I legitimately don’t get people who can’t drive.
Setting aside folks with serious disabilities, folks with long term mental decline, folks with mechanical difficulties, folks with rambunctious kids in the back seats, folks in neighborhoods with high speed limits and generally unsafe driving conditions, folks who have to drive through inclement weather, folks who don’t regularly maintain their car’s brakes and tires, folks who drive cars that have poor visibility (big trucks, particularly), and folks who just never learned rules of the road before getting a rubber stamp from a DMV that does not give a shit…
It’s difficult to understand why other people don’t drive as well as I do.
One sec. Sorry. Banging this out on my phone and I had a whoopsie-doodle. Let me clean this up and I’ll finish my post.
dumpsterlid@lemmy.world 5 months ago
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.
abysmalpoptart@lemmy.world 5 months ago
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, but that doesn’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.
braxy29@lemmy.world 5 months ago
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!
abysmalpoptart@lemmy.world 5 months ago
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 a 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.
intensely_human@lemm.ee 5 months ago
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.
abysmalpoptart@lemmy.world 5 months ago
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), or visibility issues (even cautious and solid drivers can be at risk during poor conditions).
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.
dumpsterlid@lemmy.world 5 months ago
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.
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.
dumpsterlid@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Fixed that for youuu
abysmalpoptart@lemmy.world 5 months ago
That’s why i added not high volume times, so specifically not sitting in traffic. I’m suggesting that the act of driving itself isn’t horrific, though yes, sitting in traffic is awful.
repungnant_canary@lemmy.world 5 months ago
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.
dumpsterlid@lemmy.world 5 months ago
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…
repungnant_canary@lemmy.world 5 months ago
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.
intensely_human@lemm.ee 5 months ago
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.
intensely_human@lemm.ee 5 months ago
Wow. Not for me. I drive ten hours a day sometimes. Never freaks me out.
dumpsterlid@lemmy.world 5 months ago
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?
dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world 5 months ago
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.
intensely_human@lemm.ee 5 months ago
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.
Daxtron2@startrek.website 5 months ago
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.
Socsa@sh.itjust.works 5 months ago
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.
intensely_human@lemm.ee 5 months ago
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.
Daxtron2@startrek.website 5 months ago
KevonLooney@lemm.ee 5 months ago
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.