I’m open to the possibility that it’s just me being more aware/sensitive to how people are driving around me too. And I’m not necessarily talking about drivers I have to interact with myself but just seeing what people are doing in general.
The same thing happened after 9/11 and lasted for months. People were stressed, upset and angry and it really showed up in their driving.
We now have the Republicans and their malignant narcissist glorious leader who are actively destroying this country. Medical costs, housing and grocery prices (among other things) are completely out of control and keep getting worse while Trump claims affordability is a “hoax”. Nearly eradicated diseases are surging again and children are dying. Our food has become unsafe to eat. Screw worms are infecting our cattle and humans are next. We’re in a war that was completely unnecessary. The dotard in chief is literally shitting his pants, hiding in food carts and has no idea what to do. Nero isn’t just fiddling while Rome burns, he and his ilk are smearing shit on the walls and actually lighting more fires.
People are naturally stressed, upset and angry, and it’s again showing up in our driving.
Since 2020. Covid broke a lot of brains. Once people started driving again, it’s like they forgot (or rejected) all the rules. Bad behavior that I rarely saw, like blatantly running red lights, aggressive driving, using turning lanes as passing lanes (even through intersections) went from rare to daily.
Using turning/bus lanes to cross intersections is something that I see that went from rarely to daily. It drives me crazy since they usually try to force their way back in to the lane once they cross.
You’ve an uptick in this type of behaviour coupled with a decline in enforcement.
You can go to countries where there are no traffic rules being enforced at all, but there’s not the same wanton disregard for life that I see daily on US roads. Recently was in Houston and you couldn’t pay me to live in that hellscape of entitled drivers.
It might be the age of most drivers around me but they all forgot how to use turn signals, how to merge onto a highway, what a yield sign means (hint: it’s not stop) and how to anticipate that they need to merge instead of waiting until the last minute and creeping into the other lane.
And just about every time it’s someone in a Subaru driving like they were beamed into a car and don’t know what they’re doing there.
Oh, and just about everyone comes to almost a complete stop to make any turn.
Or the fact that No and mean almost no one moves over for emergency vehicles on the side of the road. Did fucking they stop teaching that in drivers education?
The city I live in had 15 pedestrian deaths from cars as their previous record, this year we are up to 40.
Cars are rapidly increasing in size and weight, decreasing their visibility, and people wont get off their phones. I do also partially believe that covid hit cognitive function and that tough times are making people antsy and angry too.
Yes, because police stopped working after Antifa demonstrations in 2020.
Either way they get paid.
Not really. It sure can feel like it when you run into one, but people have been shit at everything since forever.
It seems so, but I don’t have any data to back this up so it’s yet another anecdote. Speaking as someone who spends a lot of time on a motorcycle, though, I feel that I probably have a keener eyeball out for this sort of thing than most.
People kind of went insane during the COVID lockdowns and as far as I can tell remained at that approximate level of insanity in the years afterwards, whereas the number of vehicles on the road returned right back to its original level.
Yes, over the last few years. I haven’t seen it get noticeably worse recently, but things like blowing through red lights and turning whenever you like are happening all the time.
A recent trends I’ve noticed is tons of people driving with one hand and holding their phone up with the other, looking at it.
And also people going very slow, like 25MPH in a 55MPH zone.
I think the older we get, and the more we know how things “are supposed to go” we notice more when things don’t go that way. I usually try to chalk it up to people that are inexperienced, elderly or not local. But there will always be people that are dicks because they can
I’ve seen endless people not using their blinkers, and I’ve seen people diving over two, three, four lanes of freeway to make their exit, I’ve seen people changing lanes in the goddamn well-marked no lane change tunnel, speeders and super slow drivers alike,
and I think it would prolly be for the best if the standards to get a license were much, much higher.
Yep. Coinciding directly with the proliferation of massive trucks with 10 seats and 600 horsepower engines and a bed too small for a TV to fit in.
It was way worse before phones were outlawed while driving. Now, people are back on their phones while it’s illegal. It’s a legitimate issue, and a hard one to solve.
People are braking like 30% later because of distractions inside of cars. More recent automobiles can tolerate braking so suddenly, but older ones cannot. Phones, funny enough, have gentrified the roads via producing unsafe drivers
And if they’re not on their phones they’re tapping on the giant iPad on the dashboard to change the HVAC settings.
I was at a friend’s place, and they had an oven with dials. Before I could even begin thinking of grandma and puppies, I had already ejaculated from the sheer beauty of it. It even had a numerical temperature gauge for every burner.
Yep. And it gets worse every year.
I avoid major areas every chance I get.
Too many people with the me me me, and whatever aditude on the road.
No, in my experience it has always been bad
Yes, and the trend feels like it’s correlated with the number of Teslas around here.
I’ve noticed over the many years I’ve been driving (1) it depends on coincidence (sometimes there are suddenly ten jerks in a month instead of the average of two -plain statistics) 2) it depends on me (if I drive defensive, it seems every one does so too).
