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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   21896 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 14, 2024

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For a long time, the trend was down. Things were getting safer, and the number of bodies dead on the streets declined nearly every year.

But during the pandemic something broke. In 2020, the rate suddenly spiked upwards. Many explanations were given, some more convincing than others. But most people expected things to return to the previous downward trend. The thing is... they haven't. The rate of people killed each year has remained at levels not seen for decades.

I'm talking, of course, about the rate of fatal auto accidents.

In 2019, the U.S. death rate per 100 million vehicles miles reached an all-time low of 1.10. But in 2020, it skyrocketed by over 20% to 1.34. This was by far the largest annual increase ever. In 2021, the rate increased slightly to 1.37 and then in 2022 it moderated to 1.35.

It's not just the rate that's increased either. The absolute number of deaths is up a lot. There are 6,000 excess deaths per year over the 2019 level.

The cope for the 2020 uptick was that, with highways empty, people built up greater speeds leading to more deaths. This might explain 2020 but certainly can't explain the 2022 data when highways had returned to parking lots speeds. Never mind that every year the rate should be going DOWN as older cars are replaced with newer, safer ones.

A decline in policing might be at least partially responsible. The overburdened police in my home city of Seattle no longer enforce traffic rules, for example. Predictably, Seattle's proposed solution to increased deaths is to install a bunch of cameras which will only punish those who choose to abide by the laws. For those who steal cars, or drive drunk, or refuse to get a license, or don't get insurance, or refuse to pay citations, the penalty will remain the same: nothing. The police isn't allowed to chase criminals even if it wants to.

Are these misguided rules the reason for the uptick in deaths? I'm not sure. I've heard that nearby conservative areas have also seen an increase in death rates. I think it's more likely that this is simply evidence of the U.S. becoming a more low-trust society. People in low-trust societies in Latin America and Africa drive like maniacs. People in high-trust societies in Europe drive safely. The U.S. is somewhere in the middle but slouching lower.

I have contact with states attorneys who deal almost exclusively with DUIs and other traffic matters. The fact is, minor offenses are down, major offenses are up. DUIs, going 40+ over the limit, way up. Going 10 over, almost non existent in court. So we have seen the enforcement bifurcation, at least in this area.

The other obvious problem I've seen is people did forget how to drive. The number of bad drivers has clearly increased. Maybe the DMV waiving in person testing for a while is a cause, maybe people just lost it after 12 months with no traffic, but the roads are clearly less safe.

Could DUI be a contributing factor? Looking at the rules on cannabis consumption by state, by my count 29 states have passed legislation to make legal cannabis more accessible in the past five years - either making medical cannabis legal, increasing possession limits for personal use, or outright decriminalisation or legalisation, among others. (I'm assuming driving while high is significantly more dangerous than driving sober, no idea on how dangerous it is relative to driving drunk.)

I think people are just generally less empathetic and more angry than they were.

Covid was a fucked up society altering thing. At the same time large cohorts of the population were convinced that other large cohorts of the population were out there to kill them, and as a result we had a summer of violent, deadly riots all over the country.

I think people are basically just more cynical now, so they drive more aggressively, and don’t care that they’re putting people in danger. I see it in my city all the time. One specific demographic of people I have noticed have decided handicap parking stalls are free game. They also drag race everywhere, run red lights, pass like psychopaths, don’t look when they turn out of parking lots, etc.

I get it, honestly. Covid and the 2020 riots, and then the election fuckery, were massive blackpills for everyone. Couple that with the stress of the economy right now, the prospect of major wars breaking out all over the place, the cost of housing, the cost of groceries, the fact that nobody fucking each other anymore, and the totally disregard of immigration laws and it’s no wonder people don’t care.

Here is a graph of both traffic and homicide deaths by race and time. Here are the black deaths by week, in which we see that both kinds of deaths spiked at the exact same time: immediately following the death of George Floyd. (Both graphs courtesy of Steve Sailer, the only person of note I've seen discuss the traffic component of the Floyd Effect.)

