If you’ve ever driven through American cities, you’ll see that a high percentage of drivers aren’t really driving. They’re using their phone and tangentially feeding occasional input into their vehicles. Automakers keep adding Federally required “safety” features to cars like auto-brake and lane-departure correction, I’ve heard from some people they use those to make an ersatz “autopilot” and just let the car ping-pong down the road while they use their phones. Others, as soon as they *almost *come to a stop, the phone is already in their hand again and they’re paying zero attention to their surroundings, probably thinking they’re being a “smart” cell phone driver.
It is rare I see a USian driver actually operating their vehicle as their sole focus these days.
I’ve personally got in the habit of managing cars behind and in front of me with longer stopping distances and early brake flashing to get their attention off their phones and back on the road so I don’t become an SUV sandwich, and also a quick polite horn toot when the drivers in front don’t realize the light cycle has been green for 5 seconds because some other driver didn’t pull forward, because all of the front drivers are on their phones.
So, they probably feel like they have to defend their idiocy.
atomicbocks@sh.itjust.works 4 days ago
Based on this and a couple recent other threads I am becoming pretty convinced that more and more of the people on Lemmy are children.
OneOrTheOtherDontAskMe@lemmy.world 4 days ago
I don’t know man, Lemmy seems to downvote people who make generalizing claims, period.
Your comment didn’t seem to ring with the community, that could be because they’re of the age group you’re citing as the group supportive of this shitty behavior (distracted driving), or it could be because the base of your stance didn’t root itself in examples they could identify with and so they downvoted an opinion they disagreed with.
I’d say the most likely reason people downvote is because they disagree, I wouldn’t have much knowledge on their age though so I won’t make claims on that part.
atomicbocks@sh.itjust.works 4 days ago
I think that’s part of the problem though. Downvoting isn’t for disagreeing it’s a vote that a comment detracts from the conversation as a whole.
OneOrTheOtherDontAskMe@lemmy.world 4 days ago
I hear you and agree with that concept.
I think that, if your goal was ultimately to further the conversation (in it’s format, I don’t see anything wrong with what you initially wrote), adding examples of what you mean by recent interactions pointing towards the user base being more skewed towards teenagers. That might have deterred anyone who was unsure of whether you were being genuine or just bashing on the next generation the way we’ve seen historically.