After decades of declining fatality rates, dangerous driving has surged again.
The cause was easy enough to identify: Data parsed by Kuhls and her colleagues showed that drivers were speeding more, on highways and on surface streets, and plowing through intersections with an alarming frequency. Conversely, seatbelt use was down, resulting in thousands of injuries to unrestrained drivers and passengers. After a decade of steady decline, intoxicated-driving arrests had rebounded to near historic highs.
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The relationship between car size and injury rates is still being studied, but early research on the American appetite for horizon-blotting machinery points in precisely the direction you’d expect: The bigger the vehicle, the less visibility it affords, and the more destruction it can wreak.
People are the same as they have ever been, the US is just genuinely entering a state of collapse and people are more desperate and less able to cope with side quests in life that demand them to be kind and patient.
That is not new tho. People now watching tv shows while driving is pretty new. And i assume people who do that are also on their phones at the same time.
80% of infected individuals have suffered neurological symptoms probably shouldn’t equate with 100% of those who experienced symptoms were found to have permanent brain damage.
They need to mandate that headlights cannot be installed > 2-2.5 feet off the ground. Putting them higher than that does not benefit you in any way, it just fucks with other drivers.
No joke, my MIL hit a dear the other day because she couldn't see it due to a truck blinding her as it drove the opposite direction. Luckily she was only going 30 so the damage was minimal but it's crazy they are allowed to blind drivers like that.
I live in a rural area with no street lights, and a lot of these redneck asshole trucks have two sets of headlights vertically, guaranteeing that you will be blinded
Same in mine, in Canberra, Australia. Maybe I'm just not driving at the times they're doing drink driving enforcement. I recall when I was a youth the breathalyzers were set up randomly midnight to 4am
We do have camera enforcement of speed, red lights, and mobile phones
I saw a police pulling radar in a school zone right around when the kids get let out. Everyone still did 15 over the limit and the officer didn't pull anyone. I'm sure they pulled people speeding faster than that but it seems they can't just ticket the entire town when 10-15 over the limit is so normalized. People still tell me all the time a cop isn't even allowed to pull you for just 10 over (which is false).
... Don't you guys have speeding cameras? As in, you drive by too fast, it snaps a pic of your license plate and after a couple of weeks you get mail saying "surprise, bitch! Here's a picture of you speeding. That'll be $400 or you're going to jail :)"?
I have seen mobile speed cameras and cops with radar guns in school zones in wealthier parts of my town, and they pull over anyone more than 2kph over the limit
I’m not saying it’s the reason, but as soon as they do and the perp wrecks and kills themselves they have dipshits online whingeing about how the poor kid of only 24 didn’t deserve to die for simply speeding.
So its better to just let them keep speeding and wait until they kill or injure someone else rather than themselves? Does that really sound more fair? Many police departments will stop the chase if traffic is too heavy to safely pursue. The cops shouldn't shoot the speeder but it's defintely not on the cops if the speeder disobeys traffic laws, refuses to pull over, and attempts to evade police resulting in a collision/personal injury.
And because the roads are not designed to keep traffic at safe speeds, and don't separate traffic from pedestrians and cyclists sufficiently, when those morons do something moronic they kill someone
Infrastructure can fix a lot of this problem - Australia is like mini-America in so many ways, but we allow speed cameras and red light cameras which reduce speeding marvelously, though I have been tailgated by someone offended I was only going 80km/h* in the 80 zone. They passed me illegally and unsafely
Even the fixed cameras do good work, even when everyone knows where they are as it's hard to speed right after them as slow cars move into the fast lane to pass glacial traffic
I point at the bike I ride as a reason cars give me space, it's a carbon fibre recumbent. Since it looks odd, people see it. But the bike lane is protected by paint on the route I mostly ride, and one driver was so busy looking at my odd bike that they went out of their lane into the bike lane. Luckily there was no cyclist just that distance in front of me - that's a pretty regular person, driving mostly safely, but screwing up. If the bike lane was protected by a kerb the car would've been deflected.
*I calibrate my speedometer to GPS speed, so it's accurate
Here in Canada I've noticed we are starting to use cameras as well, the only issue is there are lots of signs before it is installed and lots of signs when it is installed. That way you know where you can speed and where you can't speed, which is usually just 1 or 2 intersections of cameras.. It seems like a small improvement but they are too easy to avoid, especially for locals. Imagine if a traffic cop had to walk down the road and put a little sign up that says "radar trap ahead" before doing any radar.
Car sizes are getting larger in america to meet the fule efficiency requirements imposed by the government.
Car manufacturers could not meet these requirements, but they figured out that if they increase the weight of the car they could meet the fule efficiency.
Here is a video that explains it better then my ape brain could.
