When I was learning to drive the thing that took me by surprise the most is how fast the situation can change. You can take your eyes off the road for a second to check your mirror(s), your speed, etc and just in that tiny bit of time the entire situation on the road ahead of you can change dramatically.
Using a phone while driving is negligence of the highest level. It is so incredibly goddamn dangerous that I would possibly argue it should fall under attempted murder instead.
If you want to play games/text/watch movies you can also carpool.
Carpooling is just taking a short bus (non-derogatory and second-meaning not intended).
Being a passenger on a 3DS and such is such a good feeling.
Except it’s a “bus” that stops at your start and destination instead of several blocks away, and takes a fraction of the time to make the trip
Depends on the design of the area. For rural areas, that’s gonna be the case (although we could make buses go to specific houses by request and buses for disabled people already do this). But I’ve been places where the buses stop everywhere and have designated routes, so getting to a car means walking at least half a mile each way and often having to drive further, possibly in traffic the buses avoid.
Where have you found that buses stop only in front of your start and destination, and nowhere else? How do buses prevent cars from dropping off or picking up people at a curb? Where are parking structures significantly further away than bus stops?
I didn’t mean only stop at destination. Just that the pickup and dropoff are basically the destination, while parking is in some distance lot or garage. The entire routes are bus-only. Cars aren’t allowed on the street at all.
Right, so an urban area that actually has full transit coverage wouldn’t have that problem. Sadly, that isn’t relevant to the vast majority of the planet.
Its not possible for the majority of uninhabited land on the planet, but its possible for the majority of people globally that live in urban areas.
Its a good thing that busses and trains don’t take you directly to your destination.
Yes, because it’s terrible to get somethwete in a timely manner, especially people unable to walk moderate distances.
Its terrible because it is geometrically impossible for a form of transit to simultaneously have high capacity and to carry people directly to their destination.
Cars average an occupancy of about 1.5, while trains routinely carry hundreds of people. A bit of thought about the implications of everyone arriving directly at their destination should reveal why the average occupancy of such a transit mode can never be much higher than 1.5. This is something that many many advocates of PRT (personal rapid transit) systems fail to understand.
By the way, a pedestrian oriented space can be made to accommodate people that have difficulty walking, but it is virtually impossible to make a city safe and accessible for people with difficulty seeing if the expectation is that everyone is driving a car to their destination.
Yes, but the point is: if people who can walk a short distance do walk a short distance, it frees up space for the people who cannot.
Won’t that just annoy your passengers, though?
When I tell people that a driver should strive to see 100% of the road where their tires will go when driving, I inevitably get a lot of responses from people who say it’s impossible to do. I mean, you don’t have to consciously focus on it, just make sure you can see it. That’s what I learned in my defensive driving class, and I’ve been doing it for decades. Obviously, I can’t do it perfectly, so there are rare times where I hit a pothole I didn’t see, but I don’t think you should be driving if you don’t try to do this.
I always wonder how many potholes/animals/small children these people hit with their cars.
If it’s impossible to do, that’s a good reason to reject the idea of everyone driving in the first place.
What’s even worse, is that I am a person who tries to do a lot of defensive driving, and I’ve been doing it for decades, and I’m just constantly aware of all the little mistakes I still make. Maybe you can say it’s the Dunning-Krueger effect, but I think I’m objectively not a very good driver, and I don’t know what that makes all of the other people out there.
But overall, I really do agree that people shouldn’t be driving if they can avoid it. (I can’t avoid it at the moment.)
Like 5 years ago I had a pedestrian walk into my blind spot while I was checking for traffic in the opposite direction (not sure how I didn’t see them before i looked the opposite direction) so I started to move then hit the breaks as I saw them exit the blind spot immediately in front of me. I’ve been thinking about the mistake ever since and I’m extra careful to make sure there is no chance there’s a person hiding behind my A beam ever
Edit: also huge benefit to bikes is no obstructions to your view. You can see everything on and off the road
Obviously, I can’t do it perfectly, so there are rare times where I hit a pothole I didn’t see, but I don’t think you should be driving if you don’t try to do this.
I agree. Even looking the road all the time you can’t see everything at the same time: there are the mirrors, there is stuff far away, there is stuff close. I really can’t drive if I don’t pay attention the the roaf
As someone with big wheels and thin tires on a low car I’m hyper vigilant about these sorts of things.
This meme implies this is only an issue of personal responsibility ; but in truth to actually lower car deaths we need a systemic approach.
Think of cigarette companies laying blame at “addictive personalities”. They knew making people personally responsible would not threaten their business, whereas public policies against tobacco did.
This post is doing the same thing : when an accident happens we should not just ask “who is to blame?” but also “how do we prevent it in the future?”, which in this case means redesigning streets to be friendlier to pedestrians and developing other modes of transportation.
