Why Are American Drivers So Deadly?
www.nytimes.com
After decades of declining fatality rates, dangerous driving has surged again.

The cause was easy enough to identify: Data parsed by Kuhls and her colleagues showed that drivers were speeding more, on highways and on surface streets, and plowing through intersections with an alarming frequency. Conversely, seatbelt use was down, resulting in thousands of injuries to unrestrained drivers and passengers. After a decade of steady decline, intoxicated-driving arrests had rebounded to near historic highs.

… The relationship between car size and injury rates is still being studied, but early research on the American appetite for horizon-blotting machinery points in precisely the direction you’d expect: The bigger the vehicle, the less visibility it affords, and the more destruction it can wreak.

  • @marine_mustang@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    96•6 months ago

    Just my own experience and maybe due to frequency bias, but holy shit everyone seemed to lose their goddamn minds behind the wheel after Covid.

    • @SzethFriendOfNimi@lemmy.worldEnglish
      54•6 months ago

      People seem to have gone “feral”.

      Animals in the store?

      No shoes/shirt?

      Waiting your turn?

      Treating other people (especially service workers)?

      Nope. Just a feral return to “mine mine mine, me me me”

      • @GBU_28@lemm.eeEnglish
        20•6 months ago

        Yup. Everyone realized social norms/good behavior, was just a social shared agreement. If you opt out, and shit on the floor, it’s the other person’s fault for caring

      • @dumpsterlid@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2•6 months ago

        People are the same as they have ever been, the US is just genuinely entering a state of collapse and people are more desperate and less able to cope with side quests in life that demand them to be kind and patient.

      • BruceTwarzen
        8•6 months ago

        That is not new tho. People now watching tv shows while driving is pretty new. And i assume people who do that are also on their phones at the same time.

      • astraeusEnglish
        3•6 months ago

        80% of infected individuals have suffered neurological symptoms probably shouldn’t equate with 100% of those who experienced symptoms were found to have permanent brain damage.