About half of Americans (49%) say people in their area are driving more dangerously than before the coronavirus pandemic, while only 9% say people are driving more safely, according to a new Pew Research Center survey. What publicly available data there is on the subject suggests that those perceptions may be right, at least in part.
There’s no one definitive data source for how common “dangerous driving” is, or even necessarily agreement on what specific behaviors that involves. Most data on people’s actual (as opposed to self-reported) driving habits comes from encounters with law enforcement – arrests, citations, accident reports and the like. Thus, the resulting data can’t be representative of the entire driving population.
Nonetheless, there’s a fair amount of data indicating that Americans’ driving habits have worsened over the past five years, at least in some ways.
The light rail here in Seattle, going both North and South, was just interrupted because some idiot driver decided to try to beat the trains as they both were passing each other at an intersection. One idiot driver managed to take down two trains (remarkably, the driver seems to have been fine).
“We gotta rip out the rail, clearly this is a danger to the public” or " is there any way we can give cars the prioirty at a train crossing?"
To be fair, the intersection that this happened at is in fact really obnoxious for anyone trying to cross the tracks. As they should, the trains have priority. The downside is that this means that if you’re trying to cross the street (driving or walking or biking, doesn’t matter), you can end up waiting there for a really long time. I don’t know why that particular intersection is so much worse than all the others.
Most of Seattle’s light rail is either underground or on a raised platform, but this stretch of road has the tracks at grade with the rest of traffic. Terrible decision.
Still, maybe don’t try to beat any train, let alone two of them at once.