Is driving getting worse?

Been a while since I hit the A41 / M25 at rush hour but the standard of driving is simply appalling. The sheer aggression of some people (overtaking at 50 mph in a 30 limit), passing on the wrong side of pedestrian refuges, tailgating, red light jumping, ignoring people waiting at zebra crossings, texting… you name it, it’s happening with astonishing frequency.

The police could make a killing by sticking a camera van or two on the bridges on the A41 – the radar on my car shows the speed of the car in front and the average was 90mph, with the odd car at 110mph.

Only four more weeks of driving this bloody road.

Where I live its a definite “yes”. I see an accident on the way to work most days, usually either shunts due to dickheads looking down at their phones or pricks who can’t follow lines and arrows around a roundabout.

I’ve started to look into getting a dash cam as I fear I’ll need it soon.

As per the car parking thread it seems like people are just generally getting more selfish arseholeish – and cars + congestion + stressful commutes seem to bring out the worst.

A1 actually seems to be improving at the moment, only issues seem to be when people panic as it’s either raining, foggy, misty or anything out of the ordinary. Then it just slows it all down

I’ve noticed that traffic lights are now red plus one.
That means after the light has turned red one more car is allowed through. Saw a motorbike do it yesterday with his go pro on. If he got knocked off I bet he wishes he didn’t have all that in criminal ongoing evidence on him.
I don’t know if it is European drivers driving like **** or our very own home grown arse holes.

More cars on the roads, phones and toys in cars make it easier to be distracted . Cars are more capable of travelling fast and people get frustrated if they can’t use all that extra power.

Plus idiots who speed, don’t forget them

I’ve noticed that traffic lights are now red plus one.
That means after the light has turned red one more car is allowed through.

Yep, I bet the same drivers moan that “cyclists always jump red lights”. 👿

I’ve actually had someone honking their horn at me because I had the audacity to stop at an amber light.

I’ve noticed that traffic lights are now red plus one.

Drive through Wolverhampton. The lights/signs/markings are purely advisory

Perhaps it’s because I’ve mellowed and I make a very conscious effort not to let bad driving frustrate me, but in my experience driving standards are not getting worse at all. There are – and always will be – idiots (and I’ve made my own mistakes over the years), but overall I find myself less annoyed by other road users than I used to be. Granted I don’t have to drive round city centres at rush hour, which could make my blood boil 🙂

More cars on the roads

So more idiots per mile.
If you don’t drive in high population areas,it can come as a bit of a shocker.
Oh,and then there are all the old folk that really should have stopped driving years ago.

And of course we’re all getting older so more likely to moan on about driving standards, ideally whilst towing a caravan at 45mph in the middle lane of the motorway 😀

Amber is the new green, red is the new amber. On my commute home there’s a junction with several no right turn signs so to go right you need to do a left, 100 yards to a roundabout then back on yourself. Probably 2 or 3 days a week some muppet decides that the signs don’t apply to them and turns right. No particular type of vehicle either, anything from white van man to corporate exec mobile.

There is definitely a seasonal uptick in the number of selfish loonies on the roads – or maybe it seems that way to me as we live in a very touristy area. OTOH I’ve have had some very pleasant feedback from bike hire customers recently on how patient and friendly motorists are in the Highlands and Islands – and that’s coming from those who live in countries we’d more often associate with a better driver:cyclist relationship.

Absolutely yes. I can only attribute it to a ‘can’t beat them so will join them’ phenomenon. When I started driving around the A406 into NE London a couple of years ago I was staggered at the sheer amount of criminal driving.
I doubt the police would catch even half of the perpetrators if they could even be bothered to try.

Undertaking at (very high) speed, cutting into gaps that literally don’t exist, aggression, bullying – all day every day.

Far too many cyclist on the road nowadays, so annoying. I routinely egg my child on to throw rubbish at them. Make them think twice about cycling to work!

how patient and friendly motorists are in the Highlands and Islands

We did a three day road bike tour from Lairg up to Cape Wrath and back via Tongue (for those unfamiliar with Scottish geography, most of that is the arse-end of nowhere).

We barely saw any cars at all.

But still, as we rode along an otherwise completely empty road where we hadn’t seen a car for a good hour, we had some wee wifey drive up close behind and then sit on the horn, shouting at us to get out the way, rather than overtaking like a sane person. 😕

what we need is a new type of traffic light, that fires those stinger spikes up across the width of the road when the light goes red (with RF disable for blue lighters), and then retracts on green.

😈

I think Graham S has hit the nail on the head

As per the car parking thread it seems like people are just generally getting more selfish arseholeish – and cars + congestion + stressful commutes seem to bring out the worst.

Plus a element of this

More cars on the roads, phones and toys in cars make it easier to be distracted . Cars are more capable of travelling fast and people get frustrated if they can’t use all that extra power.

Plus idiots who speed, don’t forget them

But what gets me is the slow speed manoeuvres, especially in car parks etc. Some of the stuff I’ve witnessed is unreal. If I drove like some of these idiots during my test, there’s no way I’d of passed!

