a gun. Or bribe politicians, that they urge the police to focus on maintaining sanity on the roads and take away the licence(and at some point the cars) from those drivers eagerly.

Honestly, if I can, I drive a bicycle, even now in wintertime. But I often indeed wished for a gun, to bring awareness to my fragile self. To express, that I also have rights on the road, despite being lighter. But I am aware, this might not be the best solution overall.

A gun won't save you from the stupidity of bad drivers. And you understand (in your anger) that it won't solve anything. At best (not really) you shoot and kill (?) one of them. You will then go to prison for many-many-many years, you will lose everything and everyone.

Meanwhile there is a million equally bad drivers out there. We can't be doing "a purge" every weekend. It's either policing, or self-driving cars. I am looking forward to the latter.

"It's either policing, or self-driving cars. I am looking forward to the latter."

But till they are there, policing is the only other option to self justice (aside from changing the road environment like the sibling commentor mentioned). There are drivers who intentionally drive close to cyclists - if one of those will have his tyre shot (without him then crashing into other bystanders, or crashing at all) he likely will have some respect in the future. He also might invest into a bulletproof design, further escalating the whole thing, so like I said, I am not advocating for road warfare. Just expressing my anger.

Altering the built environment helps too. Narrow the streets, reduce turn radii and sightlines, protect crosswalks and bike lanes, use more "uncontrolled" configurations like 2 way stops rather than full stoplights.

It's counter intuitive on one level, but making the road feel less like a racetrack causes most drivers to slow down and treat it less like one:

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2023/11/8/public-health-...

I'm uneasy about reducing sightlines. There are drivers that will turn blindly into a corner at excessive speed because they feel lucky or invulnerable except they are not, nor the people on the other side of the turn. Small radii reduces speed no matter what, but keep the line of sight. At least one of the two parties have a chance to prevent a collision.

Speed bumps are brutally effective, like I just experienced driving through spain and france. I also do not like them too much, as they punish everyone and some of them are kind of hidden (by design) and you do not want to hit them even with just 20 mph. So they do prevent speeding in rural areas. But there should be better solutions ..

Speed limiters in cars is one such solution. It's simple to implement - we just need to make it max 130 (or whatever) km/h on highways, 80km/h on "country" roads outside of population centers and 40km/h (or whatever, even making it 50 would help tremendously) in populated areas. It doesn't need to be smart enough to understand every speed limit out there it just needs to know what zone out of 3 possible ones it's in.

Of course car lobby makes it sound like impossible task because of "think about all the edge cases" while even making the most crude system would save tens of thousands of lives and hundred of thousands of injuries per year.

As it is we can even force car manufacturers to implement max 140km/h speed limit in cars even though driving faster than that is criminal level behavior and illegal about anywhere in the world. Like we can't even force them to make the least controversial safety check imaginable already written into law because "driving a car fast boost my ego and you are not taking away my freedom to do so".

Not sure if you're in the US or not, but we have 70MPH interstats crossing over 25mph surface roads and commonly enough my GPS gets confused which one I'm on.

Or instead of doing that, just go to smaller engine sizes that force slower driving due to lower power and adjust thr throttle response. Most cars have engines that are way too damn powerful for what's needed (why does a Hyundai i30 need 249HP?) because marketing beats out other concerns. Pair that with modern throttle mapping being a square curve or close to it that means people will just accelerate because the car's behaviour encourages them to. Electric cars only make this worse with instant torque.

Drive an older car from the '90s with a mechanical throttle adjusting a mechanical throttle body and you'll realize that it barely responds until the pedal's about halfway down. Drive a newer car and you'll realize that it's already putting nearly half throttle through the electronic throttle body when the drive by wire pedal is a tenth of the way down. The brakes react like this too, which is a completely difference annoyance. It's a result of manufacturers gaming for fuel efficiency regulations and it manipulates the way people drive into being more aggressive with their acceleration.

For decades never needed speed limiters aside from the gentleman's agreement of 155MPH over tire safety reasons because most people couldn't get above 90MPH, and most cars didn't want to go above 45MPH without stomping on it. Since the early 1990s as a side effect of emissions regulations making engines much more efficient cars have doubled, tripled, or even quadrupled their power output. A 1995 Chevrolet Lumina made 210HP from a 3.8L V6 at the very top of the rev range, meaning for most driving you were at 150HP or less. Right now you can go and buy a low trim Chevrolet Blazer with a 3.6L V6 that makes 305HP about a third of the way up with a flat horsepower curve from there. Just holding speed without accelerating you're at peak horsepower in the Blazer and it feels that way.

