I wonder if it’s all of the touch screens? I got in a rideshare vehicle the other day and the driver had fucking youtube on
Trucks and SUVs have also gotten bigger with flatter fronts. People used to go onto the hood in a collision, now they go under the vehicle
Vehicles are getting way too big on average, I mean the F150 is North America’s best selling vehicle (*edit: I have since learned as of 2024 that spot actually belongs to the RAV4) since forever. It’s a problem of misaligned incentives.
There’s an exception carved out for large vehicles in the EPA guidelines that hold them to less stringent emissions standards which incentivizes building larger vehicles 1
Large cars are also incentivized by our crash safety rating system which only takes into account the mortality rate of those inside the car as apposed to average related fatalities. This means it will prioritize safety of those in the vehicle, which has led to our average fatalities increasing. 2
As an unintended side effect this also damages roads much faster because vehicle weight per axle determines the magnitude of the damage a vehicle does to the road. 3 anecdotally this makes me concerned for the additional weight that electric cars add.
Also as vehicles increase in weight the amount of microplastics put into the air as a by product of tire wear increase. 4
As cars increase in size (and therefore weight) the downsides are exponential.
All that plus everyone is going 10 over on their phones. If operating a motor vehicle is so disinteresting to you, that you need to look at your phone every 10 seconds, DON’T DRIVE.
I didn’t drive for many years because I always lived in cities with good public transport. When I drove again for the first time in 2021 I was shocked by how basically everyone went 10 over. I really feel this has gotten way worse in the last 20 years. Going 60 where the speedlimit is 50 seems to be the rule, not the exception nowadays.
Driving is simultaneously the most boring and most dangerous thing people do day-to-day. They want the driving to stop as soon as possible, so they speed. They don’t want to be stuck with their own thoughts for even a single second, so they text.
And there’s no choice. It’s not like they can get anywhere without a car in this shithole country.
That number is sure to drop soon, as clankers run everyone over instead.
what is a clanker
Humorous ‘slur’ for a robot or artificial intelligence, in this case self-driving cars. Originally from Star Wars
I got curious… In Norway pedestrian fatalities fell by ~73% (from 22 to 6) from 2010 to 2024.
Ah! So Norwegians immigrating to the US are to blame! /s
And it’s all the bad drivers and reckless pedestrians too!
We’ve never had better technology to build safer cars and streets, and yet here we are. Pedestrian detection and all, installed on a vehicle that’s got a front grille as tall as a person.
I saw someone watching a movie on their phone as they drove the other day, also a probable factor.
I met a woman who told me that during the pandemic lock downs she made money driving to legal weed states to spend tens of thousands of dollars on weed and flip it back in her state. She also told me that it was really boring so she’d frequently get above 100 while watching a movie on her phone on her dashboard. So that’s who’s out on the road with you
Fucking.
Wild.
That kind of behaviour should just be an immediate and permanent revocation of the license, car towed on the spot. Fiddling with phone to get directions or dismiss a notification is one thing but actively watching entertainment?
I have ADHD. It’s not super severe but it’s not great. I can drive 16 hrs (with appropriate breaks) without the radio. I will admit, I tend not to be super respectful of speed limits. But driving is enough stimulation for my scatterbrained self. Brain rot is a hell of a drug.
Punishment for bad driving iof any kind is nearly completely unenforced.
I also have ADHD, and have also done a 16 hour drive straight through. Audiobooks or podcasts help. Music gets boring after a few hours. Audiobooks or podcasts are constantly changing, so it’s enough mental stimulation to stay engaged, while also not being too distracting.
The only problem with audiobooks/podcasts, is that it uses the same part of your brain as driving does.
People like this are why safe drivers’ insurance premiums are still so high. The safe drivers are subsidizing the dangerous ones. We’re being forced to pay more because the risk of being hit by a braindead watches-movies-while-doing-100 driver has increased.
That’s the end result of car centric infrastructure. The bad drivers couldn’t afford to pay the full rates they would be charged. If you kick 10-20% of the population off the road, that is a whole lot of people siddenly unable to work
That many people suddenly stopping working would destroy the only thing Americans truly value - shareholder profits
We have no alternatives to driving. As such the worst drivers you’ve ever seen will continue to drive by necessity
@makeshiftreaper @CompactFlax I wish I had tens of thousands of dollars
Well she certainly didn’t seem like the type to have a couple thousand in liquid cash to start her scheme. I imagine she borrowed money and then used her drug sales to pay back the loans. Or she owed a bunch of money. Obviously she was not a queen of good decisions
Investment in better infrastructure with no profit is a crime against capitalism.