The simplest explanation is that it is still 100% the Floyd Effect. Police pull over black drivers less than they used to so dangerous drivers stay on the road until they kill themselves or others (as well as it possibly affecting deterrence and so on). The alternative explanation is that it was the Floyd effect originally but some other effect has taken over since then. I haven't looked at the most recent data, if you wanted you could check if it has become less racially skewed than the period covered by those graphs. But with the timing I'm not going to give credence to any explanation in which it was never the Floyd Effect and the spike just happened that week and primarily among black people by coincidence.

In many places the police have totally stopped enforcing traffic regulations period (e.g. SF). I wonder if the other lines on that graph have moved up in the past two years.

Assuming this data is accurate, then yes, I think we've solved the mystery. Case closed. In the end, it's less interesting than I thought.

Is the black rate jumping from 15 to 23 on the chart, given the proportion of drivers who are black, enough to have the statistical effect the OP discusses @sodiummuffin?

The OP discusses a 25% rise in overall fatalities. The post-Floyd jump on Sailer’s chart, assuming white and Hispanic levels stay the same, would have to be significant for 14% of the population to effect a 25% rise in the overall vehicular death rate.

Yes. If the black fatality rate went from 15->23 then the rate per mile driven would be more like 15->30. Keep in mind that the race-divided chart ends in December 2021.

So if a group responsible for 14% of deaths in 2019 becomes twice as dangerous in 2020 that could lead to a 14% increase of its own.

Note that the chart also shows a similar massive increase in the Hispanic fatality rate, and a smaller increase in the white fatality rate.

So, I do think Sailer's chart is consistent with the data showing a 20% increase in fatalities by mile driven in 2020.

The truly maddening thing is that, due to a lack of centralized criminal enforcement data, as well as the ridiculous amount of lag of reported data, it's extremely hard to sanity-check your speculations.

a bunch of cameras which will only punish those who choose to abide by the laws

How much of this is marijuana replacing alcohol as the recreational drug of choice?

Obviously, driving drunk is dangerous and anti-social behavior that some people do anyways. But aggressive DUI enforcement and education had massively curtailed these numbers, and a culture of how to have social drinking without drunk driving had taken root enough to curtail the worst effects. Designated drivers, uber rides, etc. In particular, some of these cultural changes could be pushed a bit more consistently than with pot because social drinking mostly takes place in bars, which can be held liable and can then encourage good behavior with things like free cokes for the designated driver and "we'll call an uber for you". With pot, this is not the case, there's no culture of avoiding driving high and nobody knows how you could push it. I also think pot stays in your system a bit longer than booze, but I'm not sure.

See also my comment about changes to the legal status of weed since 2019.

I made a new account to post this - opsec and all.

When I was younger I was an everyday smoker. Stoned for years straight. Anyone who is an everyday smoker can function completely unimpaired. Physically and mentally. In fact people on MJ do tend to drive more cautiously perhaps for two reasons. 1) The effects of MJ don’t lend themselves to driving like an asshole. 2) Even today, I imagine people don’t want to be pulled over while stinking like pot. Most potheads will smoke while driving. Bake out a car. Hotbox. Music. It’s a whole part of the lifestyle.

I haven’t smoked in over 15 years. If I were to take one puff today and try to drive it would be extremely dangerous. Without a tolerance it can be severely impairing. I dislike Mj today and wouldn’t partake even if offered in a safe environment. I also think MJ is not safe and wouldn’t allow my family to use it casually.

It’s hard to disentangle how many permastoned drivers are out there today compared to 15 years or so. But if more people are casually smoking and driving. It could have an affect.

I think I recall a Louis CK bit where he said modern marijuana is much more potent than stuff back in the day. Does that ring true to you?

It's been a trend since the '70s via simple hybridisation and selective breeding but since the decrim/legalisation in America what I've seen on social media is people moving from the already strong weed to ever more potent extracts and concentrations, which they then use by eating them (which counter-intuitively gets you wrecked for hours because it's too easy to underestimate and eating it sounds more benign than smoking) or by vaporising them in elaborate "dab" rigs. I guess it's driven by the previously unavailable access to industrial tech like chemical analysis services and the removal of the need to be clandestine. Now you have people on Instagram posing for photos with their kilogram balls of lab refined 98.8% pure THC.

