Just my own experience and maybe due to frequency bias, but holy shit everyone seemed to lose their goddamn minds behind the wheel after Covid.
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People seem to have gone “feral”.
Animals in the store?
No shoes/shirt?
Waiting your turn?
Treating other people (especially service workers)?
Nope. Just a feral return to “mine mine mine, me me me”
Yup. Everyone realized social norms/good behavior, was just a social shared agreement. If you opt out, and shit on the floor, it's the other person's fault for caring
And I swear SOOOO many fucking people on their phones. Bitch, you aren't that important. Put it the fuck down and drive.
Former firefighter: COVID didn't start that.
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.
Yes! A TON of people have brain damage from COVID and have no idea they have brain damage from COVID.
https://twitter.com/yash25571056/status/1745048307335119358
A lot of people only go the speed limit because there are cars in the way
Apparently i’m a lot of people
Yes. Covid unleashed a lot of people’s inner narcissism. Bunch of fucking me-mes.
I dunno but can we turn down the brightness on some of these fucking headlights
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.
If an 18 wheeled transport truck can have lights mounted at a reasonable height and brightness, so can your f150 or chevy Suburban.
Exactly, practically every semi has its headlights mounted just above the bumper. People saying "it's the angle that matters" don't understand that if you're in a small car you're getting blinded from both directions regardless of how the lights are angled.
The height doesn’t matter nearly as much as the angle they are pointing.
There are already rules about where they may point (for road legal lights, anyway) you shouldn't get dipped headlights in your mirror or from oncoming traffic except briefly as they crest hills
The height is a problem as when a large vehicle is tailgating you the angle doesn't matter much
I have a small car and even without being tailgated, excessively high headlights nearly blind me as they are as high or higher than my side mirrors or rear view mirror. Its so bad I'm tempted to wear sunglasses at times.
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.
With you on 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
I'm pretty biased on this one but I've been pretty outspoken that we print too god damn many driver's licenses.
For the most part, it has nothing to do with people's general driving competency. It has to do with their anger issues. People really just don't care about others anymore. Defensive driving is virtually nonexistent for the majority of drivers, because everyone's mentality is entirely selfish. Most days, many people are just giving in to their rage. And it's not just behind the wheel either. All aspects of life are being swallowed by people's indifference and anger.
Someone I knew got their license as an adult recently, and they were terrified at the lack of an actual "test" in the driving test. They drove around the block, never got above 35mph, and encountered a couple other cars.
And once you pass that, as long as you renew it and don't have any violations, you can drive until you can't see the gauges or hold the steering wheel.
We should have driving tests like the Finns have.
It's because we have so many entitled morons on the road, and we're all stressed over the worsening human condition.
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.
My town has mitigated that problem by putting a mobile camera just after the fixed camera. The sign for the mobile camera is hidden by the slow traffic, but they catch all the people who speed up just after the fixed camera
People are now afraid of speeding anywhere around the cameras
I've also heard of arrays of cameras being used along an entire street. So even if you aren't speeding at one camera, it will know your average speed across the whole street and if you were speeding between cameras.
In my city, police have pretty much given up on doing any traffic enforcement.
same, why? i didnt see any cops during xmas new year, then this morning i see 3 highway patrols, probably on their way to an accident
I'm taking this graph from wikimedia. It's super weird, no?
In some other developed countries, you can even see how lockdowns brought down traffic deaths. It especially saved children. The US just... loses it?
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.
Another hypothesis: American stroads are an unusually deadly design. Before the pandemic, though, rush hour limited speeds and artificially made the roads look safer than they were - it's hard to kill people in stop and go traffic. The increase in hybrid and remote work since the pandemic means rush hour still isn't back to pre pandemic levels.
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.
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.
But also much safer and way more stopping power. But the best car is useless when the driver is browsing tiktok
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...
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.
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.
lethal weapons, deadly accident, etc ...
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.