this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2024
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Driving a car is absurdly difficult, incredibly dangerous, takes only a second of distraction to kill yourself and others and in general is such a nightmare that it is contrary to what you say a miracle that people aren’t crashing into each other all the damn time.
Like, everybody I have gotten in a car with for the past 10 years invariably will get stressed out significantly by the unavoidable chaos of driving enough to visibly become emotional about it even during a short drive. Driving is miserable.
I can agree with some of your response to what was said by the other commenter, but my impression is that person was shocked that someone at a young age has been involved in double digit accidents that mostly sound like their fault. Some people really just are incapable of driving, though that shouldn't diminish that small lapses or true accidents do happen.
I would disagree that driving in general is miserable, though I'm sure this can vary by location. While i would prefer better access to efficient public transit (live in the USA), being able to get in a car and go anywhere is pretty freeing, provided it isn't during high volume times, especially on a freeway.
i have never been in a serious accident. over 30 years driving, probably 2/3 of it in major metro areas with notably terrible traffic, and i have had maybe 5 fender benders... i would have to really think about it.
driving is absolutely dangerous and terrifying. but wow, it's kinda nuts that the person in the screenshot has had so many accidents!
I can totally understand, and that makes a lot of sense. I think the sheer volume of accidents in the post are what's so shocking. I've only been in a vehicle with an obviously reckless driver two times (so far. And to clarify, two people, once each), and from my perspective, some people really shouldn't drive. Heck, one of those two times was supposed to be a casual date (she was picking me up, we were in college), and i asked her to drop me off immediately. Big nope.
I disagree. It’s like a gun. There’s negligence, but “true accidents” I’m not sure if I buy it.
A person can actually, literally, control whether their car hits anything. It’s a solvable problem.
I> A person can actually, literally, control whether their car hits anything. It’s a solvable problem.
That is a really silly way to look at car accidents and the tragedies that come out of them. Just because you could rewind time and change what the drivers were doing to avoid a crash happening doesn’t really mean anything about the inherent risk factors to driving. Accidents are going to happen, we live in the real world not the one in which people behave consistently and perfectly and freak unexpected situations never happen.
Further, most people HAVE to drive their car in order to live their life on a daily basis (getting to work and back being the most obvious need). Driving isn’t a choice for most people at least in the US, so people are absolutely always going to be driving when they really don’t want to or aren’t at their most alert. It is just something we have to do sometimes in order to make ends meet in our lives.
No, you can walk around with a gun, even with it cocked and so long as you keep your finger off the trigger the likelihood of an unavoidable or unforeseen accident is still fairly low. A gun is an inert object that must be compelled to become lethal by the pressing of a trigger. A 5000 pound SUV on the other hand, by simply moving at normal driving speeds in close proximity to other people, consistently presents lethal opportunities that the driver must actively take steps to prevent from becoming realities.
A gun and a car are almost precise opposites in that respect. A car is like a gun that periodically aims at someone and automatically begins a firing sequence and you have to be paying attention enough to actively intervene and stop it.
This is, I think, an apples:oranges comparison as you're not taking the objects' functional properties into account.
What is a gun, objectively, designed to do, in the most basic terms?
Fire a projectile when the trigger mechanism is actuated.
What is an automobile designed to do, in similar terms?
Move, when the accelerator is pressed and slow when the brake pedal is pressed.
An apples:apples comparison would be something closer to this:
You can walk around with a safely holstered gun and, barring a very unlikely malfunction or external factors, it will not go off, until the trigger is pulled. You can also walk around a safely parked car and, barring a mechanical malfunction or external factors, it will not move, unless someone presses the accelerator.
Like a computer, cars and firearms generally just do what their operator "tells" them to do.
I don't think it's fair to assume, at best, an accident is negligence. There are numerous things that can lead to an accident that wouldn't be negligence, such as normal wear and tear causing problems with something such as brakes or steering (perhaps not caught during routine maintenance as they weren't issues at the time), something falling into the road (weather related, wildlife, erosion), a glitch of some kind (two green lights, not negligence necessarily) , or visibility issues (even cautious and solid drivers can be at risk during poor conditions). These are just some examples, but in the cases nobody involved would be at fault.
I believe the comparison to a gun is woefully inaccurate and invalid. Both are machines with the capacity to cause harm, but the similarities end there.
Fixed that for youuu
That's why i added not high volume times, so what i meant was regarding specifically driving when you aren't stuck in traffic. I'm suggesting that the act of driving itself isn't normally a horrific experience, though yes, sitting in traffic is awful.
Edited for some clarity
Yes and no.