In the '90s you might see a variety of weed that was hyped up on claims of being analysed at ~25% THC (on an ideal sample a single time). Now, at least if you live in a decrim state and my impressions are correct, you can buy all manner of products that are regularly analysed by dedicated professional labs.

You also see more interest in the other cannibinoids now that the labs allow them to be distilled out and separated by people who know what they're doing rather than mad scientist stoners burning down their houses while playing with ether after reading a couple of articles in High Times.

With that said I think there is a separate phenomenon where people spend their youth smoking lots of weed, burning off all the neurochemical novelty and good times and being left with little more than the side effects that were probably always there but weren't very noticeable because they were having too much fun. They blame it on the weed being too strong but it's more like an alcoholic blaming the nausea and broken relationships on brewers putting diesel in their overproof rum. Yeah, the rum is too strong, but if you gave a couple of shots to a teetotaller they probably wouldn't shit their pants and start a fight with a policeman. They'd probably fall over, start laughing and tell you you're their best mate.

The stupid thing about illegal drug use is that people massively disregard dosage. There's a Scott article about Adderal vs street meth where he describes how the dose street meth users are taking is something like 100x more than the typical prescription dose. At that level it's no wonder that instead of studying harder they rip up their floorboards looking for listening devices. Instead people think that doing more = being hardcore, and people ignore that an overdose doesn't have to mean dying, it just means that you experience negative and unwanted effects from having taken too much.

See this write-up. Anecdotal evidence, but I avoid weed nowadays as it seems far stronger than even seven years ago. The last time I used it was May and it was just unpleasant: full body shivering, anxiety, paranoia, unable to maintain a train of thought. It was like being on ket. I personally know four people who developed delusional/psychotic symptoms in the last ten years after smoking weed essentially every day for years.

I can echo this. I spent about a year in college smoking basically daily (and a couple years prior probably at least once a week). During this period my tolerance had become high enough gradually enough that it was usually at least a mildly pleasurable experience and only mildly disorienting.

A combination of turning 21 and becoming convinced that daily smoking was making me lazy caused me to pivot to alcohol (not a strict improvement in hindsight) and stop cannabis consumption completely.

I have tried it a handful of times in the years since and every time it has made me painfully anxious and disoriented. I attribute this to both a) me no longer having any tolerance and b) only being offered super high potency cannabis. The latter being because either everyone that presently consumes regularly has red-queen's-raced themselves to the point that they require it to feel anything, or the weaker stuff I started out on no longer exists in appreciable, widely distributed quantities.

I remember them claiming that in the 80s. Link. It's an evergreen drug-warrior claim.

It’s a fact, nobody disputes that potency has increased by an order of magnitude.

Which makes it about 112% THC now, right? If people really did usually smoke low-potency ditchweed, it was before most current smokers were born.

The link the other user posted suggests that even in the 90s potency had only reached around 5-7%. Almost all studies around limited risks to high weed consumption revolve around weed of less than 10% THC, a third of the current amount common in legal states. And a doubling in the last decade alone is also significant.

The link I posted claimed 6-14% in 1985. Like I said, this is evergreen drug warrior propaganda and I don't give it credence. I doubt they know the actual numbers and if they did they would lie about it.

70s weed had like 2-3% THC, modern US weed has 25-30%. (In Europe it’s more like 14-16%.) It is literally ten times as potent in terms of the psychoactive ingredient, yes.

The average in the early 2000s was probably 8-14%, so much of that growth is indeed in the last ten years. Unfortunately, states have adopted all or nothing approaches to a lot of weed regulation instead of just capping THC at moderate levels.

It would be interesting to see a weed regulatory scheme for THC (or CBD etc)% similar to how alcohol has a regulatory regime (beer/wine/liquor) that roughly tracks ABV.

I've never bought weed from a dispensary that didn't have that information.

It's just not particularly useful. Too many other factors.