Yup. When you look around, everybody is on their fucking phone these days. No wonder they are killing people.
You would think in a country that leads the world in the lawsuit industry someone would have come after Telcos for not installing safety measures on phones so people can’t do stupid shit while driving.
I don’t want to be treated like a child. I just want people to be responsible for their own actions.
Many people won’t be responsible for their own actions without treating them like a child.
And now the States has forced the EU to allow shit cars like that.
Nobody forced them, EU politicians are Trump bootlickers, cowards afraid to stand up to a bully.
There would certainly be consequences if they stood up to the US.
Maybe, maybe not. Maybe consequences are for the best. Time to wake up and wean off being dependent on USA goods and technology.
All Trump has is his fucking tariffs, which are doing as much damage in the USA as the other countries.
There are shit tons of MEPs who are in Trump’s and/or Putin’s pockets. There won’t be any consequences for them personally.
Europe is essentially a collection of neocolonies of the US empire. As Europe’s colonies gained independence and as NATO constantly increased demands for US military hardware and as fossil fuels became dominated by trade in dollars and as the Eurozone robbed them of currency sovereignty, they became stuck in a state of dependency on the US and USD. The amount of leverage Trump has to punish Europe is actually massive, tariffs are the tip of the iceberg.
How does a winter without imported US gas sound? You can’t get it from Russia anymore, after all.
The only hope I see for Europe is if they pivot to Asia, especially China. The only alternative is to get off of imported US natural gas and oil traded in dollars by switching to Chinese solar and electric vehicles, embrace electrification. The Netherlands backing down on stealing that Chinese chip factory gives me some hope that Europe isn’t going to alienate itself from China too.
The UK could start drilling more oil and gas, that would alleviate some of the pressure.
Also, who would the USA sell all that surplus gas that was destined for Europe? It would hurt the USA too, although not as much of course.
The US would just wait for the EU to collapse, because even a single winter without US imports would destroy them. The UK couldn’t ramp up production that quickly, they’ve been declining as producers for a long time. There’d be at least a few years when people can’t heat their homes or run factories because they’re cut off from the US and Russia at the same time.
Trump also seems fully willing to destroy the US just to teach his enemies a lesson lol
Besides, just drilling for more fossil fuels is going to kill us all. Electrification is the only serious solution.
The US would just wait for the EU to collapse, because even a single winter without US imports would destroy them.
Yeah… That would never happen. The EU only imports less than 20% of its LNG from the USA. The majority of LNG that used to be imported from Russia is now being imported from Norway.
The UK has been ramping down its oil and gas drilling on purpose, to meet the climate goals. They could ramp it up again. Maybe the EU would suffer higher gas prices for one winter, until the UK ramps up and there are other countries other than the USA or Russia to buy the gas from, it just takes time to get the agreements and infrastructure in place.
The EU would most certainly not crumble even if it completely stopped buying EVERYTHING from the USA.
The USA would just suffer alongside the EU, maybe less than the EU, but both would certainly suffer. If anything, the USA might collapse due to inevitable civil war.
Yes, the US shooting itself in retaliation. Real bad consequences, that.
Tariffs are really stupid
Yes, the US is a stupid country full of stupid people.
But, there’s a reason Europe is bending the knee. As stupid and self destructive as the US is, it can still wreck their economy.
The reason is that MEPs have been installed by Russia.
Yes, Russia controls all the world’s governments.
This is a reasonable thing to believe and not at all fucking stupid. 👍
We’re all speeding towards the next great depression. Giving into the US won’t stop it from coming. But I do see your point
and its 100% from unnecessarily large cars
and car infrastructure
Average car size probably rose approximately 70% as well. I remember when Hummers were considered absurdly large, now they’re not even the largest things on the road.
You don’t like the ‘pedestrian mower’ trucks, where the driver can’t see anything that’s less than 30 feet in front of them? Weird. /s
bah. children are not the future. Ever talk to one? pretty ignorant.
In my experience, drivers are getting shittier by the week doing increasingly stupid and illegal maneuvers
Don’t forget the rising costs of living, forcing more people onto the street, creating more pedestrian-vehicle collisions generally.
