| HN Mirror

It’s easier to convince voters and politicians to enact technical control mandates than to persuade the lizard brain of your average human. Is that lazy? Sure, but there is no extra credit in life for taking the hard path.

Much easier to go after politicians and say “People will keep dying if you don’t enact this policy, and we will vote you out if you don’t.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/10/magazine/dangerous-drivin... | https://archive.is/2024.01.16-150053/https://www.nytimes.com... (“Why Are American Drivers So Deadly? After decades of declining fatality rates, dangerous driving has surged again.”

> Above all, though, the problem seems to be us — the American public, the American driver. “It’s not an exaggeration to say behavior on the road today is the worst I’ve ever seen,” Capt. Michael Brown, a state police district commander in Michigan, told me. “It’s not just the volume. It’s the variety. There’s impaired driving, which constituted 40 percent of our fatalities last year. There are people going twice the legal limit on surface streets. There’s road rage,” Brown went on. “There’s impatience — right before we started talking, I got an email from a woman who was driving along in traffic and saw some guy fly by her off the roadway, on the shoulder, at 80, 90 miles an hour.” Brown stressed it was rare to receive such a message: “It’s got so bad, so extremely typical,” he said, “that people aren’t going to alert us unless it’s super egregious.”