The main difference is that many people enjoy the taste of alcohols of varying ABV, whereas outside of a very small niche of connoisseurs almost all stoners smoke to get stoned. Higher THC is always better for the weed user, since ingested dosage can be altered (although obviously it makes consuming huge amounts much easier) in a way that higher ABV is not always better for the alcohol drinker. I was in the US recently and except for a token 12% strain all flower was 26-30%. Meanwhile beer is always going to have a market over absinthe.

Great idea, but I don't think it'll have legs until legitimate dispensaries become so normalised that imposing this regulatory scheme won't drive people back to their unregulated dealers. I know a guy who got a scrip to buy medical cannabis from a dispensary, 100% legal, but still bought cannabis from his dealer because it was cheaper. There are probably millions of people who live in states with legal weed with a dispensary selling quality-tested weed on every corner, but who still go to the same dealer they've gone to for years just because they have a business relationship with him. Until getting your weed from a dispensary rather than an unlicensed dealer is the rule for 80-90% of the people, there's no point imposing additional costs on the dispensary.

Yes, this is why I think a hard cap on production and sale at ~15% THC (high enough to satisfy most consumers, leaving little margin or value in illegal production of higher potency marijuana) would be best. Otherwise it’s an arms race.

Great question, I'd love to know.

In a broad sense, being stoned is less impairing than being drunk. Not categorically - one (standard) beer is less inebriating than several dabs (especially sans tolerance). But, for typical consumption, I think it's clearly the case. The asymptotic inebriation is much greater for booze - people can drive blackout drunk, incapable of telling your their name. Even a hardcore alcoholic is still very fucked up at a certain amount of alcohol. I'd much rather be driven by the typical pothead who hits the bong every ten minutes than by the typical drunk who polishes off a fifth (15 shots) a day, or even the average person after a few drinks.

This is a double edged sword: it's easy and reasonable to say "don't drink (preferably any, certainly more than ~2 units) and drive." But, since THC is generally less inebriating, people are more likely to be stoned frequently/all the time, and this almost requires driving to participate in society. Similarly, I think it's much less acceptable to show up drunk to work than stoned.

A further difficulty is the lack of THC tests for current level of inebriation. It's hard to enforce stoned driving laws when all you can tell is "this person has consumed THC in the last few weeks."

I don't have a policy proposal here - just observing how tricky the situation/comparison to alcohol is.

Weed is much less predictable, especially edibles.

Alcohol I can predict a reliable time period at which I will be safe to drive home. If I have two beers at the start of the night, eat a burger, and drink water, four hours later I'm fine. If I take an edible, there's no period of time until I sleep through the night where I'm comfortable.

What does the more granular data about who is dying suggest?

More young male drivers dead by their own (drunk / high / speeding / stupid) hand might hint at a different cause to more pedestrians dead, or more people dead in vehicular collisions.

There are cultural differences, but one of the lowest rates of any major nation isn’t in an extremely homogenous country but in Britain (a third of the US rate per mile travelled). Homogenous Eastern European countries do worse, as do the Southern Europeans.

Speed limits are actually higher than the US, too, (70 vs 60) so I wonder why British drivers are so much safer.

My guess would be that a much smaller percentage of brits are doing 2 hour commutes on highways every fucking day of their lives. At one point you just start driving in autopilot and doing shit like sneaking in a quick text in if that's an everyday thing.

Also hot take but I've driven in 15 different US states as a tourist. But I'm a car guy so I notice this shit. Not a single American who isn't from New Jersey knows how to drive to save their life. Most of them don't even hold the steering wheel right, they do this hunched over 2-10 position thing. Don't get me started on the left lane hogging or taking hours to switch lanes. All unsafe driving practices. New Jersey drivers are good though, average speed of 85 in the I95 around philly, and things just moving along smoothly, I love it.

Every region has its own driving culture. NJ may suit you, but I find driving there to be absolutely miserable.

Among regions with aggressive drivers, I much prefer Boston. They are aggressive, but in a precise, pointed way rather than what I perceived to be the raw hooliganism of New Jersey.

The fact that NJ has fewer traffic deaths than other areas is probably more due to the fact that they've eliminated unprotected left turns than any particular skill of their drivers.

