I wonder if the psychology changed the driving or if the driving changed the psychology - specifically if the open roads and license to speed in 2020 brought out everyone's inner asshole.
I think that's it and I wonder if it isn't also because of the gig economy and more deliveries.
Anyway, people are really worse at driving than they were in 2019.
In other evidence of growing asociality, regional voters agreeing with the statement "Taxes in the Bay Area are high enough, I will vote against any tax increase" have risen from 48% in Nov. 2019 to 63% in Aug. 2021.
I also think that most people have decided that distracted driving is a-okay. It seems like most drivers I see are on their phones. And of course cars and trucks increasingly have massive screen-based entertainment systems that often include texting functions.
There was a guy who cut me off at a merge and forced me to brake to avoid a collision and then started to get out of his car (because I kept honking) was probably not looking at a screen. Fortunately, traffic started to move and he closed his door.
I agree with 1. I see crazy speedsters more often now.
I, too, perceive a deterioration in safe driving, but I'm always suspicious of assertions about other drivers. ("Drivers in [my city] are the worst!").
Nonetheless, I am compelled to acknowledge that I, personally, have become a worse driver in the pandemic -- not aggressive, just dumb. My best guess is that in my case, it's from lack of use -- I haven't driven nearly as much. But I might be getting old ...
My neighborhood has been successful at getting speed bumps installed. This has made some drivers livid but it has also reduced the number of parked cars hit. Plus, I think the deer are learning to cross the street by the bumps.
MA prohibits cellphone usage while driving. You are allowed to touch buttons on a mounted phone, but that's all. I have no idea how seriously this is enforced. I think Moby's 2 is accurate as well. I find that package delivery trucks (UPS, Amazon, FedEx, etc.) and "gig economy" drivers (meal delivery, etc.) are the worst. They are under time pressure and quotas, so I give them some sympathy, but they are incredibly dangerous.
MA is particularly bad, because there is essentially no traffic enforcement here. People (even before the pandemic) drive 70 or 80 mph on roads posted for 35 or 45. They've only gotten worse as the pandemic goes on, which probably establishes a "new normal" even as the pandemic slows down.
People in trucks keep crashing into my retaining wall too. It's not that it never happened before, but it definitely happens more. We had to yell at Lowe's a bunch to get them to restack the blocks.
Mostly, when men in trucks crash into that wall, they quickly and half-assedly repair it while hoping no one heard the giant "boom".
NHTSA research thru June 2021.
Oddly, it seems like a lot more people were going sans seatbelt in the first two months of the pandemic, looking at rate of crashes involving ejections (Fig 6). That simmered down, but it's still measurably worse than pre-pandemic. And greatest increase among men in rural areas.
Fig. 11 shows a big increase in speed on urban interstates, although that could be a function of less congestion. Seems to be going back down, but only very slowly.
It's much worse for pedestrians because gas prices dropped and savings increased so every asshole wanted to put his asshole on the seat of a $60,000 truck with a grill that hit a person's head
Giant trucks have also really made it easier to let people know how big of a shit you are by the way you park.
Mostly, when men in trucks crash into that wall, they quickly and half-assedly repair it while hoping no one heard the giant "boom".
Tigra and Bunny would like a word.
(It's unclear how the NHTSA paper is defining "rural". They say they collapsed the 12-level USDA Urban Influence codes into two, but don't say where they decided the dividing line was.)
I haven't noticed driving being particularly worse around me, but maybe that's just my distracted driving. Though a pedestrian did get injured in a hit and run at the entry to our street last month.
Hell is other people, and the 9th circle is those other people in their cars. One of the great joys of retirement has been no more 105 mile each way commute to work 2 or 3 afternoons/evenings per week. Robert Putnam found that commute time was one of the greatest predictors of social isolation, and I think that I and some other drivers tried to compensate for that by engaging in utterly stupid competitive driving tactics as a form of social engagement.
So far I've only had one person acting out in reaction to my "I Go The Limit" bumper sticker (with smaller footnote "Except Highways"). But it is something on my mind.
I am driving a lot more than I used to, and I am both more technically proficient and more reckless; I'm also aware of the psychological state of "merging with the car" that turns me into a hostile, awful car-person rather than a human being with no metal exoskeleton. It is fucking horrific. I think people are now disconnected from their bodies in general, and also disconnected from any embodied sense of living in a social world. A population that has been put in skinnerboxes for two years is generating worse drivers, go figure.
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Apropos of connection to bodies, just a quick question: is it worth proactively finding a sports doctor or PT or something if you seem to injure yourself constantly when exercising? I looked up the current thing and apparently it is "runner's knee."
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When driving, other cars to me are only obstacles and competitors, takes active thought to see that there's a person there. On foot or on a bike, even when people do something to impede, they're recognizably people. I moved 6 years ago, new place supported metro commute before covid rather than driving commute, huge quality-of-life improvement.
