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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.
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.
Does this actually hold up in court? The whole case could be thrown away if there was never a reasonable reason for the traffic stop in the first place.
Depends what the law is where you are, I imagine. I would imagine what constitutes a reasonable suspicion of driving without due care and attention is down to officer discretion. If they wrote you up for only that (assuming the officer does not decide to start suspecting other things, now that they’ve got you there) and you decide to take your chances challenging it in court you’d have a pretty good chance of winning, but of course they make the punishment for taking it to court and losing excessively harsh in comparison to the ticket in order to discourage you from doing that.
I’ve never heard of a case in traffic court where your outcome is worse than the original ticket, except in cases where an officer has reduced 30 over the limit to 20 over the limit, in which case there is a chance you will be charged with 30 over if you lose the case.
Maybe eliminating cars would prevent cops from being able to fabricate traffic incidents to make ticket and arrest quotas?
Dont review the PR while driving
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.
Speed cameras typically are set to 10%+3mph to account for variations in speedometers/tyre pressure etc. At least in the UK.
Sure. It’s reasonable to say “you will probably not be ticketed for going 5 mph over the speed limit”, but that is not the same as saying “it is legal to drive 5 mph over the speed limit”. Hell, where I live you probably have to go 40 mph over the speed limit before the cop is even going to wake up.
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?
Not sure that’s the best analogy, because that does also happen. Explosions from cooking oil fires are more common than you might think, and most people are woefully unprepared for that, too.
We know it’s boring. That’s the game.
Don’t like it?
Perhaps you hate the game.
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.
If it’s impossible to do, that’s a good reason to reject the idea of everyone driving in the first place.
What’s even worse, is that I am a person who tries to do a lot of defensive driving, and I’ve been doing it for decades, and I’m just constantly aware of all the little mistakes I still make. Maybe you can say it’s the Dunning-Krueger effect, but I think I’m objectively not a very good driver, and I don’t know what that makes all of the other people out there.
But overall, I really do agree that people shouldn’t be driving if they can avoid it. (I can’t avoid it at the moment.)
As someone with big wheels and thin tires on a low car I’m hyper vigilant about these sorts of things.
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
You don’t shift up because you’re lazy.
I don’t shift up because my shit box actually starts making power around 3k rpms
We are not the same
Super agreed that automatic transmission makes drivers less aware and should not be what people learn to drive with.
Haha well said
Stick shift in traffic is just annoying though.
So get more traffic into active and public transportation. Then there will be less traffic to annoy drivers.
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 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.
I’m pretty sure computers do a better job of managing the clutch and the regenerative brakes and stuff, but we need to give more things to drivers to do to help keep them focused and engaged if we’re going to continue to allow them to operate automobiles.
Driving is fucking boring. Let one person do it, take the bus or train
Totally agree. Time you’re driving is wasted time. If you’re on a bus, you can set an alarm for a few minutes before your stop and just totally zone out or do whatever.
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.
Idk man the community is called “fuck cars,” not “transitioning from a car-based culture to a transit-oriented culture is difficult for which I bear no personal responsibility” so it may just be the case that this isn’t the forum for you 🤷♂️
The problem is car-centric infrastructure, which the description of this community agrees with. Each person’s responsibility to fix the problem is their slice of making policy decisions that change the infrastructure. You can’t fix the problem just by getting mad at people who use the existing infrastructure.
I might also suggest that each person’s responsibility is to watch the road and not kill pedestrians like the graphic says, but I guess whatever helps you sleep at night.
The name of the comm uses aggressive language, which sets up readers for conflict right away. Not ideal, and also a reason that the attitudes in here are so hostile, whether from folks who want things different or folks who rely on or even like cars.
Cool, man. Fuck cars.
I always wonder how much nicer transit is in other cities. One of the last times I took the train here there was still blood smeared across the wall from a stabbing that had happened a couple weeks earlier (it was one of many that year). Every time I drive by the train stations there’s people smoking meth in the open, or someone screaming at people.
As much as I’d like to take transit, there’s not a whole lot I can do to make it safer. I vote for the parties that might make things better but get outvoted every time here. So how exactly does one “take personal responsibility” in an area where public transit is a safety hazard?
The drivers in this area are all selfish fucks that actively endanger everyone around them… bonus points 60% of them drive a great big emotional support truck. So it really is a choice between the idiots on the road or the methheads on the street, pick your favourite flavour of hazard.
I’ve been hit by a lot more cars than I’ve been stabbed by methheads so I take the bus instead. You might want to look at some actual statistics about the number of people who die from stabbing vs cars before making your decision.
I’m well aware of the statistics. Doesn’t mean I want to go directly to places where highly unstable people congregate. “Cars kill more people so the meth dens are safer” isn’t a great sales pitch. My point is that quality of transit is dependant on where you live and isn’t always the magical solution it’s painted as, as much as I wish it was.
If aggressively bad drivers could read they’d be quite upset about this.
I ride a motorcycle. Whenever I see someone driving like they’re drunk, I try to see if I can pull beside them and have a look. Lo and behold, 95% of the time, they’re on their phone.
I hope you’ve got a helmet camera and send the police the footage with plates and driver holding their phone clearly visible.
They have to edit out all the illegal lane splitting and speeding first.
The WHOLE time? Can I not blink!!!
Not allowed. Glue your eyes open and install an eyedrop dispenser to keep them moist.
I’m sorry but blinking is for public transit users only.
But they don’t blink either. They watch their phones the whole time.
One eye at a time. Feels weird at first but you’ll get the hang of it eventually. Now go practice.
I did it for 10 seconds and felt like I really needed to blink. Now my eyes are watering.