Not a single American who isn't from New Jersey knows how to drive to save their life. Most of them don't even hold the steering wheel right, they do this hunched over 2-10 position thing.

In joisey do they have one hand at 12 and the other out the window?

The reputation of New Jersey drivers in Philly is absymal. My wife always checks if someone driving badly has Jersey plates and then will announce that Jersey srivers are the worst in the world.

Having said that Philly drivers are themselves pretty terrible from what I can see.

New Jersey drivers are not bad. They are some of the best in the US. They manage to drive much faster under much more hectic conditions than most of the country and still have some of the lowest road accident rates, that is by definition what better driving is.

Well, unless aggressive driving is part of why the conditions are so hectic in the first place.

One measure of better driving is certainly road traffic accident rate, but thats not the only measure. How quickly on average do you travel? If everyone was zipper merging more politely rather than forcing in at the last second would everyones drive be smoother/faster?

Philly drivers are aggressive, and I think the road situation would be better overall if they were less so. I don't drive too much in Jersey myself and I don't look out for Jersey plates either so I am certainly open to Jersey drivers not being as bad as claimed.

For my money there are a couple of things almost all American drivers seem to be terrible at, zipper merging and roundabouts. Near universally awful as far as I can tell.

The US drivers tests do seem to be significantly easier than the UK (though it does vary by state of course). Delaware's is so simple I am convinced a 10 yo could pass it.

Not a single American who isn't from New Jersey knows how to drive to save their life.

That's because in New Jersey, driving to save your life is the only way you make it to next week. If you do the sleepy Pennsylvania driver thing, you're going to get hit by someone running a red light. If you hog the left lane you're going to be VERY uncomfortable as the other drivers zoom around you with not much margin. If you take hours to switch lanes people will pass you in the partial lane on both sides. NJ has a reputation for aggressive drivers, and it is deserved. Only place I've driven where you can be sitting at a red light with traffic in front of you and the driver behind you will be on the horn, apparently expecting you to go through.

You are kind of proving my point. That most Americans drive like grandmas (that too ones that don't know basic highway etiquette). All these things you are saying are how it should be! There are things to do and places to be.

New Jersey drivers are "aggressive" but the traffic actually moves! No matter how much of a warzone navigating a full 3-lane highway where the average speed is 85 MPH is, it takes more skill to do that and make it to next week than do whatever the fuck PA or CT drivers are doing. I'm from Dubai where the drivers are 2-3x more aggressive and unpredictbile than NJ drivers, so I felt right at home in NJ and found any other state infuriating to drive in.

Forget about the aggression though, using the left lane for passing (or atleast moving when you see a car approaching you at 95 MPH from the back), not taking hours to switch lanes, not braking randomly in a fucking highway, are all things much less common in most of Europe than America.

Running red lights is bad, actually.

Never said it was a good thing. Not left lane hogging, not braking randomly, not taking eons to switch lanes, Not sleeping on the green light are all good things though

Well you did say "All these things you are saying are how it should be!"

What’s wrong with 2/10? When I went through drivers’ training, that was taught both in the class and in the state-issued handbook as the position least likely to lead to serious injury in the event of an accident due to the way the airbags deploy.

(Actually, the teacher said we should do something closer to 2:30/9:30, but that’s still pretty close.)

Significantly less control than 3/9. Look at any motorsport driver, you will see 3/9 9/10 times.

As for which is safer, I can't really find anything concrete on that.

You may notice that motorsports is very different than regular motoring. Race cars tend to lack airbags, for one.

Do British drivers actually abide by the speed limits? US drivers routinely drive at least ten MPH over.

Everyone everywhere seems to drive 10 over.

What? No they don't. Only a minority of drivers go that fast anywhere I've lived.

Yes they do, in my American coastal experience.

I'm willing to accept "Americans on the coasts routinely speed a lot", but not "Americans routinely speed a lot". The latter isn't true.