My neighbour is a prime example, the other day whilst stood in front of her car – well, about 6ft away emptying my own. She courteously informs me to ‘be careful’ as her car always rolls forward first, whenever she wants to go in reverse!

I like that spike idea.

In Netherlands they stuck speed humps at every lights, so instead of Red=Stop, Green=Go, Yellow=Go very fast, it’s Red=Stop, Green=Go, Yellow=Knacker your suspension.

Retracting spikes should make it a more comfy ride if you’re in the back of an ambulance.

Round here, it seems that even 2 years after turning a crossroads (a straight thru road and 2 T-junctions) in to a 4 way stop, that the previous rules still apply. And that 30kmh sign is just a decoration, just like the 4-way stop signs.

And my street (that was one of those T-junction bits) which is one-way, and has been for at least a decade, is actually allowed to be 2-way if you’re just “quickly nipping half way down the street” to save driving round (it’s a 4x 100m square block). PS it is 2-way for bikes.

Is driving getting worse?

Mine certainly is.

No, it’s the cars! They are spontaneously crashing, the drivers are merely victims.

http://www.theargus.co.uk/news/14569030.Woman_injured_after_car_flips_upside_down/

“A WOMAN has been injured after her car flipped and landed on its roof.“

http://www.theargus.co.uk/news/14397650.Woman_in_hospital_after_car_goes_off_the_top_of_Ditchling_Beacon/

“A car was reported to have crashed and rolled 150 metres down a steep bank.”

Bring on self driving cars we are simply not fit for purpose when it comes to driving.

Even then self-driving cars are getting into accidents because they follow the rules and are “not aggressive enough”

Last month, as one of Google’s self-driving cars approached a crosswalk, it did what it was supposed to do when it slowed to allow a pedestrian to cross, prompting its “safety driver” to apply the brakes. The pedestrian was fine, but not so much Google’s car, which was hit from behind by a human-driven sedan.

Google’s fleet of autonomous test cars is programmed to follow the letter of the law. But it can be tough to get around if you are a stickler for the rules.

One Google car, in a test in 2009, couldn’t get through a four-way stop because its sensors kept waiting for other (human) drivers to stop completely and let it go. The human drivers kept inching forward, looking for the advantage — paralyzing Google’s robot.

..

“The real problem is that the car is too safe,” said Donald Norman, director of the Design Lab at the University of California, San Diego, who studies autonomous vehicles.

“They have to learn to be aggressive in the right amount, and the right amount depends on the culture.”

— from http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/02/technology/personaltech/google-says-its-not-the-driverless-cars-fault-its-other-drivers.html

*sigh*

I don’t know if it is European drivers driving like **** or our very own home grown arse holes.

WTF? where does this crap come from?

WTF? where does this crap come from?

Planet jambaland…

I drive around North, West and South Yorkshire, A1/M1/M62/M18 and all areas in between.
Roughly 1400 miles a week, and to be honest I don’t witness hardly anything like you lot are describing.

Maybe I don’t let it bother me as much, or maybe a its a regional thing, not sure. But for the mileage I do, you would think I would be seeing a LOT of crashes/ near misses/ aggressive drivers/ red light jumpers/ road rage etc etc..
But it’s a rarity I see anything even similar.

What am I doing wrong ?

Yes, there are 4.5 million more cars on UK roads than there was in 2000 but more than that Cars are bigger than they used to be – each new model is bigger than the last one, the little VW Fox is actually bigger than the first VW Golf.

We should have invested in better infastructure by now, I don’t enjoy driving to work, I really dislike it, I like the school run even less – but there aren’t any viable alternatives for me – the road between my House and my Sons school are Mad Maxesq and the crossing points are leathal. In other countries I’ve visited there would be a walking path, or a cycle path (ideally both) linking the two away from the half alseep or hyper agressive drivers, but there isn’t – the trains don’t go anywhere near I need to go, nor do the buses.

As a country, we’ve crammed more into existing infastructure for too long, yeah some clever people can manage to ease the pressure now and again, a few designated left turns at roundabouts, a clever junction here and there and a short cut to save you the full lap of the largest, busiest roundabout in Europe – but they only seem to work for a few years before demands catches up with supply.

Our never wavering need to protect house prices doesn’t help, we could take a few fields and build 1000 new homes on them, a school, some shops make a new junction on the A road or motorway to feed it some walking paths and a cycle nextwork to the nearest town/city or heaven forbit a train line and we’d spread the load, even reduce it – but no, that might effect house prices, so we’ll cram a couple of dozen into the gaps between the existing ones, chuck 10 more on the site of an old petrol station or something next to a already busy road – more conjestion, more polution, more stress and pressure.

Well, at least Cardiff is trying to build some new little suburbs, they’re not exactly where I’d put them, but they’re not bad.

What am I doing wrong ?

Simple, it’s the same thing as the old “1 in 6 people are gay. If you have 5 straight friends then it is probably you” 😀

What am I doing wrong ?

Nothing. But do that kind of mileage this side of the Pennines and you will see all the tomfoolery mentioned.

“They have to learn to be aggressive in the right amount, and the right amount depends on the culture.”