And the widespread prevalence of stroads in the US, which are more or less the most dangerous environment for pedestrians humanity has ever invented.
Don’t forget the rising costs of living, forcing more people onto the street, creating more pedestrian-vehicle collisions generally.
I’m sorry, do you seriously think the rise in pedestrian collisions is attributable to the homeless? And do you think they literally live in the street or something?
I’m an xray in a public trauma hospital.
I see at least half a dozen homeless hit by cars every shift.They don’t set up their tents on the literal street, but they do have to cross it countless times everyday.
Combined with murder machines called stroads. Yah it’s a big part of the problem. One of many parts.
Sounds like confirmation bias and that same old assumption that only poors don’t just drive a car everywhere.
I’m sorry I didn’t mention all the people who don’t matter to my point.
But since you’re bias is making assumptions about things I didn’t mention, I usually see half a dozen a week who aren’t obviously living on the street. Once every couple months or so, I even xray a hospital employee who was biking into work when they got hit by a car, or bailed trying to avoid one. But that doesn’t mean they couldn’t be one of the working homeless.
Thanks for the laugh 😆
Damn, 23 posts in 4 hours. You sure are posting fast.
They have to. They’re driving.
Who would’ve thought that market incentives and regulatory capture would lead to this?
/sThe share of pedestrians increased over that period, which may have had something to do with it. I suspect cell phone use while driving makes up a large part as well.
If you walk into the knife, someone is running around with, then its your fault?
I agree with you on cell phone use being a contributor. I’m not convinced that pedestrian numbers contribute at all to the increase. I’m not really even convinced that pedestrian numbers have increased at all. Population, yes, has increased but given how growingly hostile most of the US is to pedestrian traffic, I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that real pedestrian numbers have decreased.
Cost of living in that time has gone up substantially nation wide. In my city (Albuquerque) there are easily twice as many people on the street today as 15 years ago. This report says it’s gone up %40 in just the last 2 years alone.
Um, that’s a report on homelessness. The majority of pedestrians are not, in fact, homeless.
Right, but majority or not, if homelessness more than doubles, the number of pedestrians will also increase. Will it not?
Keep in mind there is no one single cause here. There are half a dozen major causes probably.
I live in a small town and when I’m walking around it seems as though half of the vehicles that drive by are in their phones
How is that legal in the US?
It’s not but they do it anyway.
Yes. And while walking.
Lack of focus all around.
Expand public transportation towards the goal of banning personal cars nothing but giant space hoarding, planet destroying death machines.
Until everyone outside city limits has transportation to get to or to do work, it’s not a viable option.
Then start with the cities. Make them more human, more livable. They have the largest population and would have the most impact, anyway.
Nothing has to be a blanket solution and aiming for a goal doesn’t mean the goal is fixed or has to be reached immediately.
Yeah, I’m a big public transport supporter, I never owned a car and so forth, but the transport options outside of city limits are always crap. I haven’t found a good solution yet, and definitely never saw one implemented.
I holidayed in a village in France and got around fine by a mix of bus, bike and train, and it looked ok to do that if you lived there and worked, but most of the locals still drove because there were occasional journeys where cars really helped and once you decide to sink €000s into a car, it’s then cheap to use it for each extra journey instead of wait for a bus or train, or take time to pedal or walk a bit to stops.
So I think it could be possible even in villages, but some services will need making easier to reach without cars.
I certainly know plenty of places where local governments aren’t even trying, of course.
Force employers to pay transportation costs and you’ll see commute lengths plummet.
You have to begin somewhere. Doing nothing is the “not a viable option”.
Ofc. Cities typically are good, at least the ones I’m familiar with. Light rails, the subway, the L, and even trains. Buses and light rails with bike racks. City bikes.
As society winds down to zones of even greater desperation, a city is not where I want to be.
quote “expand towards the goal”
No, that’s ass-backwards. You have to stop catering to drivers first in order to incite them to support building the transit. Politically, it does not, can not, and never will work the other way around.
Your argument is nothing more than disingenuous support for the car-dependent status quo.
The people who live remotely will still need to drive. No one is building transit out to one family’s homestead.
And don’t forget all the bedroom communities that have sprouted up. New builds and town homes by the 100s, wrapped around a rural road, a convenient store, and a post office, surrounded by farmland and livestock.
Seeing the drivers around me, I’d believe it. Anytime I go for a walk or run I almost die. People are willing to hit another human being.
Now do 1810 thru 1961!
