this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2024
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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.
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.
Just one more lane bro it'll fix traffic
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.
K
It's been an issue for a long time, but Trump, as well as COVID, severely exacerbated the issue
Its a mech suit that the more you consider it a freeing source of maneuvering the world the more attached to it you become and safer you feel from the rest of the world. No matter it makes people have all kinds of emotional responses that are unpleasant for the rest of us.
Either they're forced or they believe they're forced to drive cars. I'd become insane too.
I’m sure that’s part of it but it can’t be the whole story. Some of the worst asshole drivers I’ve seen were driving not what I’d call “A-B cars.”