I have driven as far west as Las Vegas and as far east as NYC, I don't even know how many multi-day road trips, etc. I have a family member who sets the cruise control to the speed limit and doesn't touch the gas. We can go hours getting passed non-stop while never once catching up to a car ahead of us. Either everyone who isn't speeding is also doing the cruise control at exactly the speed limit thing, or almost nobody is driving at or under the speed limit. I often complain about how dangerous it is because even the 18 wheelers all want to pass us and that shit is risky on a two lane country road.

That says that most Americans speed, which I agree with. What I disagree with is the claim that most Americans are going 10 mph over the speed limit (let alone more).

In my American lifetime of anecdata coastal Americans and Texans very far from any coast love to speed.

And given the distribution of population in the US, I think that's most people. But yes, I've seen reddit threads were posters bafflingly ask questions about why anyone would speed. So someone somewhere thinks the norm is to drive 60 miles per hour on the freeway. Midwest or deep South maybe? Someplace I don't go apparently.

Were those posters possibly people who don't do much interstate driving? My experience is that you're much more likely to find speeding on the interstate than on a non-interstate highway, and more likely to find it on a highway than on local roads. This also applies to the magnitude of the speeding: on a highway, you might be going the limit at 45 along with most of the other drivers, but there'll be a couple cars who go past you at 50, whereas on the interstate the posted limit will be 65 and the speed of traffic as a whole will be between 70 - 75.

Personally speaking, I follow speed limits fairly religiously on non-interstate roads, but am willing to go 5 or so over the speed limit on the interstate, or up to 10 over if the driving conditions are good, everybody else is going at that speed, and the speed limit isn't already something pretty high like 70. I seem to recall that this was a bit of an acquired behavior on my part: when I was younger and most of my driving was local, I would obey the speed limit pretty much everywhere, but then got less strict with my interstate speeds the more I drove on the interstate. So I could see somebody who mostly drives local not realizing how going faster than legal is more common on interstates.

Midwest or deep South maybe?

I've driven in various places in the Midwest, and I don't think I've ever encountered a place where everybody stuck to the speed limit on the interstate. I guess here it would depend on what percentage of people would have to be going faster before this would be considered "the norm". If 20% of drivers are going 5 over, is considered abnormal (because the vast majority of people are going the speed limit), or is it normal (because it's consistently present behavior)?

The average highway speed in light traffic seems likes it’s pretty consistently around 80, which is 5-15 over the speed limit.

Really? People don’t routinely go at least ten over on highways and rural roads where you live? We have vastly different experiences then. In the city where I work, even the timed lights require you to go about five MPH over the speed limit to avoid hitting a red light.

No. Both where I live now (Denver) and where I lived previously (northeast Wisconsin), people going 10 mph over were in the minority. People routinely go 5 over, but not 10 (let alone more).

Every state I have driven in, has had the exact same thing on the freeways, at least 10mph over being the norm. From PA to Kentucky to Florida to Louisiana to Minnesota.

Having said that I have never been to Colorado or Wisconsin so I can't say you are wrong there.

Where I am, 5 over is ubiquitious on city streets and 10 over is common on city freeways where the speed limit is 60, most drivers go 65, and 70 is common during rush hour or among people in the left lane.

Sometimes I think that's bad, then I go to Nearby Big City and drivers ubiquitously go 70 on freeways where the limit is 60, with 75 being somewhat common and 80 not at all unheard of.

Simple answer: People driving bigger trucks and giving even fewer fucks.

Longer answer:

Pedestrian deaths are up by thousands and:

In 2016, cars hit and killed nearly 6,000 pedestrians. That’s a serious spike from the historic low—below 4,000—in 2009.

See: read://https_www.wired.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.wired.com%2Fstory%2Fpedestrian-death-rates-climb%2F

Also statistically,

Key findings from 2019 to 2020:

• Fatalities increased and injured people decreased in most categories. • Speeding-related, alcohol-impaired-driving, and seat belt non-use fatalities increased. • Urban fatalities increased by 8.5 percent; rural fatalities increased by 2.3 percent. • Older drivers 65 and older involved in fatal crashes decreased by 9.8 percent; drivers under 65 involved increased. • There were fewer fatalities among people 9 and younger and people 65 and older from 2019 to 2020. Most fatality increases were people 10 to 64, with the 25-34 age group having the largest increase of 1,117 additional fatalities. • Male fatalities increased by 8.6 percent, and female fatalities increased by 1.9 percent. • Nighttime (6 p.m. to 5:59 a.m.) fatalities increased by 12 percent; daytime (6 a.m. to 5:59 p.m.) traffic fatalities increased by 1.4 percent. • Forty-two States and the District of Columbia had increases in the number of fatalities.