105 mile each way commute
Holy moly.
22: Mounting a replica of a human head on the hood of the car does not help.
21.2: Maybe run less for a bit? Running through joint pain turned out very poorly for me.
21.2. You should look into occupational therapy, if your insurance covers it. I had some serious hand/wrist pain some years ago that interfered with piano and tennis, and going to OT was basically the best medical experience of my life. I had to stop playing tennis altogether for a few months while I focused on stretching exercises and massage, and then gradually my therapist allowed me to play for short periods of time while trying out various wrist orthotics and different ways of moving my hand. Some of the interventions were not especially successful (none of the wrist orthotics turned out to be very feasible for tennis-playing), but I felt personally cared for in a way that I had never previously experienced in any medical environment, and within a year the problem was resolved enough to allow me to go back to my normal activities.
Mitt Romney strapped his children to the top of his car as a pro-social protest.
1: My wife drove to work during the shutdowns, and definitely adjusted to the expectation of open roads and greater speeds. I think a lot of people who got the freedom of well designed (half normal capacity) roads got addicted to the feeling, and are adjusting poorly to all the people clogging up their commutes.
My favorite was the English guy who took his kids out for a drive to see if he was going blind.
well designed (half normal capacity) roads
Well-designed in the sense of easy to drive, but clearly not in terms of fatality/injury outcomes. I took the 2020 data as confirmation that there is no solution to traffic safety that results in it being easy and fun to drive in cities - in addition to making public transit faster, driving where anyone lives needs to be far slower and pokier, on a human scale, and so that the only people who drive are those who absolutely need to.
21.2: I spent the morning with an occupational therapist, but it was in the NICU and she was helping my son take his first shot at bottle-feeding. If it's not just the runner's knee but also you are 4.5 lbs and need to be reminded to keep breathing while you are drinking, I would strongly recommend seeing an OT.
Endorse 26. A few years ago my knees went from fine to achey to agonizing in about a year, and it only took 2-3 months of PT and a couple more months of very light self-maintenance to resolve it. And yes, the experience was very positive, even aside from the outcome.
30 is also correct. The combination of screens and giant trucks has me in "ban private vehicles from cities" territory.
Endorse 26. A few years ago my knees went from fine to achey to agonizing in about a year, and it only took 2-3 months of PT and a couple more months of very light self-maintenance to resolve it. And yes, the experience was very positive, even aside from the outcome.
30 is also correct. The combination of screens and giant trucks has me in "ban private vehicles from cities" territory.
Dammit.
Anyway, it's not driving-specific, even if the driving may be the most visible and dangerous aspect. Educators everywhere are saying that they've seen acting out unlike anything from the before times, and I'm 90% certain that the spiking murder rates, unmatched by spikes in property crimes, are also an effect of 24 months of things being fucked up. Everybody has their own hobbyhorse for why things are fucked up ("people feel abandoned", "everybody's isolated", "traumatic loss"), but the reality is that there's no way for life in a pandemic not to be fucked up, Fox has made it worse, and so nobody's happy. I guess it makes some people happier to blame specific things, but they're still miserable.
I'm doing well, but everyone seems so shouty that I mostly keep it to myself.
I mean, when I'm drinking, I'm really mostly happy.
I, personally, have become a worse driver in the pandemic -- not aggressive, just dumb.
Lots of covid-related brain fog going around too. A lot of people are simply less cognitively responsive than they used to be.
Around me I haven't seen an increase in the kind of driving I associate with Maryland license plates, but there do seem to be more people driving in the dark (not dusk, fully dark) with their headlights off. So I'm on board with the brain fog theory.
Last weekend, two separate people drove into two different buildings here, only one of which was a bar.
31: Good luck, Kymyz! Hope your little one takes to the bottle!
When I say that to the parents of a teenager, suddenly I'm the asshole.
I know I should step up to defend Maryland drivers but the truth is I will never move back there because of the traffic.
I know people who live out in the panhandle and don't have to go into the cities very often. They seem to like it.
When people tell me I have become more aggressive, I just want to punch them in the face.
A guy I knew used to commute from Harper's Ferry to Bethesda four days a week. Then Covid came and saved him so much time. I bet Harper's Ferry is nice if you have a metro-D.C. income.
I have a relative who works in tech sales, all remote, and her employer now has a salary scale that slides by metro area.
When my brother was a post-doc at NIH, he lived in Bethesda, and he used to go fishing around Harper's Ferry. This was the late 1970s. I wonder if NIH post-docs can afford to live in Bethesda now.
It's all on the same river, so you could canoe to Bethesda from Harper's Ferry.
Just like Valerie Harper did before she started the ferry.
her employer now has a salary scale that slides by metro area.
This is one of the crackpot ideas I floated last year that you all reprimanded me for! Sort of.
