WP: Unsafe drivers made up larger share of motorists during pandemic, study says

[Mr. Sinister]

2 hours ago, China said:

So, I just got home.  On the way, I saw a number of people without their headlights on, despite the fact that the sun was setting, plus the fact that it was dark because it was overcast and raining.  One of them, when I pulled up along side him, I noticed his driver's window was down.  So I rolled down my passenger window and yelled at him to turn his lights on.  Startled (partly because he was looking at his phone), he yelled back "Hey!" but didn't turn his lights on.  We moved on, but I got beside him a couple more times trying to tell him to turn his lights on.  He just looked an me and smiled in a sort of bemused and confused way.  I don't think he understood the message I was trying to convey.  God save us from the morons on the road.

 

Be safe, man. A lot of people are being shot out here in these situations. I just don't even bother anymore, and wait to get by

On the way back from class tonight, l noticed the  Beltway was littered with drivers without their lights on, in a literal rainstorm. Dark cars, at that. Just unbelievable.

[The Evil Genius]

I think daytime running lights are the reason a lot of people drive without their lights on before sunrise/sundown. People just think they have their headlights on or something.

Edited August 4, 2023 by The Evil Genius

[China]

1 hour ago, The Evil Genius said:

I think daytime running lights are the reason a lot of people drive without their lights on before sunrise/sundown. People just think they have their headlights on or something.

 

Car manufacturers should stop making it a manual option.  All headlights should be automatic.  There's no reason for them not to be.

[Mr. Sinister]

23 minutes ago, China said:

 

Car manufacturers should stop making it a manual option.  All headlights should be automatic.  There's no reason for them not to be.

 

Agreed. Even when I started driving in '06, my dad always told me to be sure that I turned them on at all times. I always check both front and rear.

[LD0506]

Every time I see this thread I wonder when it was that unsafe drivers DIDN'T make up the majority

[China]

Today's story comes from Falls Church, VA.  As I was driving along Rte 29, a car ahead of me wanted to make a right hand turn but had apparently overshot their turn by about 25 feet.  Rather than continue on and make a turn at the next street, they decided it would be better to come to a full stop and reverse down Rte 29 to make their turn.  🤦‍♂️ Imbecile.

 

[Larry]

On 8/3/2023 at 11:44 PM, The Evil Genius said:

I think daytime running lights are the reason a lot of people drive without their lights on before sunrise/sundown. People just think they have their headlights on or something.

 

I think that's part of it.  But I'll also say the proliferation of electronic dashboards.  

 

Used to be, near dawn/dusk, you couldn't see your speedometer unless you turned on your headlights.  (As I'm sure all of us discovered.)  

 

But on my car, the dashboard is backlit whenever the key is on.  

[skinsmarydu]

23 minutes ago, China said:

Today's story comes from Falls Church, VA.  As I was driving along Rte 29, a car ahead of me wanted to make a right hand turn but had apparently overshot their turn by about 25 feet.  Rather than continue on and make a turn at the next street, they decided it would be better to come to a full stop and reverse down Rte 29 to make their turn.  🤦‍♂️ Imbecile.

 

My husband taught me to "live on the right hand side of the road".  It's kind of easy where I live, I know where everything is and can navigate my area really well.

I don't make left turns where it's sketchy...make a right and go around if you have to.  

They're moving the local CFA from on a corner to down the block where it's going to be even harder to take a left, which is stupid anyway.  Georgia engineering is retarded on a level yet to be seen.  We have entrance lanes onto a highway merging into the fast lane, for God's sake.  🙄

I'll go around a block a hundred times to avoid having to parallel park.  *My mom is the ace at that, but I can't do it, so I don't even try.*

[China]

So I step out my front door and notice that there is a car parked blocking my driveway.  I look and nobody is in the car or anywhere around.  I assume they probably went to the taco joint down the street.  Regardless, I'm pissed so I shake the car to see if I can get the alarm system to go off.  No luck.  So I call the police on them.  Of course they get back before the cops show up.  I give them a piece of my mind.  The meekly said they were sorry, but didn't offer anything else, as they were fully aware they had no excuse.  Especially since, as I pointed out to them, there were several open parking spaces nearby they could have used without blocking my driveway.  Moron.

[China]

Just think, people driving cars like these are all around you on the road:

 

 

 

On a related note, I recently drove my deceased father's car back from Florida to give to my nephew.  The transmission made a couple of weird noises, so I had him get it checked when he was getting it inspected.  Turned out that whoever had fixed the transmission not that long ago had installed some parts backwards which caused all kinds of adverse wear, including on the axles.  Apparently I was lucky I made it back without it breaking down and stranding me on the side of the road.  Unfortunately, I have no idea who did the crappy repair job, so I can't go back to them to make it right.

 

Edited February 25 by China

[China]

Thousands of New York driver's licenses suspended over lack of vision tests: How to check your status

 

The New York state Department of Motor Vehicles says thousands of driver's licenses are suspended for failing to submit a vision test.

 

Between March 1, 2020, and Aug. 31, 2021, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the state DMV allowed drivers to self-certify their vision to renew their license, as long as they agreed to submit a vision test within a year.

 

The deadline to complete a vision test at a DMV office expired at the end of November 2023, resulting in over 45,000 licenses being suspended in December.

 

As of April 5, nearly 36,000 licenses remain suspended.

 

Click on the link for the full article 

[China]

Fury road: Cities are seizing illegal mopeds and scooters amid backlash against food delivery drivers

 

A soaring demand for food delivered fast has spawned small armies of couriers — and increasing alarm — in big cities where scooters, motorcycles and mopeds zip in and out of traffic and hop onto pedestrian-filled sidewalks as their drivers race to drop off salads and sandwiches.

