I’ve talked to multiple people who refuse to take an Amtrak to travel because they were delayed one time, but they’ll sit in gridlock for an hour each way on the interstate daily without blinking an eye.
They’ll sit in that traffic blaring their horn and fantasizing about flying over all the traffic.
What? First of all, Amtrak is often more comparable to air travel as far as alternatives go.
Second, those Amtrak delays are genuinely upwards of 5 hours. I had a trip leaving at 9 pm, and they had me waiting at that seedy train stop until 1am.
Not their fault though, it was Union Pacific’s fault.
today I was on my daily commute, the first 15 minutes are through dense urbanish suburbs and the last 12 minutes are on a highway. Waiting behind a garbage truck and a school bus interacting with the sides of the road.
I thought “I don’t belong here… no, my car doesn’t belong here. Would be much easier to bike from my house to the parking lot near the highway and drive the rest of the way. Would cut down on time wasted waiting in this congested traffic.”
I do find myself caught in that. Particularly if I’m stuck in traffic for no readily apparent reason.
“All I’m saying is ‘it better be an accident’ and ‘somebody better be dead!’”
I wouldn’t think that outside being stuck in traffic.
A strong but older example of this is driving crimes. For a while killing someone while driving was just prosecuted as manslaughter (accidental killing), cuz that’s what it is. But juries weren’t convicting very often.
Someone realised that people didn’t like the idea that you could commit manslaughter, a very serious crime, just be driving your car and making a mistake. And so a new crime was created called reckless driving or something similar. It had a similar jail time but different terminology. And it got juries convicting more.
Clearly people have for a long time preferred to not think about just how absurdly violent or dangerous the act of driving is, to the point that killing with a car just didn’t count as a normal killing crime.
this will vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction of course.
Ah is that why there seemed to be this thing called Vehicular Manslaughter in American TV shows? I don’t know if we have that here in Australia but I always wondered why such a thing existed since surely it was just… manslaughter whether a vehicle was involved or not.
yep! I’m not sure how much it’s common knowledge, but I heard it from a lawyer/legal-academic in a non-public forum, so I trust it. It wouldn’t be too hard to dig into the history of it though.
I would love to drive less but it would take me 8X longer to ride a bus to work. I also can’t ride my bike due to fear of death by car.
you’re forced to drive in a place that’s designed to force you to drive
It’s not a failure of the alternative modes of transport
You just need to redesign the place
Yup, that’s why we all need to continue advocating for transit and safe streets.
Tailgating comes to mind. It’s not that different than pointing a gun at someone, and people do it constantly.
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There are a lot of things people do while driving that are dangerous but very common. Things like driving with the high beam, speeding, tailgating, using a phone while driving etc.
The problem is that enforcing the rules is hard. You would either need a large percentage of the population to be police officers, or to put traffic cameras on every street.
The study seems a little bs.
They ask questions like, should a person smoke in public? And then ask if car fumes are a problem to the public.
Well they are not really comparable, like you don’t need to smoke and you can smoke elsewhere. I literally need to drive to work and can’t just drive through a forest.
They also ask about personal property being left in the street and stolen. People said that if someone leaves their stuff in the street and it’s stolen, then it’s their fault. But when it switched to cars, it was suddenly not their fault.
Well where else can I leave my car? If I leave my iPhone in the street, that’s a bit different.
I’m in the boat of people who wish that we did not need cars, but sadly my city is nowhere close to having a decent public transport.
