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I think about the topic of bad drivers a lot - I think it is absolutely a systemic issue, in American society anyway. Cyclists are perhaps uniquely vulnerable to the things bad drivers do, but of course pedestrians and other drivers are affected as well.
I have the sense - entirely subjective, backed by no data admittedly - that the problem is less with driving ability and more with driving decision-making. That is to say: driving tests are testing for things like the ability to handle the car properly, and the ability to follow the rules of the road. However, the dangerous situations I see on the road are commonly not caused by people who can't drive the car safely, but people who don't do so for other reasons: they are impatient, they don't care about the safety of other drivers, they are drunk or high, or they are looking at their phone instead of the road. The guy that killed the Gaudreaus is a great example; he was drunk but I see this happen often. It's illegal to pass on the shoulder, and in instances like this there's no need to. You can always wait until you have room to pass legally, but dude decided that that didn't apply to him.
Just as a related thought, not tied exactly to your point, but I also subjectively feel like since the advent of smartphones, the quality of driving has dropped sharply; and I wonder if this is supported by evidence. I don't know if there's anyone tracking the frequency of, for example, someone failing to turn left when they get the left-turn arrow, because they're watching their phone instead of the light; and how many quality life-minutes that's costing society.
I know post-Covid we have more traffic fatalities. Looks like phone adoption could have caused a minor spike, then a larger spike that went down before 2019-2020. The pre-2020 increases aren't found in other nations looks like, so the phone factor may not be real.
People get comfortable, then they stop driving and start doing whatever else. Most people are not going to be F1 capable drivers. There the act of working a vehicle is an active, exhaustive set of skills that require constant attention and decision-making. The average person puts however many thousands of hours behind the wheel and they stop thinking about it unless their lizard brain gets triggered.
Average people are going to have lapses in attention while driving. Average people will make a mistake and get mad at someone else for it. Most of the time they won't hurt themselves or others. That's how I assume the majority of accidents occur. Not cases of poor judgment ("I can make this light"), but cases of without much judgment, absent mindedness, and habit.
Cases of misjudgment and bad drivers obviously cause accidents. The courts don't try very hard to identify these people out of the sea of tickets and educate them. Even people that get DUI's don't have to take more training. They get sent to some state-sponsored money mill that they pay money to be told drinking and driving is bad. Forget DUI school. Make them take driving classes taught by professional drivers. People that receive DUI convictions could be the most elite class of driver on the road.
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At least in Toronto the number of hit and runs had doubled in the five years leading up the pandemic. The speculation is that these are mostly distracted drivers on their phones or other screens. The incident cited in the article where someone was hit sequentially by two vehicles both of whom fled is awful.
I can't imagine things have improved since then.
I wouldn't expect distracted driving to disproportionately impact hit and runs but not overall accidents, so the fact that that's the statistic used here makes me suspicious that overall accidents don't follow the same trend.
More likely impaired driving and/or rolling around with a bunch of guns/drugs -- those ones change the calculus on hit-and-run a lot more than 'oh shit I was checking my messages'. Could be 'suspended license' stuff too.
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