It seems that most people are falsely convinced (or even peer-pressured to some extent) that you must drive at the speed limit or even above it. But you actually don't have to. You must adjust your speed for weather conditions, road conditions, traffic intensity, surrounding safety infrastructure (or lack of it) and your skills and current condition.
It seems that learning how to choose your speed is missing from most driving courses worldwide. Sometimes, road maintenance provides some advice on that, for example in France you have different speed limits for wet/dry road. But in other cases drivers ignore that guidance - sometimes highway speed limit is lowered due to lack of hard shoulder or animal fences but very few people understand that and most just ignore the limit.
And then there's your own condition - if you're tired, slow down, your kids are crying in the back, slow down, you're on new road, slow down, have a gut feeling, slow down!
What you're describing is actually mostly a case for driving too fast for given conditions. Even if you're not speeding but you can't read and comprehend signs, road, other cars, pedestrians and navigation - you're driving too fast, slow down.
So I think both your and OP's comments boil down to attention. As long as you remember essential driving rules and pay attention to road, surroundings and those rules it's difficult to cause an accident. But if your attention is slipping then it's a slippery slope.
And if you observe that you often struggle to pay attention to one of those things, you should review your actions and skills and apply necessary corrections.
Driving is easy in a way that it's schematic and there are not many rules compared to say aviation. But it's not mindless! You must think about your skills, capabilities and your state of mind and act according to those. In aviation pilots do thorough risk assessment before and during flight, and drivers should do that as well. What makes driving easier than flying is that when you identify the risk as too high you can just slow down or stop.
So to summarise. For God's sake SLOW DOWN! It saves lives.
I just don’t agree with this, flying an airplane has got to be harder in a lot of ways but one way in which driving is more difficult is the the amount of things you can hit while driving and how easy it is to hit those things.
The entire point of an airplane is to get up into the sky so it doesn’t have to worry about hitting other things when it goes fast…
In terms of regulations, there's a ton of laws that private pilots must observe.
In terms of situational awareness, I would say in some cases driving and flying are comparable. When flying VFR you are responsible for the separation from other aircraft and for navigating. So pilots need to look outside to stay away from others and look on map/ground to stay away from restricted airspaces, which gets intensive in busy airspaces.
I’m sorry not hitting another flying object in an absolutely MASSIVE three dimensional space that is 99.99% empty is a trivial task next to driving through a busy city in essentially a two dimensional space (you can’t go above or below to avoid hazards) with high speed traffic going the other direction only inches away, abrupt requirements to stop when something pulls in front of you, a dizzying variety of cars, pedestrians, bicyclists and other hazards to keep track of and the constant pressing need to ALWAYS be ready to brake or steer violently in order to avoid crashing.
Also when air airspace does get relatively congested like say at an airport, there is usually a tower full of people who’s job it is to route traffic so all you have to do is follow their directions and communicate effectively. You don’t have to make instantaneous choices like someone trying to get to an exit across 5 lanes of busy highway traffic that isn’t letting them in.
Let me put it this way, with an airplane cruising on a level flight path, how long could the pilot let go of the controls and ignore the environment around them before they hit something? That is a difficult question to answer, it could be 10 minutes… it could be more (assuming the aircraft can maintain a cruise speed and level flight). With a car, the answer is simple, it takes no more than 3-5 seconds of ignoring the environment around you and letting go of the controls to hit something. At highway speeds the difference of a second or two can determine if you collide head on with another vehicle at a combined velocity of 120+ mph.
An airplane pilot rarely is put in a position as risky as driving a car unless they are acting extremely irresponsibly. The rules of flying set out to make it so the pilot ideally never needs the kind of split second reactions that driving requires on a day to day basis (except for perhaps during landing).
The numbers support my claims too, flying is BY FAR AND AWAY safer than driving a car. It isn’t even close, driving is by the numbers extremely dangerous compared to everything else we are required to do in order to live our lives.
Yeah it’s easy to hit things. But it’s also easy not to. Just like, look at where you’re going, go slow enough that you can stop if you need to.
It’s far easier to get to the grocery store without hitting anything with the car than it is to, say, pass the first level of Super Mario Bros.
Then why don’t we let kids who can beat Super Mario Bros in their sleep (and thus from your perspective have demonstrated the skill required to learn how to drive) drive cars?
Again just because it is easy to aim the steering wheel and press the gas peddle doesn’t mean that every time you so much as drive to the grocery store and back you aren’t literally doing the most dangerous (mandatory) activity in most adult’s lives (both in terms of risk to yourself and risk of killing or hurting others).
Because they can’t reach the pedals or grasp the moral cost of killing people, and those kids failed a lot at Mario Bros before they got that good. We can’t afford to have people fail a lot with cars until they get good.
