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.
In PA it’s legal to pass right if the person in front is turning left and I hate it, but recently I’ve noticed people not slowing down or rolling through grassy shoulders on the right just to stop and get a soda down the road. People walk these roads at night for jobs but folks don’t care. :(
I used to think it was fine to do that and then a pedestrian was killed near me in this pass on right situation, and I realized that while I slow down to to a crawl to pass on the right (20-30 kph) lots of people must blow through there at full speed, not realizing or not caring that its a gigantic blind spot for cyclists and pedestrians. I’d support that law.