This is barely hyperbole lmao I love it
Go to any Instagram comment section about something to do with bikes, and every other comment is some blood thirsty version of “I get hard when I run over bikers”.
It’s revolting.
My favorite is when someone has some minor road dispute that cost them maybe a couple of seconds in drive time, and they follow you to catch up with you and scream at you about it…almost as if they weren’t actually on their way to go fucking do anything.
They were already late to whatever they’re supposed to be doing, and you’ve just become the excuse they needed.
In all seriousness, what the hell is up with the psychology of drivers? So much road rage, nastiness, and utter contempt for everything around their metal box of death on wheels.
In the US at least, Trump has validated half the country to express naked contempt for anyone they deem “other.” This includes: any person of color, any woman, anyone younger than them, anyone that “looks” educated, anyone walking, anyone on a bicycle, and anyone in an electric car, among others.
I love that you worked a Trump reference into this but I’ve seen this sort of terrible behaviour from drivers since I was a kid (I’m 40). It’s also not unique to North America, nor even the West (seen the same thing in China).
No, it’s something about cars that creates a disconnect between us and other people. It’s like people outside the car’s windows are TV characters, not real people.
Sorry for triggering you, bro. But the cartoonist is trans, lives in New York, the comics where she is depicted are regularly set in NYC, the comic specifically references “in the last two years,” she regularly makes comics about Trump, I specified in the United States, bicycle deaths from cars rapidly increased in the US starting in 2016 and reached their highest ever in 2022 (the last year with comprehensive data), and pedestrian deaths from cars increased 83% since 2009 with a larger increase occurring in the second half in the 2010s.
The comic isn’t directly about the fact that people in cars behave poorly around bikes and pedestrians in the last four decades. It clearly addresses the recent spike in aggressive behavior from motorists, especially towards pedestrians and, by extension, cyclists.
Do you have some statistics to back up that claim? Wikipedia shows much higher cyclist fatalities per 100k population in the 1990s and prior decades. The only recent trend I can see there is an abnormally low fatality rate in 2010 followed by a return to 2000 levels.
Anyway, the point of my inquiry is to try to make sense of car drivers. This is a community about the impacts of cars on society, not the other way around.
Wrong data. Look up cyclist fatalities by automobile. You looked up the total.
I’ve only been able to find absolute numbers for those. I can’t find statistics based on number of bicycle trips, miles travelled, or per capita.
Feel free to refute this but how’s this:
https://data.bikeleague.org/data/national-bicyclist-pedestrian-road-safety/
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Not excusing the behaviour but I’d bet it’s the amount of traffic people often sit through everyday along with the overall pace of life feeling faster.
I’m lucky to work weird hours where traffic is almost zero, but personally, sitting in hours of traffic everyday to and from work would make me want to pull my hair out.
Not excusing the behaviour but I’d bet it’s the amount of traffic people
often sit throughdirectly contribute toYou’re not stuck in traffic… You are the traffic
I agree with the “cars are not stuck in traffic, they are the traffic” thing, but I think it can be unfair when you make the subject people.
I am currently lucky enough that I can take the train to and from work. Never have to get on the asphalt on my commute except to cross the street twice. It’s great. I sit down and it goes. Lovely stuff. This hasn’t always been the case, though. My car was my one and only option at my previous workplace. Way too far to bike, no public transport, so I was forced to drive there. I hated every minute of being one of the many single-occupant cars on the road. I’d very much have liked to not be sitting in front of a steering wheel believe you me, but the city simply did not provide any better alternatives. I argue that I was stuck in traffic because I didn’t choose to be there in a car to begin with. And that most definitely did get on my nerves quite often, and it did make me more irritable.
Yeah yeah people could and should vote for politicians who’ll build that infrastructure, but until those are elected and that infrastructure has been built, there are plenty of people who are stuck in traffic.
What’s wrong with drivers? Frustrated mammal instincts while physical venting is impossible.
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The feeling of wearing big heavy armour (the car) and being separated from others not perceived quite as human in their armour intuitively calls for extreme force in all interactions, but the instinct is frustrated by knowing any collision is expensive and must be avoided, the opposite of folkrace. (Imagine the stress and frustration if rugby armour was expensive and easily dinged and scratched, so the players would have to avoid getting rough, and if someone hit your expensive armour, it would suddenly become your job to extract insurance info or money from them while the game went on.)
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Being agitated by imperfect humans in traffic while not being able to vent the anger out through muscle action is frustrating - you have to sit stiff in place and keep the controls steady. On a bike you can direct the anger to your muscles and get rid of it. A stimulant crash (often anger) while driving in heavy traffic is extra bad and common after a day of stimulants at work. (When the power steering belt broke on a Volvo V70 I was driving as a taxi, it was nice, healthier and more fun to use force to make the car turn. Why don’t car makers allow me to adjust the powering ratio when it’s all programmable now? Why are cars and computers designed to deprive the driver and user of all exercise?)
I worked in a university traffic research unit (psychology and cognitive science angle) after being a taxi driver.
(This text editor is shitty and frustrating, and my Lemmy feed is poison, but luckily I can fidget and pace a bit here by the computer.)
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I hate driving, it feels like it got way worse after covid, like people forgot how to drive properly
It’s the same phenomenon of de-socialization that was radically accelerated during peak Covid that has led to everything from a 1000% increase in unruly passengers on airlines, to a drastic decrease in relationships and dating, to a whole host of people just checking out from the social contract and embracing ludicrous conspiracy theories and retreating to online safe-spaces where any crazy thought will be validated and praised.
As a species we were not meant to have constant exposure to millions of people’s innermost thoughts and feelings and unrestrained impulsive ideas. It fucks with your head. Combine that with the economic incentive of keeping people in one spot, scrolling their attention-span to sawdust, and you are training an entire generation of people to turn off their inner monologues and to stop thinking entirely, just seeking validation and things to click on.
I feel strongly that AI ruining the internet will be a net-positive, as it’s going to drive more people to human spaces to connect with each other. Sure there will be a whole segment of people raised in the AI slop of the next decade, but there will also be a subset of people who want more and create their own spaces with other real humans.
Ok but it does seem like people drive way worse now than just a few years ago. I have theories though.
Theory 1: Existential dread. People are so beat down by climate, endless war, failing economy, and more that they’ve gone completely insane.
Theory 2: Long covid brain.
Theory 3: Trump and other authoritarian world leaders/parties/orgs has validated unmitigated rage and contempt towards almost anyone for almost any reason.
“unholy merging of flesh and metal” got me. Oh that’s good.
I guess the holy merging would be human and bicycle.
You’ve never had a cyclist on the sidewalk yell that you’re walking on the wrong side of the sidewalk as they blast past you at road speeds?
Assholes are assholes, regardless of what flavor unholy chimera they’ve merged into. They’re just less deadly when they’re non-charmeras.
That’s true, I have had cyclists yell at me as a pedestrian and driver (no I didn’t do anything wrong as the driver).
Carmera.
The cyclist in the last panel was probably running a red light.
![[meme] THE CHIMERA](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/452937e5-62b3-4663-9795-14adc523c5bd.jpeg){kind=link}