I bet there's some crackpot guru out there who would offer to teach me to breathe while drinking and claim it would cure my knee. But thanks for the advice about not having fun like a fun person, but rather going to see a doctor like a mature person who can postpone fun. I really should, though. I feel like even if I took up swimming, I would somehow find a way to throw my back out by kicking wrong. Sustainable moderation is just not natural to me, unlike sustainable total laziness in a chair all day.
Swimming is horrible because there's always someone in the next lane who is 107 and faster than you.
I bet Harper's Ferry is nice if you have a metro-D.C. income.
There are an awful lot of ugly tract McMansions standing on what used to be cornfields in those parts.
Also Bethesda is not on the river.
Well, Georgetown is and Bethesda is on the Metro.
You are going to have to portage from the Foggy Bottom station
Foggy Bottom girls make the rocking world go round.
They say the State Department is the sexiest department.
54.2: I'm old enough to remember when there weren't more than a few of those abominations. It's not just the McMansions, as there are tons of mini-Mansions as well: the largest house you can put on a relatively small lot. And of course condos as far as the eye can see. There's so much demand that every piece of unprotected land will be developed. (This is not unlike the situation here in MA, as it happens.)
Anyway, you can take the C&O canal instead of the river and be within a few steps of the Metro.
The C&O starts in Georgetown, it won't help you much. The white people of Georgetown made sure of that when they blocked Metro construction.
I got rear-ended on my commute home yesterday, but that was because the roads were super-icy rather than anything aggression-related. It was such a light bump that I figured it hadn't caused any damage and didn't bother to pull over and exchange insurance info (nor did the other driver), but afterward when I looked it turned out it did cause a substantial dent that will need to be repaired. We do have uninsured motorist coverage so I think insurance will cover it, but definitely poor judgment on my part not to stop and check.
There's a train between Harper's Ferry and Rockville, get on the metro there. I know people who work in Bethesda and commute that way. Last train North is pretty early, but if your schedule fits, it's a way to live out there-- high ground as the waters rise.
I can say more than anyone wants to hear about sprawl, NIMBYs, and the development boundary there. Government of the closest-in county has plenty of good people, there's an initiative to basically relax the status quo which is single-family zoning almost everywhere. The initiative has opponents of course. The county executive is a build-nothing boomer, 2022 election will replace him with someone almost certainly better.
Is a train really more practical than a canoe? River transport is far older.
Its more practical for the upstream trip.
I guess you can do that if you're lazy.
60:. That's what happened when my mom sold her fairly small house in Bethesda. The buyers tore down the old house cut down the trees and built the ugliest mini-McMansion that fills up the entire property.
If houses were supposed to look nice, people would have better taste.
I was just torturing myself by looking at the satellite view of monstrosity they built where my childhood home used to stand. The big ugly house is bad enough, but there was basically a small forest on a slope in the back and those bastards cut it all down and put in more lawn.
The trees my dad planted shortly after I was born are now huge in the satellite view. It's too bad he never got to see the yard with mature trees.
Lurid @ 21: I have two busted knees from falling down a shit-ton at age 21 learning to skate (I did learn to do so really well, but it's much safer to learn at age 8 ...), a busted right shoulder from putting up too much weight with poor form, and a busted left shoulder from too-enthusiastically getting back into lifting, after my ortho fixed the right shoulder. So he had to fix the left one too.
I can wholeheartedly endorse finding a good ortho and a good PT place, and doing what they say. They're mechanics, and your body is a semi-rigid, semi-soft machine. Right now I have knee pain from not enough exercise during the pandemic; after a month-and-change of exercise, I'll re-evaluate, but if it doesn't *all* go away, I'm going back to my ortho so he can see what's wrong. He's taken me thru his decision process as he walks thru the MRI images -- it really is engineering.
Don't stint. There are no replacement joints in the stockroom. And something else: the .... *material* improvement to my life, and to my attitude, from getting my joints fixed, or getting PT conditioning and training to move them from "it hurts" to "it doesn't hurt", is enormous. If they're able to help you (which typically is the case) you will not regret it.
I never have.
Where do the keep the replacement joints then?
You definitely shouldn't use a new hip that fell off the back of a truck.
I don't have much of a basis for comparison of driving because I didn't have a car from 2008 until October or November 2020. Got the car because of the pandemic. So I'm part of the problem. I definitely plan to start driving less and biking more now that spring is coming, at least.
53: Agree wholeheartedly.
We've just dumped a bunch of money into repairs for our 15 year old car. It's going to pieces in little ways, but I think it will hold together for another couple of years. Plus, with a car that old, people don't play traffic chicken with me as much.
Wasn't there an SNL commercial for a high end luxury car NYC customized that looked like trash on the outside but was super fancy inside?
This car is kind of trash on the inside too.
But, if the mechanic is right, it will no longer vibrate when you break and the warning lights won't be flashing when it comes back.
But, if the mechanic is right, it will no longer vibrate when you break and the warning lights won't be flashing when it comes back.