this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2023
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The average person shouldn’t be allowed to drive. It’s extremely dangerous and most people are desensitized to it and absolutely don’t take the natural responsibility towards others that comes with having the ability to kill someone with a finger twitch (or a slight lapse in attention) seriously enough. I don’t think it would be allowed if it was just invented this year.
Too many places let you drive if you do the happy path stuff right: stopping at a stop sign, changing lanes safely, etc. But the most important time of your driving is when you're about to hit a semitruck and you need to get your car out of the way, and there is no training material for this at all. People often panic and slam the brakes and aggressively turn the wheel, which is a perfect setup for understeer and losing control of your car. They are literally getting in a situation where they are about to die and they choose to greatly increase their risk due to negligence.
It's cheaper to run simulators than purchase cars and hire trainers. Get em in nasty situations and teach them how to get out of it. For real, if mom and dad can't evade sinking their freeway missile into a van full of kids, they shouldn't be able to get behind the wheel and be presented with opportunities where this might happen any time they drive.
...in this essay I will explain how my 500 hours in Burnout: Paradise makes me a superior driver...
You say that, but I'm fully convinced a good rally simulator will help a looot to control a car in adverse conditions
But I could be totally wrong, I do do a lot of real life and sim driving
In a sense, I agree that it makes sense to train people to be better technical drivers. The issue is that for avoiding accidents, your time is orders of magnitude better spent practicing planning and avoiding potential situations in the first place.
Being able to see where you need to pay extra attention, what cars to keep extra distance to, and being able to judge what a safe speed is saves far more lives than building the technical skills to get out of a situation once you're in it.
To be fair though: at least in Norway we have an obligatory course where we drive on sleet/ice or oil to practice controlling a car in winter conditions. However, the main focus of the course is on recognising how fast you can go in different conditions, and how far of a breaking stretch you need to plan for.
Someone's been playing grand theft auto
Honestly if you can play that game you must have super human reflexes. I used to play it on the xbox360 and loved it but I’m older now and recently got it on ps5 and I’m just constantly smashing into shit. I would be terrible in a real car!
Maybe doing this will also make people more hesitant to get behind the wheel. If more people are aware of the risks of driving, maybe they’ll start to demand alternatives
If you can't avoid an Infrared Homing AGM-65 Maverick Missile should you really be on the road?
what is the best to respond instead of slamming brakes and turning the wheel?
Dashcam channels can sort of teach you. A defensive driving course is better though.
Germany's driving test (and school) is fairly strict and will fail you for small mistakes which is good for beginners but after all, there is no test or reinsurance after some years of driving. After some time, people will see driving as a right not a privilege. This is the case for the vast majority of counties. This is the problem.
Problem is that there's no other alternative for most people. Unless you live in a city, public transportation isn't a valid option. Most people living in most locations (at least in the US) have to have personal vehicles to attend school/work, shop, and socialize.
Once self driving cars become commonly available, driving will no longer be a requirement and I think that driving licenses should be stricter on who's allowed to drive.
The way I see it is fuck em, if you can't safely drive and follow the rules to mimimize risk for everyone around you then pay for a taxi or take the bus. No public transport? Get your ass on a bike. Everytime I go out, even for a short 10 minute drive to the grocery store, 90% of the time I see someone doing something insanely stupid and dangerous but because nothing bad comes of it they don't learn not to do that.
Driving a vehicle should be considered a huge privilege considering how easy it is to kill not just yourself, but others simply by being a dumbass and not taking it seriously enough. People back up without looking, make turns without looking, tons of dumb shit constantly, shit I had someone merge into my lane without even looking when I was right beside them, I had to slam on my brakes to get out of the way and I was only able to do that because there was no one behind me. I honked at them and they just flipped me off. There should also be a forced age limit for being able to drive cause old people are fucking terrible drivers, or at the very least they should have yearly tests past a certain age to ensure they're still capable of driving.
Drive properly and safely or deal with the massive consequences of not being able to get around quickly. Need a license to get to/do your job? Drive safely or get fucked. Absolutely zero sympathy for shitty drivers.
Man, this really pisses me off because I know they know they’re the dumbass who fucked up but their fragile ego can’t take being honked at so they flip you off nevertheless. Hate idiots like that.
It infuriates me, but what're ya gonna do right? Just gotta deal with the stupidity of the average person unfortunately.
