Fuck Cars
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
Rules
1. Be Civil
You may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.
2. No hate speech
Don't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.
3. Don't harass people
Don't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.
4. Stay on topic
This community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.
5. No reposts
Do not repost content that has already been posted in this community.
Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.
Posting Guidelines
In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:
- [meta] for discussions/suggestions about this community itself
- [article] for news articles
- [blog] for any blog-style content
- [video] for video resources
- [academic] for academic studies and sources
- [discussion] for text post questions, rants, and/or discussions
- [meme] for memes
- [image] for any non-meme images
- [misc] for anything that doesn’t fall cleanly into any of the other categories
Recommended communities:
view the rest of the comments
I'm taking this graph from wikimedia. It's super weird, no?
In some other developed countries, you can even see how lockdowns brought down traffic deaths. It especially saved children. The US just... loses it?
People just went batshit over the pandemic for some reason. I don't know if it was a nihilistic embrace of the void in the face of plague and death, or what, but in addition to garden-variety street racing and dangerous driving ballooning while the roads were lightly used, there's been a huge increase in sideshows shutting down intersections, people just deciding not to pay for license plates or annual inspections, and generally making the roads more dangerous for everybody else.
I suspect that the anomaly in the US might be reflective of the way that social cohesion has corroded in the last decade or so. The pandemic broke us, but adhesion to the social contract has been getting weaker for a long time. People suddenly driving like maniacs is, in a sense, just a symptom of that breakdown.
Another hypothesis: American stroads are an unusually deadly design. Before the pandemic, though, rush hour limited speeds and artificially made the roads look safer than they were - it's hard to kill people in stop and go traffic. The increase in hybrid and remote work since the pandemic means rush hour still isn't back to pre pandemic levels.
But its happening on all road tupes, not just 'stroads'
Is the increase in accidents even across all road types?
The data is not broken down by road type.
Injecting the anti stroad agenda helps nothing. Its not relevant here. It mutes whatever truths the anti stroad people have and thier advocates get categorized into annoying wackjob category.
US has a very opportunistic culture, to an irrational degree apparently. If there's less cars on the road people take it as an excuse to drive more recklessly.