FFS so now they’re considering making auto cars just as much of a **** as everyone else on the roads?

awesome!
race to the bottom.
🙄

This from New Scientist back in May this year SUMMARY: As a society devoted to car worship we accept 1.2million deaths globally per year as the price worth paying for freedom, flexibility, and a major driver of our economy. So, we are stuck with bad driving for as long as we continue to let people hold the wheel, but hopefully that won’t be for much longer! [end of summary].

“AUTONOMOUS cars are just around the corner. Cities across the world are rolling out pilots of driverless vehicles, and soon motorists in Germany will be able to relax on the autobahn as their cars drive them from Munich to Berlin.

In other words, we are on the brink of a transport revolution as potentially radical as the one that began in 1908 with the Model T Ford. By 1931 the automobile’s transformative power was so clear that Aldous Huxley imagined the people of his Brave New World worshipping Henry Ford as the creator of their dystopian society.

Huxley was on to something. The Ford revolution changed Western society. It fuelled urban sprawl and led to the remodelling of cities to prioritise the motorist; urban freeways and motorways carved up the suburbs.

Car worship, as we know, has also led to rampant air pollution and gridlock. It almost single-handedly created the oil industry: before mass car ownership, petrol (gasoline) was a worthless by-product of kerosene lamp oil. Now it feeds vast amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Highways are a death trap: an estimated 1.25 million people die every year in vehicle accidents, the vast majority a result of human error.

But this was and is considered a price worth paying. Cars equate to personal freedom and convenience, and keep the economy moving.

Today we have a chance to rid ourselves of the bad while keeping the good. Autonomous cars could be everything that human-controlled cars are not: safe, smart, cheap and clean….”

FFS so now they’re considering making auto cars just as much of a **** as everyone else on the roads?

Yep. And in a way it is inevitable.

Take a current driver, stick them in an autonomous car, and they will soon be moaning that the stupid thing stops at amber lights, only does 70 on the motorway, won’t enter box junctions, won’t squeeze past cyclists, stops at stop signs, gives way at junctions etc etc

I reckon standards of behaviour in general are on a downward slope – in or out of cars.

Still we can always blame Thatcher.

Unfortunately, unless people are given autonomous and made to scrap their non autonomous ones, the only people that will actually buy them, if they actually afford them, are the people who are not the problem.

Are boy racers gonna swap their kevved up corsa for an autonomous car? Are the Jeremy Clarkson wanna be’s gonna swap their scoobies or evo’s? Are parcel couriers going to swap their vans for something that just doesn’t go as fast as a pressured driver? I very much doubt it.

Autonomous car may be just around the corner, but nobody’s gonna be buying them!

What we need at the moment is more police on the road and better education. I’d even say that 10 yearly re tests or at least a competence test, should be mandatory.

I’d even say that 10 yearly re tests or at least a competence test, should be mandatory.

Yep.

In industry if you had to operate machinery that caused over 21,000 serious injuries and over 1,700 deaths every year then any sensible Health & Safety policy would require you to be regularly tested and re-certified.

That reminds me, my CSCS card has expired!!

Autonomous car may be just around the corner, but nobody’s gonna be buying them!

I’m a slow old bloke and I wouldn’t. I’m very suspicious of automatic transmission!

Yes to regular retests though. Bring it on.

I reckon standards of behaviour in general are on a downward slope – in or out of cars.

I dont think they are really, just some bits stick out a bit more. How many people do you see just completely ignore red lights as if they were not there, and I dont mean go through a few seconds late? Very very few. How many cars just overtake a stationary queue in the oncoming lane, none id bet. Go to other countries and these rules of the road just dont exist in drivers minds.

Im of the opinion that people are sheep, whether they know it or not. People follow the rules because everyone else does, but if someone breaks one then others follow. Say someone drives through a 30mph village at 40, then a number of other people will instantly do that too. Everyone cruising along a busy dual carriageway, someone blasts through at 95, plenty of others take this as a invite to do the same. You can see it happen, people just switch to following the pattern of someone else without realising.

Poor etiquette can be changed by surrounding them in people doing things a better way, I dont see why it cant change driving also. If you want to change how those people act, you need to make sure YOU act the right way. No speeding, always indicating, smooth driving with no aggression. If you do it, get your family to do it, get friends to do it, it will reduce their stress and pass on to others.

There will still always be the odd one or two, but they need to be swamped out by better driving. But ignore one rule (i.e. No speeding regardless of how ‘safe’ it is) and others see another person who doesn’t care and it just spreads into other actions.

Autonomous car may be just around the corner, but nobody’s gonna be buying them!

I’ll buy one as soon as I can reasonably afford one… I get up in the morning dreading going to work… I love doing my job, just hate the stress of driving to get there.

I have noticed over the years of commuting by bike that the default at a junction appears to have gone from an acceptable ‘stop at junction and then check’ to ‘keep going and slam brakes on if any bike/car happens to be in the way’.

Still standard have obviously dropped – tricky to do much with a car with a skinny latte in one hand and your iPhone in the other…