Design infrastructure to be actively hostile to cars. It’s the best way to be pro environment, pro bike, pro a better future
This meme is a parody of PSAs aimed at telling people walking and cycling how to avoid getting hit. Y’know, the personal responsibilty + victim-blaming approach.
Thinking about that cab driver who was so pissed when I asked him to please not watch a movie while driving. dude had a tablet attached to the window in front of him
Taking the train/subway/tram/bus is just like having your own personal chauffeur.
I hate driving myself anywhere like a “peasant”. All the rich folks outsource mundane tasks like driving or cutting ones lawn, that how they stay rich!
I remember in my childhood reading a joke that went something like: One person says to another: “You know, I’ve recently started to regularly travel in a large vehicle with its own chauffeur.” – “Really? Wow!” – “Yes! Oh, look, my bus is coming!”
Honestly, automatic transmissions becoming the standard was a determent to driving safety.
I read driving is boring, it’s not when you have a stick shift to pay attention to.
It’s also harder to speed with a manual transmission I think. Maybe not on a highway, but on roads with lower speed limits, you can really feel/hear the engine when you’re going to fast in a lower gear. Sometimes too lazy to shift into fourth gear, when I know Ill have to downshift again anyway for a turn or corner. So I just won’t speed and stay in in third gear.
With automatics you can access so many more distractions.
This is just a thought
You don’t shift up because you’re lazy.
I don’t shift up because my shit box actually starts making power around 3k rpms
We are not the same
Super agreed that automatic transmission makes drivers less aware and should not be what people learn to drive with.
Haha well said
Stick shift in traffic is just annoying though.
So get more traffic into active and public transportation. Then there will be less traffic to annoy drivers.
I’m a school bus driver. I actually had the dispatcher last year tell me that it was legal to drive 5 miles an hour over the posted speed limit. I was like “so the posted speed limit isn’t the posted speed limit?” It’s amazing the crazy shit that gets into the heads of people that should know better – which is fucking everybody.
It should come as no surprise that some of my fellow drivers text, doom-scroll Facebork, and watch movies while driving the buses. I’ve never seen someone doing it with actual kids on the bus, but I think that’s only because they know the kids might rat them out for it.
A few of them vape on the buses, too.
Speed cameras typically are set to 10%+3mph to account for variations in speedometers/tyre pressure etc. At least in the UK.
Sure. It’s reasonable to say “you will probably not be ticketed for going 5 mph over the speed limit”, but that is not the same as saying “it is legal to drive 5 mph over the speed limit”. Hell, where I live you probably have to go 40 mph over the speed limit before the cop is even going to wake up.
it’s mind blowing how we are expected to all regularly use a giant dangerous machine like that.
imagine cooking, but the oven can explode at any moment and you have to pay 100% attention all the time while baking, because at any moment, if it were to explode and kill you and everyone in the room, you only have 0.2 seconds to react and not die.
such oven would never exist, but a car?
Not sure that’s the best analogy, because that does also happen. Explosions from cooking oil fires are more common than you might think, and most people are woefully unprepared for that, too.
The speed limit is the maximum, but it is also the minimum if you’re the kind of person the police are looking for an excuse to pull over.
In places where people follow speed limits more than half of the cars are going 5km/h (3mph) below the limit because their speedometer lies and they don’t know. I doubt those people increase their chance of being stopped by police
Does this actually hold up in court? The whole case could be thrown away if there was never a reasonable reason for the traffic stop in the first place.
No, but we have such a Byzantine legal code that they can often concoct some plausible sounding legal justification anyway.
Depends what the law is where you are, I imagine. I would imagine what constitutes a reasonable suspicion of driving without due care and attention is down to officer discretion. If they wrote you up for only that (assuming the officer does not decide to start suspecting other things, now that they’ve got you there) and you decide to take your chances challenging it in court you’d have a pretty good chance of winning, but of course they make the punishment for taking it to court and losing excessively harsh in comparison to the ticket in order to discourage you from doing that.
I’ve never heard of a case in traffic court where your outcome is worse than the original ticket, except in cases where an officer has reduced 30 over the limit to 20 over the limit, in which case there is a chance you will be charged with 30 over if you lose the case.
Maybe eliminating cars would prevent cops from being able to fabricate traffic incidents to make ticket and arrest quotas?
I just want to credit the author(s) who happen to be in the fediverse, too: @[email protected]
Best comment in the thread. I saw it on Bluesky and didn’t know I could give credit within fedi. Thanks for linking!
Sure! You are welcome! I visited the site and I was amused there was a mastodon icon at the bottom ❤️
The fedi-memes are becoming self sustaining!
Oh my god if I could take a train to work I would be soooooo happy.
