A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
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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:
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.
If you want to play games/text/watch movies you can also carpool.
Carpooling is just taking a short bus (non-derogatory and second-meaning not intended).
Being a passenger on a 3DS and such is such a good feeling.
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.
In places where people follow speed limits more than half of the cars are going 5km/h (3mph) below the limit because their speedometer lies and they don't know. I doubt those people increase their chance of being stopped by police
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.
No, but we have such a Byzantine legal code that they can often concoct some plausible sounding legal justification anyway.
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?
This meme implies this is only an issue of personal responsibility ; but in truth to actually lower car deaths we need a systemic approach.
Think of cigarette companies laying blame at "addictive personalities". They knew making people personally responsible would not threaten their business, whereas public policies against tobacco did.
This post is doing the same thing : when an accident happens we should not just ask "who is to blame?" but also "how do we prevent it in the future?", which in this case means redesigning streets to be friendlier to pedestrians and developing other modes of transportation.
Design infrastructure to be actively hostile to cars. It's the best way to be pro environment, pro bike, pro a better future
This meme is a parody of PSAs aimed at telling people walking and cycling how to avoid getting hit. Y'know, the personal responsibilty + victim-blaming approach.
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.
Thinking about that cab driver who was so pissed when I asked him to please not watch a movie while driving. dude had a tablet attached to the window in front of him
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.
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!
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?
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.
I just want to credit the author(s) who happen to be in the fediverse, too: @howdoyouguide@mastodon.social
The fedi-memes are becoming self sustaining!
Best comment in the thread. I saw it on Bluesky and didn’t know I could give credit within fedi. Thanks for linking!
We know it’s boring. That’s the game.
Don’t like it?
Perhaps you hate the game.
Oh my god if I could take a train to work I would be soooooo happy.
1: trains
B- I could leave slightly later and be relaxed most of the time
III• if there's dense fog like today or severe weather, I don't have to stress out for 30 minutes going 20 in a 55 because I can't see 150ft ahead of me.
I had a 55-minute commute by train for a few years and it was absolutely wonderful. It was two hours a day of time to read, or if I was still tired I would just nap the whole way. TBF it really helped that my station was 5 minutes from my house and the train let me off literally in the basement of the building I worked in.
Then I changed jobs and had a 45-minute commute by car, and that shit was just nightmare fuel.
If aggressively bad drivers could read they'd be quite upset about this.
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.
Dont know about other states but in california since covid speed of traffic went from 3-5 over the limit to 10% over the limit, rounded up for speeds over 50. 72 in a 65, 49 in a 45. Something new and infuriating is the number of people who think taking their foot off the brake is enough acceleration to get through an intersection, and the people who think 35 is an acceptable speed to merge onto the freeway.
Driving is fucking boring. Let one person do it, take the bus or train
But you don't understand, they have to speed up to tickle their adrenaline just so the commute isn't boring, and texting to maximise their time.
(real argument, i'm not even kidding.)
You can drive slower.
You will want to check your local laws on this one. Where I am the minimum speed limit is 20mph below the maximum unless otherwise posted (usually on highways where it will be posted 85/60 or something).
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 think distracted driving is way more dangerous than fast driving, assuming the person going 10mph over is paying attention. That said, people are terribly bad at understanding where and why you should be proceeding slowly.
Freeway? Yeah fine whatever. Blind intersection? Fucking slow down.
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.