You don't need to make the cars bigger to meet fuel economy requirements; it's a decision by vehicle makers to make them bigger rather than take advantage of the more efficient engine designs available to produce a vehicle which uses less fuel.
It's partly that, but the other aspect is the absurd "light truck" exemption where SUVs and pickup trucks have less stringent emissions standards. So there is less incentive to go the downsizing route, and instead make bigger and bigger cars because if you're a car company, you make more money per vehicle this way.
People just went batshit over the pandemic for some reason. I don't know if it was a nihilistic embrace of the void in the face of plague and death, or what, but in addition to garden-variety street racing and dangerous driving ballooning while the roads were lightly used, there's been a huge increase in sideshows shutting down intersections, people just deciding not to pay for license plates or annual inspections, and generally making the roads more dangerous for everybody else.
I suspect that the anomaly in the US might be reflective of the way that social cohesion has corroded in the last decade or so. The pandemic broke us, but adhesion to the social contract has been getting weaker for a long time. People suddenly driving like maniacs is, in a sense, just a symptom of that breakdown.
US has a very opportunistic culture, to an irrational degree apparently. If there's less cars on the road people take it as an excuse to drive more recklessly.
Cars also got a lot faster than they used to be. Mostly due to many more gears in the transmission as well as much higher horsepower compared to cars even 15 years ago.
Because our requirements for getting a license are basically nothing. You answer 20 is super basic questions half of which have fucking nothing to do with driving or have insanely retarded answers like "how many feet exactly should you turn off your high beams if there's another car approaching" YOU TURN THEM OFF FUCKING IMMEDIATELY WHEN YOU SEE ANOTHER CAR!! Oh sorry I blinded you I was pretty sure that was about 500 ft my bad
And then the Practical test the vast majority of places do a quick little jaunt around the block on some insanely basic streets have you parallel park real quick and then you're good to go. The drivers in America are more deadly because they learn literally fucking nothing from the process of acquiring a license
Re the headline: Can someone explain to me - a German - when to use "deadly" and when to use "lethal"? Feeling pretty confident with the language, but this one just confuses the shit out of me...
I'm no linguistics expert but these are the definitions from Webster
lethal applies to something that is bound to cause death or exists for the destruction of life. lethal gas
deadly applies to an established or very likely cause of death. a deadly disease
They are synonyms and most people would probably use them interchangeably. I guess the biggest difference is lethal applies to something that is about to cause death, whereas deadly applies to death that has moreso already happened.
Hmm, they're pretty synonymous, but I think you're noticing this slight, occasional difference in use: Lethal is active, deadly is passive. A thing can actively be lethal when used by you, but when it's something that happens to you, it's deadly. An accident is something that's considered to have happened to you, despite the fact that it's typically your fault to some extent.
They're the same meaning just about exactly. Maybe lethal is a little more "fancy" if that makes sense. There's a lot of pairs of words in English like that, where one synonym came from old germanic/norse languages and the other came from old french/latin languages.
That's why wedding vows say "to have and to hold", for example. More educated people back in the day would use "have" (from habere in latin) and more common people would use "hold" (idk exactly from where but i assume old german or something.) When there was a wedding they wanted everyone to understand what was being said.
@dmrzl@silence7 I think they're largely interchangeable, like "lethal crash" and "deadly crash". Perhaps the use of deadly here was for alliteration: deadly drivers.
Ah, just being an alliteration might be the case. I used to separate these by active/passive (as pointed out by some of the other comments) which is why this was so confusing to me.
Thanks for all the replies. I had a very grim interpretation where the driver being an active part was removed. This happens a lot in German media where it is rarely a driver killing someone but instead someone "dying in traffic" - as if it's a higher power.
Glad it might just be interchangable or an alliteration...
I looked into similar data from the NHTSA regarding accidents during lock down on the hypothesis the insurance companies would have an interest in WFH.
I was stunned to see accidents did not decrease. Anecdotally i was working in field service during this period, and observed what seemed like less traffic, and yet the data disagreed with my impressions during the time.
We're practically a trustless country at this point. Lack of trust in others as well as government is highly correlated with aggressive shit driving.
In addition, as an often aggressive driver, boy is it irritating to be driving amongst the zombies that are all going 45 on the highway in the middle lane because they're all staring at their phones.
While I agree 99% of people are fucking morons I am curious about something.
I've been driving for awhile now and I've noticed that since 2019 it has gotten SIGNIFICANTLY worse. I'm curious if the increase in awful drivers is in anyway related to the current economy. We have nearly everyone working multiple jobs to stay afloat. Could this be causing people to be more reckless from a mix of exhaustion and the fact they feel forced to take risks and drive in order to maintain their relationships since they don't have time to do it any other way?
I am in no way justifying this behavior I'm merely just interested in if this is in anyway related. I really can't express just how bad drivers have gotten in such a short span of time.