Well for one they can't reach the pedals or see over the steering wheel, and the safety systems in the drivers seat are built for adult sized humans. I totally believe the average 10 y/o possesses the mental capacity to operate a motor vehicle though. I was riding dirt bikes around town at that age. Now, their risk assessment abilities might be off, but I've seen plenty of people way into adulthood that don't seem to have those abilities either.
And oh my god did you just call driving mandatory? Why don’t you care what words mean that is ridiculous.
For the vast majority of Americans having a car is a mandatory part of having a job?
I can’t remember the last job I applied to that didn’t ask specifically whether I had a drivers license and car.
Yes, owning a car is mandatory at least in most places in the US. I don’t like it, but to believe otherwise is a strange distortion of the reality for most.
Hi I live in America, the word "mandatory" is definitely apt
I mean, I guess I could add a few hours to my commute by taking buses, but our public transit blows
I never said it didn't suck, but it only sucks because other people are terrible drivers. It isn't absurdly difficult at all unless you're incredibly incompetent.
This is the least important reason driving sucks is because other people aren’t perfect at driving. The reasons driving sucks:
-1. There are wayyyyy too many cars on the road
-2. In order to try to solve 1, the entire landscape has been devoted to facilitating more and more cars which makes it depressing as fuck to go anywhere because where you are going is functionally the same as where you came from.
-3. Owning a car is absurdly stressful, massively stressful so everybody on the road at a minimum is stressed about making sure their car doesn’t fall apart and they can’t get to work.
-4. People spend massive chunks of their lives sitting in cars commuting to work for almost no reason, highways are filled with people everyday stopping and starting, stopping and starting over and over again in traffic using fossil fuels to move several thousand pound objects miles and miles all for nothing.
-5. This bring me to my last point. Just because it isn’t physically difficult to press the gas and brake pedals on a car and use the steering wheel doesn’t mean driving is easy in the slightest. It is one of the most difficult things human beings have ever been expected to do on a daily basis in terms of extreme life ending consequences for losing attention or control for only the briefest of moments. It isn’t hard to drive a car compared to say riding a horse, but driving a car is so mind numbingly frustrating and exhausting in modern life that there is a good chance one day you won’t be paying attention when that freak rare situation occurs and you need to respond instantly in order to not hit another several thousand pound object hurtling towards you with fragile humans inside (not to mention humans everywhere on the street, barely an arms length from your metal box traveling at lethal speeds).
Driving is extremely difficult, look at how stupendously self driving cars have failed to tackle the challenge even when we created AI opponents that can easily beat the best Go players in the world years ago. The fact that wayyyyyy more accidents don’t happen all the time is actually pretty incredible in terms of the daily volume of sustained, unbroken focus it takes from every single person driving to prevent more crashes.
You think this because you were desensitized to it as a child riding in the car and then a teenager who learned to drive early on. My wife is from a large city where they don't drive and she only learned as an adult and is basically paralyzed by how terrifying it is half the time.
Yeah just in the same way a person who learns to walk as a toddler is “desensitized” to the dangers of balancing on the ends of long sticks to get around.
She might want to look into some CBT for that. It’s not the only way it has to be.
Wow. Not for me. I drive ten hours a day sometimes. Never freaks me out.
If you don’t start yelling at somebody or something within 10 minutes of getting in the driver seat you are in the vanishing minority of drivers. Are you some kind of monk?
Ancient ninja secret of give-no-fucks.
People have become so jaded by driving that they've lost the perspective on how much it beats the hell out of walking. Even if you consider being in 25 MPH highway traffic to be "slow," you're still covering more distance in an hour than most people would be able to cover on foot in an entire day.
True. I went from homeless two years ago to having a car now, and I appreciate the reminder.
It’s so much fucking better than having to walk, or take public transit where any trip is minimum one hour even if it’s only a ten minute drive away.
Driving loses your perspective on speed because you're in a big metal box. Being on two wheels can regain the sense of speed at lower driving speeds, but I've noticed after 6 months of motorcycling that even those speeds can begin to feel slow on a motorcycle, especially on long rides. Sounds like that's my calling for the track :)
Oh you mean just yelling at people? I thought you were talking serious emotional distress. Well of course I yell my head off at people it’s my civic duty as a driver to yell at people.
However I quit caffeine last week, and since then it’s down to maybe 5% as often as before. And I no longer find myself ranting after the thing is over. Just things like “whoa what the fuck!” and then it’s over.
Also, an accident is just a matter of time / miles. You can be the most careful driver in the world and a car can pull in front of you on the freeway and come to a dead stop. You'll hit them from behind and the insurance company will blame you.