 

Officials in Boston, New York and Washington, D.C., have started cracking down on delivery companies by issuing warning letters, seizing illegally registered or driven vehicles, and launching special street patrols to enforce speed limits. The pushback is not limited to the U.S.: There have also been a series of crackdowns in London and other British cities.

 

For their part, the delivery companies have pledged to work with city officials to ensure that all of their drivers operate both legally and safely.

 

In a letter this week to food delivery companies DoorDash, Grubhub and Uber, Boston officials cited an “alarming increase in unlawful and dangerous operation of motorcycles, mopeds and motorized scooters” that they said put the drivers, other motorists and pedestrians “in imminent danger.”

 

The letter alleged that some drivers were operating unregistered vehicles and breaking traffic laws, and warned of an imminent crackdown on the vehicles. It also demanded that the companies explain how they can ensure their drivers are operating safely. The Massachusetts State Police said they identified dozens of mopeds and scooters that were improperly registered or being operated by unlicensed drivers. Fourteen illegal mopeds and scooters were seized Wednesday in one Boston neighborhood alone.

 

In New York City, authorities have seized 13,000 scooters and mopeds so far this year; on Wednesday, they crushed more than 200 illegal mopeds and other delivery vehicles. Authorities in Washington, D.C., meanwhile, launched a program Wednesday called Operation Ride Right to ensure drivers of two-wheeled vehicles are complying with the law. Since it began, authorities have made five arrests and impounded 17 mopeds.

 

“They have terrorized many of our pedestrians, particularly our senior and older adults,” New York City Mayor Eric Adams said Wednesday at an event in which motorized two-wheeled delivery vehicles were destroyed. “Riders who think the rules don’t apply to them, they’re going to see an aggressive enforcement policy that’s in place.”

 

When food delivery services had their major resurgence during the COVID-19 pandemic, most drivers used cars to deliver their fare. That led to increased traffic congestion, prompting a shift to motorcycles and other two-wheeled modes of transportation.

 

Click on the link for the full article

[China]

Why Are American Drivers So Deadly?

 

After decades of declining fatality rates, dangerous driving has surged again.

 

In the summer of 1999, a few years after graduating from medical school, Deborah Kuhls moved from New York to Maryland, where she had been accepted as a surgical fellow at the R Adams Cowley Shock Trauma Center in Baltimore. Founded by a pioneer in emergency medicine, Shock Trauma is one of the busiest critical-care facilities in the country — in an average year, doctors there see approximately 8,000 patients, many of them close to death.

 

Kuhls considered herself to be up for the challenge. At 31, she was substantially older than the typical resident — she had been a banker before she was a doctor — and steelier too, capable of operating with preternatural calm in even the most frenetic of circumstances. But her first few months at Shock Trauma tested her resolve. The center sees a particularly high proportion of the region’s car- and motorcycle-crash victims, and not everyone can be saved. On bad days, it could seem as if as many patients were being revived as were being shipped down to the basement morgue.

 

At a residency at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, Kuhls had been taught how to handle what’s known in the trade as penetrative trauma — stabbings, impalements, gunshots. Now she underwent an education in blunt-force injuries, which are often considerably harder to diagnose: A gunshot wound is its own clear evidence, in the form of a ragged perforation, of where the surgeon must focus his or her attention. But a body battered in a car crash tends to yield fewer clues — the damage can be invisible to the untrained eye.

 

“If you’re going very fast, and then suddenly you’re not, the floppy parts of your body — your intestines, your kidney, your liver — will keep going,” Kuhls told me. “That’s just plain physics.” She went on: “And our brain is floating in our skull, surrounded by fluid. But what if the skull bounces around or the car roof caves in and connects with the driver’s head? It might not look like it, but that person is probably bleeding to death internally. You don’t have much time to save them.”

 

At Shock Trauma, Kuhls worked alongside a surgeon named Carl Soderstrom, who was an unusually committed chronicler of data. When evaluating patients, he made it a point to collect information on everything from the size and scope of their wounds to the number of intoxicants percolating in their systems. “It was inspiring, because it added another dimension to the work we were doing,” Kuhls says. “Like, here’s a way to quantify the immense consequences of crashes. Here’s how we can demonstrate the toll of an issue that had become extremely real to me.” It was one thing, Kuhls believed, to talk about a rollover wreck that broke a 13-year-old girl’s neck. It was another to be able to prove that dozens more children were being injured in similar crashes every year.

 

In 2000, Kuhls accepted a dual-track job as director of the trauma I.C.U. and assistant professor of surgery at the University of Nevada School of Medicine, in Las Vegas, and took her interest in data with her. Initially, she had to scrap for the funding to conduct some of her earliest surveys, including a study on the low usage of car seats in the local Hispanic community.

 

Reliance on publicly available information, like the year-end traffic injury and death report published by the state, would get her only so far, Kuhls discovered. The Department of Transportation typically provided few details on each crash or what might have caused it. “I got good at cold calling people and asking for whatever information they had,” Kuhls told me. Few turned her down. Friendly staff members at trauma centers around Nevada gave her injury data; law-enforcement agencies sent her traffic-stop reports.

 

Gradually, a picture came into focus. Outside the tangle of streets that surround the Strip, many roads in the city are flat and fast and conducive to speeding, which remains a reliable predictor of the severity of injury. On slower roads, blown stop signs and red lights contributed to many of the serious wrecks, as did the proximity of pedestrians. But Kuhls could also see what was working: When the city laced a series of footbridges over Las Vegas Boulevard, pedestrian deaths subsided. The addition of a stoplight could prevent a stretch of previously uninterrupted road from becoming a drag strip.

 

Click on the link for the full article