Speed Bump Olympics

https://youtu.be/r11j5yo8BhM?si=NnDDZtmiyNAHkqvQ

This neighborhood has brutal speed bumps with a warning sign on a 30mph road. This double bump just hammers cars.

I'm sure that the people living there love the noise of cars scratching their floors on the road when they are sleeping /s

Couldn't they find a more silent way to slow down cars?

I think every car remembers that spot (or rather the area, which is the intention behind it) and after a learning period, only speedy tourists will hit the road.

Is there a reason small roundabouts are not more popular in the US in residential areas? You probably have noticed them driving through Spain and France as well. Especially in the south of both countries they seem to come very often in small cities. They worked pretty well in my opinion to keep the traffic flowing, but keeping the speeds in check due to merging and turning. Now whether our emergency vehicles could navigate them well is a different story I suppose.

There are drivers that will turn blindly into a corner at excessive speed because they feel lucky or invulnerable except they are not

Making the corner tighter helps solve this.

I walk to work in the suburbs. I have to cross a 6 lane highway. It's signaled properly. But the one thing that nearly kills me every few months the road has very smooth radius corners. Drivers can easily carry 40mph through the corners. Between red-on-red being legal, right-on-green-even-though-pedestrians-crossing-is-active, and generally driver fuckery, I'm amazed nobody has been killed at this intersection.

Surrounding my child's school are blind s-curves and streets barely wide enough for 2-way traffic. All densely lined with parked cars. And yet I people speed through these areas on most days during pick-up time, and often they looking at their phones (or whatever else they might be up to behind blackout-tinted windows).

The only thing narrow streets and turns do is make it harder for parents to check for oncoming traffic before crossing. No amount of "traffic calming" will protect us from these rotten drivers. We need at least a modicum of enforcement.

If you get the speed limit wrong with a sign, you can change the sign. If you get it wrong after throwing built obstacles all over it, we are stuck with it. And you're going to get it wrong sometimes, because neighborhoods and safety technology changes (and because safetyism gives low-speed-limit people too much political influence).

"and because safetyism gives low-speed-limit people too much political influence"

Some of us have children, and some of us will hopefully always going to have children, so sorry, but we won't go away with our safety concerns as death on the road is the number one safety issue in everyday life.

It’s interesting. I finished reading the Amazon PIP thread. There was a comment about the double standard of at-will employment dishing out immediate firings, but employees must give 2 weeks notice; how employees have become accustomed to getting the shorter end of the stick.

At what point did we lose our ability to enforce our own desires through violence? The one real tool we have for making any tangible change, just stripped away from us at some point.

> At what point did we lose our ability to enforce our own desires through violence?

You can even today join a gang or the mafia, you will find that this is still a very common use case.

If you do, you might also find out that it's not a lifestyle anyone wants, thus realizing why most of civilized society doesn't work that way.

In my experience, that's usually only because the people that inhabit the gang or the mafia are not themselves civilized.

Dueling, boxing, and so on used to be common among the upper crust. I still get into fights with some of my immigrant friends whenever we reach some total impasse on conflict. We're all civilized, educated, and generally good people. But violence always seems to be the quickest way towards a resolution to certain problems, where simple communication will not do.

In my military officer training, routine boxing/wrestling/fighting was included to give people a "taste of getting hit in the mouth". It was also super effective for solving disputes. I remember having some trivial issue with a roommate that eventually turned into wrestling. After it petered out I couldn't tell you what the problem even was. Sometimes wish a manner like this existed in my workplace settings. A guess the caveat is this doesn't work between large spreads of physical abilities (gender, age gaps etc.). Not complaining i cant fight old people but wish conflict resolution existed in such an immediate and effective manner.

> At what point did we lose our ability to enforce our own desires through violence?

Judging by reports of violent crime, it would be a stretch to say that the “right” to exercise violence when your individual will is otherwise thwarted is very much still possible. I mean if someone wants to gun down their Amazon HR person or manager, there is little to stop them. It won’t end well for anyone though.

There are many readily available technical solutions to limit danger from cars and drivers. The problem is that there is zero political will to do so. I think mainly because of car manufacturers playing this on two fronts: bribing or blackmailing politicians (think what happens to economy if we don't sell faster, bigger, stupider cars!) and influencing pop culture - driving a car in irresponsible manner is still seen as cool and manly thing to do. It's cigarettes all over again and it will take a monumental effort to change it.

I always thought it was a good idea to assume all the other drivers around me were likely to be incompetent idiots. Obviously not the case, but it means when you do encounter one you will be ready.

My first driving instructor gave me the greatest line on this; "expect other drivers to be idiots, you will never be disappointed"

Use of signals is the single most important consideration in my opinion. Other drivers cannot read your mind. Using signals protects you.

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