Caused by:

38,824 people died on U.S. roads in 2020. Fatalities compared to 2019: ↑6.8% overall ↑21% rate per 100 million VMT ↑14% in alcohol-impaired-driving crashes ↑17% in speeding-related crashes ↑11% motorcyclists ↑3.9% pedestrians ↑14% unrestrained passenger vehicle occupants ↑21% ejected passenger vehicle occupants
↑9.4% in single-vehicle crashes ↑8.5% in urban areas ↑12% during nighttime ↑9.5% during weekend

See: https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/813266

Basically, people driving faster, more impaired and fewer people wearing seat belts.

I wonder if it has to do with increased marijuana use. My impression is that it has skyrocketed the past few years, and most people don't think driving stones is dangerous.

I now live in a relatively rural county. It gets between 0-1 murders a year. Traffic fatalities are almost as rare.

Nearly every traffic fatality I read about (and murder for that matter) is someone from outside of the county causing trouble. High speed chases originating in the part of town, in the county where illegal immigrants have created a festering boil of gang crime and chaos for going on 20 years. These high speed chases get on the highway at 120 mph, and usually wreck in our county where the roads are bit less hospital to those sorts of shenanigans. Drops down to 2 lanes from 4, more sharp turns, more grandmas going 10 under on their way home from church, etc.

I have no idea how representative this is. But if anyone said to me that my county has just as many problems with traffic fatalities, per capita, as that neighboring county where all the ne'er-do-wells that technically die in my county come from, I'd call them a bold faced liar.

I'd be interested in better numbers on the number of licensed drivers. The absolute number of licenses per individual have been ticking up. But some of these statistics... Well, it's easy to count the absolute number of registered licenses, but people can technically drive without a valid license, and people can also have licenses in multiple states.

Now, according to the numbers I have, the number of licenses has been ticking up. And the number of licenses per capita has been ticking up. From .89 in 2020 to .91 in 2024...

Now naively, increasing the number of drivers shouldn't change that deaths/hundred thousand miles number- but when you already have 90% of people driving, 1 more percentage point probably doesn't represent the best drivers getting licenses. The more separated society is, the less public transit there is, the more people are forced to drive to work to survive, the worse the bottom of the bell curve of drivers on the streets is going to look. I can imagine quite a few ways in which Covid may have incited these factors.

This is all just a hypothesis though. Really I'd want a curated regional dataset of accidents with information about when those involved got their licenses. Without that it's hard to correlate. It's likely the accidents aren't uniformly increasing, but are localized to some areas more than others. All in all, a better dataset would let us make much better hypotheses.

I can imagine quite a few ways in which Covid may have incited these factors.

I have sometimes wondered if there are people who have started driving instead of using public transit simply because they fear that they'll catch Covid on the train or the bus.

In the USA? Outside of New York and the Bay Area everyone already drove. Driving in New York is ridiculously impractical, and besides, everyone who was that worried about Covid just refused to leave the house.

Now some people driving instead of taking public transportation because public transportation imposed a bunch of extra bullshit around Covid policy seems at least mathematically possible, but I’d bet the ven diagram of ‘people bothered by useless Covid bullshit enough to change their habits’ and ‘people who took public transportation when parking at their destination cost less than $15’ is two circles.

Not only that, but the kind of person who is worried about covid enough to drive rather than use public transport is probably the kind of person who tends to be more cautious in general and not the kind of madman reckless driver who goes around causing fatalities. Some people argue that overly cautious drivers tend to cause more accidents compared to normal drivers due to an unpredictability borne out of timidness. I don't know if that's true or not, but if it is I'd suspect that the resulting collisions are more of the fender bender/rear ender type than the stuff that causes fatalities.

