Monday, March 09, 2020
The Car People
I know I'm a grumpy old man now, but I cannot resist the anecdotal report that drivers seem to me to be getting altogether more reckless lately, at least around here. I am seeing near collisions with pedestrians almost daily now, and my own vigilance is ramping up considerably lately... Is it that people are relying on all this faux-smart vaporware "navigation" software now? Is it that everybody's on their phones now and letting things slide? Is it that general norms about waiting for lights, watching for pedestrians, and so on are evaporating or just changing in ways I haven't picked up on yet? There is a quality of reckless impatience I am discerning in drivers lately. I could easily be wrong, I cannot entirely trust my impressions because I have disdained car culture all my life and am always happy to assume the worst of people (after half a century of knowing them), but it's starting to feel sometimes like the ones with the cars sometimes act like getting where they want in their big cars matters more than the lives of the little people without cars, it's starting to feel sometimes like people without cars aren't quite as real to people in cars as we should...
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3 comments:
Here in Valencia the drivers are terrible. And in remote mountain villages drunk driving is still common (some roads aren't policed). But it's not aimed at pedastrians just generalised recklessness.
And it might be an age thing to. You do tend to pick up on consideration and risk more and that's probably a good thing IMHO.
I do strongly suspect it's an age thing, as my personal grumpiness factor has SERIOUSLY ramped up over the last four years or so and I can't think of anything, other than aging, that might account for THAT... (laughs into shotglass (not really))
Pardon the sexism, but what I see mostly are middle age women in SUVs and millennial girls in Hondas driving recklessly as if their live depended on getting from point A to B. Yeah, there are the old men that are 80+ that should be put off the road and high school male punks racing from red light to red light, but I place the ratio as 60 women and 40 men in my south bay community. Sorry gals, but this is what I've observed standing on the street or riding my bike to work.
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