Two days ago I was cycling along a rural road; slightly before an intersection (a road to the left, like this: -|) a guy behind me started to pass me on the left lane and a woman on the intersecting road tried turning right.
After he passed me, in what seemed like a few seconds I realized that they would surely crash - the woman wasn’t looking in front of her (looking to the left to see if she can enter), and the guy wouldn’t be able to go to the right lane in time. And so they did. A frontal crash, but no major injuries as far as I could see (they both walked out of their cars).
What’s interesting about this is that both are at fault: the woman should not just check her left, but also look where she’s driving. The guy shouldn’t have tried to pass me before an intersection - that’s illegal. But both made those simple mistakes and it resulted in major damage to their vehicles and endangered their lives. But as tempting as it would be to call them bad drivers and move on, this made me think a bit about safety and cars.
Is it really a good idea for so many people to be driving, from a basic safety standpoint? We require people to have a certain skillset to operate heavy machinery and exhaustive training in every other instance except for cars - where standards are so low even your average Joe Blow can pass the test. And this is in Europe, btw. Cars are just fundamentally unsafe for a general user. The deaths from car crashes are treated as an inevitable reality, when in other modes of transportation things were done to make them safer and it worked, similar things happened in many industries with industrial machinery. Only with cars do we accept this lack of safety and shitty outcomes.
The problem is we give a heavy, fast piece of machinery to people who are a wide cross-section of society and may be unqualified, or at times tired or distracted, and make mistakes. This can happen even to professionals, but if there were far less cars on the roads, the potential consequences of those mistakes would be far less severe. It takes small moments of distraction for a tragedy to happen, and it would be difficult to expect from people as a group to never make mistakes - but this isn’t accounted for when crafting traffic laws. Those don’t seem to effectively stop people from making mistakes, they just infrequently penalize them.
I believe that good driving requires empathy. Empathy for other road users - pedestrians, horses, bikes, cars, whatever - makes you a calm, courteous and safe driver.
Empathy requires a lot of brain power - you need to be able to analyse your surroundings and anticipate your needs and the needs of others, in real time and at speed . I reckon most people lack the discipline to free up the head space required to be empathetic. A proportion will lack the head space to do much more than just drive the car, but that might be my cynical misanthropy creeping in.
Absolutely.
I’ve always gotten around by bicycle as where I’ve lived it’s always been the easiest form of transport and I never felt that I wanted to have a car. Around 30 I was thinking it might be nice to move to the countryside, and for that I’d probably need to be able to drive, so I learned to drive. Some of the things I learned at driving school made me feel a lot more empathy for motorists actually, since I realised that sometimes I ride in their blind spot, or make drastic manoeuvres that could perhaps be alarming to them, so I think it improved my ability to cycle safely. Conversely, as I walk and cycle nearly all the time, as a driver I’m very careful around pedestrians and cyclists and always give cyclists plenty of space when overtaking.
To be honest, here in Kyoto, most people are not total assholes, and they probably still ride bicycles around their neighbourhood, so it’s not considered an elitist or hipster mode of transport. I think this really helps everyone consider other road users as humans, regardless of the mode of transport. There are definitely still complete wankers around, of course, but I don’t sense much aggression from any road users most of the time.
Your last paragraph including something that resonated with me. I do think some have come to view cycling as something that is elitist/hipster, at least as a distinct subculture away from the mainstream - with its own lingo and uniform.
I think it’s that in the US, UK and many other countries, cycling is just not convenient for normal people as a form of everyday travel due to the way many cities are designed, resulting in the type of cyclists you see generally being younger, braver people commuting, and those who cycle as a hobby or for fitness. In countries where cycling is a convenient means of transport, such as the Netherlands and parts of Asia, there is a much wider variety of people on bikes, including mothers with children, old men riding with their pet dog in the basket, and even motorists will probably spend some time on a bicycle, as it might be a convenient way to get around their neighbourhood or pick up some groceries.
I think that this makes it a lot easier to create a stereotype of cyclists in places like the UK, where the mainstream rightwing press writes regular hit pieces of cyclists, as the image of “the cyclist” is easier to imagine as “the other” for a larger portion of the population.