Isn't this all pretty marginal stuff? How could it explain a > 20% increase in a single year? In recent decades, the rate decreased smoothly, and almost every year until 2020, and then bam:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in_U.S._by_year

Maybe, maybe not. I'm skeptical of my own hypothesis without more numbers. But if a bunch of high risk drivers started driving again circa Covid, who were previously getting around in other ways (because they know they're bad at driving), we would expect those people to get into a disproportionate number of accidents per mile driven.

These 1-2% licensing numbers are probably the wrong ones to look at for this hypothesis though. What we really want is the number of infrequent drivers that became more frequent drivers. Or better yet, miles driven sorted by driver insurance risk profile. These people may have largely already had licenses.

In my area things have definitely flown off the handle. I see people run red lights multiple times a day whereas before I practically never saw it. If you're lucky, it's a tightly grouped pack of cars where the tail just disregarded the yellow and the red. At least you're not going to drive into the intersection because you can see them and they just eat into your green.

If you're not lucky, it's one motherfucker who runs the red with no cars ahead of him. You'd be toast if you're too fast off the line when you get a green.

I also see a lot of cars with reflective license plate covers that are supposed to foil red light cameras. I know a lot of people who drive in the carpool lane with no one else in the car. I don't know if these rates are meaningfully different from before the pandemic, but it's bleak.

I suspect a lot of it has to do with the numbers of uninsured and unlicensed motorists. I can’t actually find good #s on this so could be wrong, but im sure that the # of unlicensed and uninsured motorists has exploded since we no longer enforce laws against this in most large cities.

That would surely manifest itself in a divergence between blue and red states or counties, then.

The explanation I like the best is that Corona broke the culture. There was a culture of how to behave on the road that produced such-and-such behaviors with such-and-such results. Corona disrupted the culture. Now road culture has settled in a new equilibrium, and it produces worse results.

I'm contrasting this theory to speculation I've heard about how Corona made people more aggressive or anti-social or stupid. Maybe that's true, but I find it hard to make a compelling etiology of individual actors. Everybody gets Corona, and that rewires everyone to be less risk-averse?

Policing is probably part of it, but only a lagging response. It takes a lot of work for the police to establish the culture of how to drive. It's much easier for them to observe whatever the culture is and penalize the most aggressive drivers. Imagine, for example, that one day everybody started driving 5MPH faster. Could extra policing really roll that back? Maybe they could, but it would be a lot of work to pull over every driver on that small change. It's much more plausible that they would continue to police the top offenders, which might become a slightly-larger category.

The explanation I like the best is that Corona broke the culture.

This is my explanation too and I hate it. My inner Vox journalist wants to find some numerical explanation, some demographic trend, some "one weird trick" that explains the data. But I can't. I really do think the cranky old man theory is right this time. Society got worse. End of story.

The question is, will it heal on its own over time, or is this just the new reality?

The question is, will it heal on its own over time, or is this just the new reality?

We're back to the dark days of.... 2006. I think we'll live. Most of us, anyway.

I think we'll live. Most of us, anyway.

:)

We're back to the dark days of.... 2006

The cohort of cars on the road in 2022 were much, much safer than the cars in 2006. But driver quality in 2022 was so much lower that it has erased the entirety of that difference. Brutal numbers.

The cars on the road in 2024 are much, much safer compared to the cars in 2006.

Are they? What's so great about them? I'm fairly sure the big gains in car safety (crumple zones and such) came before then. Now we're on to "active safety" of questionable value (e.g. the car nagging you because it thinks you're crossing a lane line which is really just a tar patch)

Modern cars are at the point where you can literally drive your family off a 300 foot cliff to kill them and everyone survives.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna85033

It's not hard to find recent news stories of people driving off cliffs and dying. Either Teslas (a small portion of modern cars) are just exceptionally safe or that family was miraculously lucky.

I think teslas are pretty safe even among modern cars.

Yes, crash test ratings are up a lot in that time.

Also keep in mind that the average car on the road is more than 10 years old. So, in 2006, the average car was from the 1990s.

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