About half of Americans (49%) say people in their area are driving more dangerously than before the coronavirus pandemic, while only 9% say people are driving more safely, according to a new Pew Research Center survey. What publicly available data there is on the subject suggests that those perceptions may be right, at least in part.
There’s no one definitive data source for how common “dangerous driving” is, or even necessarily agreement on what specific behaviors that involves. Most data on people’s actual (as opposed to self-reported) driving habits comes from encounters with law enforcement – arrests, citations, accident reports and the like. Thus, the resulting data can’t be representative of the entire driving population.
Nonetheless, there’s a fair amount of data indicating that Americans’ driving habits have worsened over the past five years, at least in some ways.
I hear you. I’ve definitely read some eye-rolly hyperbole in this community. I walk a fair bit. I ride a bicycle. I also drive a car. I’m not subscribed to this community, I just visit it when it pops up on the feed.
That said, of the places I’ve lived, the ones that had good pedestrian and cycling infrastructure and good public transit tended to be more pleasant places to live, but I’m not saying that’s directly causal. I think probably it’s more that communities that try to support more walkable/rideable places to live also tend to have city and state governments more invested (or at least interested) in creating more enjoyable communities overall. Who knows, though. Definitely the level of baseline anger and aggression from your average person differs pretty wildly depending on where you are in this country.
My city definitely fits that description. We spend $150 million annually to build/reallocate infrastructure to bikes. I drive by miles of empty bike lanes every day to work. (Blue collar labor with tools kind)
I do get frustrated when congestion is engineered into roads in the name of safety for those who don’t exist. We have a new “bike box” that prohibits right turns on red and I’ve never seen anyone ever use it.
It wouldn’t sting so bad if the money we wasted were actually used. Empty lanes as far as the eye can see …
We had a neat thing happen in my city recently.
A bridge was closed for repairs for 4 months. During that time, no one used the road approaching the bridge on either side! That’s a ton of lane that nobody was using, but we decided to not take it out.
Shockingly, once the bridge was replaced, drivers started using those two sections of road again.