1: trains
B- I could leave slightly later and be relaxed most of the time
III• if there’s dense fog like today or severe weather, I don’t have to stress out for 30 minutes going 20 in a 55 because I can’t see 150ft ahead of me.
I had a 55-minute commute by train for a few years and it was absolutely wonderful. It was two hours a day of time to read, or if I was still tired I would just nap the whole way. TBF it really helped that my station was 5 minutes from my house and the train let me off literally in the basement of the building I worked in.
Then I changed jobs and had a 45-minute commute by car, and that shit was just nightmare fuel.
I did my all my PMP hours and studying during my 40 minute subway commute.
This post rubs me the wrong way because it shifts blame for a systemic issue onto individual drivers. There are a lot of drivers that should not be on the road but they are forced onto the road by a lack of viable alternatives. The resulting consequences should be blamed on those planning decisions, not on the individuals.
I mean if you really want to get down to it, people have the transportation options they vote for in most cases. I live in an area where people are pretty enthusiastic about transit and cycling and even here people feel like they have a god give right to do 10mph over the speed limit.
We recently had a big push to install speed cameras outside schools, which would only be active for two hours pers day, and the council meeting was still absolutely filled with assholes trying to argue that literally just enforcing the speed limit during the start and end of the schoolday was a violation of their rights.
The older I get the more I realize that people are always at least part of the problem. Especially in a democracy, since democracy is something you do, not something which is done to you.
I can’t meet whatever threshold of proof, but there’s no way “Driving any slower than the speed limit is just as dangerous” ISN’T what the raging lunatics on the road tell themselves when weaving thru traffic before they comment the same thing on posts like these.
It’s such a common brain blind spot. Videos of lunatics flipping their own cars trying to pass someone will have comments blaming the other car.
It’s absolutely and obviously untrue that driving slower is equally dangerous.
Absolutely and obviously until you get someone merging at 30 into a highway; merging at far lower speeds is very dangerous. Blind turns not going a reasonable speed limit can also be dangerous. Like, I fuckin hate cars. i bike everywhere. But I’m not going to make a take like “being slower is never as dangerous”
You’re misrepresenting what I’m saying. I just mean it’s not equally dangerous. If we’re comparing comparable speed differences it’s much safer to drive slower. Yes, 30 mph slower is dangerous but less so than driving 30 mph faster.
Generally the safest speed would be the slowest one that doesn’t create a hazard through speed differential with traffic.
Of course people are the problem. But the problem is the people arguing and voting for more car infrastructure, which is a different set of people than drivers. A lot of people drive while being supportive of other modes of transportation, because they have to use the infrastructure that already exists.
Idk man the community is called “fuck cars,” not “transitioning from a car-based culture to a transit-oriented culture is difficult for which I bear no personal responsibility” so it may just be the case that this isn’t the forum for you 🤷♂️
The problem is car-centric infrastructure, which the description of this community agrees with. Each person’s responsibility to fix the problem is their slice of making policy decisions that change the infrastructure. You can’t fix the problem just by getting mad at people who use the existing infrastructure.
I might also suggest that each person’s responsibility is to watch the road and not kill pedestrians like the graphic says, but I guess whatever helps you sleep at night.
The name of the comm uses aggressive language, which sets up readers for conflict right away. Not ideal, and also a reason that the attitudes in here are so hostile, whether from folks who want things different or folks who rely on or even like cars.
Cool, man. Fuck cars.
I always wonder how much nicer transit is in other cities. One of the last times I took the train here there was still blood smeared across the wall from a stabbing that had happened a couple weeks earlier (it was one of many that year). Every time I drive by the train stations there’s people smoking meth in the open, or someone screaming at people.
As much as I’d like to take transit, there’s not a whole lot I can do to make it safer. I vote for the parties that might make things better but get outvoted every time here. So how exactly does one “take personal responsibility” in an area where public transit is a safety hazard?
The drivers in this area are all selfish fucks that actively endanger everyone around them… bonus points 60% of them drive a great big emotional support truck. So it really is a choice between the idiots on the road or the methheads on the street, pick your favourite flavour of hazard.
I’ve been hit by a lot more cars than I’ve been stabbed by methheads so I take the bus instead. You might want to look at some actual statistics about the number of people who die from stabbing vs cars before making your decision.
I’m well aware of the statistics. Doesn’t mean I want to go directly to places where highly unstable people congregate. “Cars kill more people so the meth dens are safer” isn’t a great sales pitch. My point is that quality of transit is dependant on where you live and isn’t always the magical solution it’s painted as, as much as I wish it was.
If aggressively bad drivers could read they’d be quite upset about this.
Driving is fucking boring. Let one person do it, take the bus or train
Totally agree. Time you’re driving is wasted time. If you’re on a bus, you can set an alarm for a few minutes before your stop and just totally zone out or do whatever.
