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.

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?

If you want to play games/text/watch movies you can also carpool.

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'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.

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.

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.

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 just want to credit the author(s) who happen to be in the fediverse, too: @howdoyouguide@mastodon.social

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

If aggressively bad drivers could read they'd be quite upset about this.

I think distracted driving is way more dangerous than fast driving, assuming the person going 10mph over is paying attention. That said, people are terribly bad at understanding where and why you should be proceeding slowly.

Freeway? Yeah fine whatever. Blind intersection? Fucking slow down.

@CombatWombatEsq

The problem is that most of that people that need to be hit are in the cars, and there are just too many of them. Too many.

Not too much slower though. In my state ten over and ten under is covered by the same rule. Its reckless driving.

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.

you can drive slower

Please don't drive slower than the speed limit. That can be dangerous 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.

I often drive slower than the limit. I set my Sirius XM to classical or new age and don't fucking touch it.

I'm in a hybrid, and I use the pulse and glide technique to maximize fuel economy.