We aren't saying that they should be driving, quite the opposite. We're saying that it's completely fucked that in some places you have to drive to participate in society, precisely because many people shouldn't. There needs to be alternatives to driving so that law enforcement can remove anyone's license without effectively placing them in house arrest.
If cars became restricted, other options would come up. Better public transport would become available.
You would need an exception though for rural areas
Most people live in cities. And if 95% of the electorate can't drive, you can bet alternatives will be prioritized.
Only 45% of people in the US have access to public transportation.
And just having access to some public transportation doesn't mean you have useful access. Being able to access a bus stop doesn't help if it won't take you where you need to go, or if the time schedule isn't acceptably close to your needed transportation times.
There's a few places that didn't get cars until later and "no thank you" was a very common reaction. We really ought to just ban private ownership.
Imo it's kinda unavoidable. Humans make mistakes all the time. We could greatly reduce the risk however, if we simply reduced our reliance on independent vehicles. Unfortunately this depends on the place where you live as well but if possible, it would be much safer for the collective majority to bike/walk to areas or use public transport where applicable as it would drop the amount of traffic on the roads
This is why I personally am looking forward to fully self-driving cars. We’re a long way off, but when self-driving cars can completely replace the human element, I think the world will be a much safer place.
This is short-sighted. We need to entirely divert away from using cars as our primary mode of transportation.
Now there's an unpopular opinion
That all sounds very German, lol. I'm mostly just speaking from my America-centric perspective. It would be nice to have reduced road traffic here and make riding more fun, but a lot of the people that support public transit typically hate motorcycles just as much as they hate cars so I feel like I have to oppose them even though I don't own a car myself.
'just' 49€, and that's the problem.
What are you talking about, that is cheap in regards to monthly transportation costs.
Because if there's one thing everybody needs, it's to either triple their daily commute or live in a pod.
Cars are popular for a reason.
Or just a good public transportation system, really. I would never drive if I could take a bus to every place I need to go.
On the flip side I’m worried about manufacturers realizing that the continuous revenue stream from autonomous vehicles is more profitable than selling vehicles outright thereby increasing the cost of buying a vehicle to the point where ownership becomes functionally obsolete except to the ultra-wealthy. This also makes it much easier to restrict the movement of people. Self driving car companies could easily disable the ability to travel to entire areas either because they say they’re too dangerous or not profitable enough to operate in. I can imagine entire cities and rural areas becoming ghost towns. While personally I think autonomous vehicles, in a vacuum, have the potential to save countless lives, the reality is that in time we will be giving the companies making these vehicles the ability to dictate where we can and cannot go.
I think this is spot on.
Adding onto this, city driving is just... different, in a way that I think a human element is always going to be needed. Sometimes you need to take a risky left, or cut across the double yellow lines into the other lane past someone, or run a yellow. Are these things unsafe? Of course. But when it's rush hour you have to be a dick just to get through it sometimes. In 2016, Uber built and tested their self-driving cars in my city of Pittsburgh, because we notoriously have some of the worst and most confusing spaghetti messes of roads in the country. They stopped whenever a car struck and killed someone. I rode in one one time because I was just tryin to call an Uber for a concert, and since it couldn't go on the highway it took the worst way through downtown, and got stuck at a red light for over 5 minutes because the car was waiting to take a left, and everyone was going around us and not giving us a break.
Also, all these new cars with their auto-correcting features scare the shit out of me. What happens when you go across the double yellow to go around someone riding a bicycle and it swerves you back into their lane?
You could call these bugs to be worked out but I feel infinitely safer when I'm the one doing the driving. In a perfect world maybe our infrastructure and transport would've been planned differently but I swear half the roads around here are based on deer trails or something, winding through crazy hills in the woods. I've heard self-driving cars do best on roads specially designed for them. We can't even get the city to fix our thousands of potholes, or crumbling infrastructure. We had a major bridge collapse a couple years ago, and the way it was rated during inspections was pretty close to the other ones around here. So how on earth are self-driving car roads going to be put in?
That's probably going to happen with or without self-driving.
As a disabled person who's visually impaired I totally agree with this!
Sadly, most cities are build in a way which forces you pretty much to own and drive a car. Everything so far apart and tho public transport may help, tho in some cases is either neglected or badly implemented. Ideally, i think cities should be built around a way that easily allows traveling on foot, bike or with a solid subway and/or bus system.
People who die while driving are almost all die by accident.
People who get shot are far more likely to be killed intentionally.
I think updating the driving test to mandate proving you’re able to drive a stick would thin the herd quite a bit.
Especially in the USA