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.
… 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.
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.
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”
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.
And I swear SOOOO many fucking people on their phones. Bitch, you aren’t that important. Put it the fuck down and drive.
We just got phone enforcement cameras, they’re cantilevered over the lanes
A lot of people only go the speed limit because there are cars in the way
Apparently i’m a lot of people
Some of them really really don’t like that at all
It works though
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.
If the headlights are higher than another driver’s eyes, the light will go straight and downward into their eyes. There’s just no way to highlight the ground without blinding drivers in front of you if the headlights are so high.
If the head lights are angled properly then they won’t be shining straight down. They should be offset so they are pointing down and to the right. If you’re in front and you’re being blinded it’s because they aren’t angled.
The key word is “proper” installation. A lot of idiots don’t know how to do this.
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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
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.
Yep. Average speed cameras. They work great on roads with no exits or turns for a while. They detect your time entering the zone, and the time exiting and work out your average speed
They don’t work on city streets as 1 minute at a red light, or even 15 seconds traversing a roundabout, messes up the average
We also have aerial speed checks - a plane circling above a highway identifies speeding cars and radios to police ahead.
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.
But its happening on all road tupes, not just ‘stroads’
Is the increase in accidents even across all road types?
The data is not broken down by road type.
Injecting the anti stroad agenda helps nothing. Its not relevant here. It mutes whatever truths the anti stroad people have and thier advocates get categorized into annoying wackjob category.
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.
“Drivers were frustrated,” says Kuhls, now a professor of surgery at the Kirk Kerkorian School of Medicine at U.N.L.V. and chief of trauma at an affiliated public hospital. “My own theory is that whatever personal conflicts they had were exacerbated because they’d been sheltering in place during Covid. So they’d get on the road having self-medicated with drugs or alcohol, or they’d just be incredibly reckless.”
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.
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.
I’ll burn this bitch to the ground before I drive a 4-cylinder.
But my freedoms
If killing every goddamn mammal on this planet and letting the octopi take over is the price we pay for liberty, so be it.
In case you forgot, we’re mammals too. The only freedom you’re rushing towards is the freedom of death, but at least we get big vroom vroom sound make happy on the way
You can stop trying to sell me on it, I’m already on board!
That’s probably the most pathetic thing I’ve read on Lemmy so far. Kudos on sharing, I guess - I wouldn’t humiliate myself in public this way for sure.
Sounds like something a virus would say
Everyone else was making the same joke, why did you get the downvotes?
Because this sub is an outrage factory with notoriously bad sarcasm detection lol
notoriously bad sarcasm detection
Ahh first day on an Internet forum eh. There there.
Poe’s law.
You know oil companies aren’t going to thank you personally… right?
I’ll take a car with an inline 4 and a stick over the majority of other vehicles.
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 …
Deadly Weapon is my favorite action flick franchise
I don’t think you can use lethal for a metaphorical situation where nobody can actually die. For example “Deadly smile” or “deadly fart”
There are a few examples where there’s a convention around using one or the other, such as ‘lethal dose’ but not too many.
yeah you can
You can definitely say lethal fart and nobody would think it weird.
I don’t think I’ve ever heard it used that way. Only deadly
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.
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.
Sure there were less cars on the street but the ones that WERE there were faaaar more likely to be the same kind of karen/kyle that shouts at mask wearers for somehow violating their ‘freedoms’.
Constantly angry people make terrible driving choices.
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Is it so hard to believe that in an era where more and more people are distrusting authority and breaking rules, especially considering how the right wing Americans have reacted to COVID measures, that they’d also start disobeying traffic rules?
Couple this with cell phones, smart watches and infotainment systems fighting for our attention, even while on the road.
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If that is your experience, you should urgently review what news sources you rely on.
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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.
It’s Mobile phones
We’ve had those for a minute. It’s not new.
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.
