[avidiax]

Some amount of that is inevitable, but there is another level of defensive driving where you anticipate poor behavior and arrange that it won't cause an accident.

Have a look at a few dash cam accident videos [1]. There are many maladaptive patterns of behavior, but a frequent one that the average good driver can improve on is limiting speed on two occasions: when approaching a blind spot, and when passing stopped or slow traffic.

That second one gets lots of otherwise good drivers. They seem to think that by limiting their speed vs slow/stopped traffic they'd be encouraging people to dart in front of them. Which is somewhat true. But with limited speed, that's an avoidable or less injurious accident. By gunning it past stopped traffic, you make the accident unavoidable and more serious.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/@IdiotsInCars1

[thomasguide]

Without wanting to paint with too broad a brush, I would say in my experience driving in 10x countries, U.S. drivers, being most habituated to spending their lives in cars, drive in the most distracted, least careful way. Especially in places where the typology is the U.S. default of low-density, car-oriented sprawl. Accordingly there are an appaling number of deaths and injuries on the road: 1 in 43,750 people dies each year in the U.K. in automobile accidents vs. 1 in 8,500 in the U.S.A.

Inb4 deaths per mile driven, I'd argue higher VMT in the U.S.A. only proves the point - too many cars being driven too much because of silly land use. High VMT is acutally a symptom of a dangerous mobility system as much as a cause.

[michaelcampbell]

Add to that the relative ease to get a license in the US, and the level of punishment for breaking the laws.

I (an American) was on holiday and Switzerland and was explained the process of getting your license back if you lose it. It is a big disincentive to driving badly and putting yourself at risk of that, to be sure.

[maest]

Coming from outside the US, I was shocked to see how many drivers were on their phones _while the car is in motion_, scrolling Instagram or similar.

[sigseg1v]

Adding on to this, a common reaction I see to online videos of driving incidents is "why did this person just stop? of course you are going to crash into them. They shouldn't have stopped" and many people agreeing with it. It seems they are blind to the fact that if the following driver was using a safe following distance and speed, they should easily be able to stop, making the incident the fault of the driver following too close, not the one stopping.

[duderific]

I haven't checked on this in a long time, but IIRC, the insurance company will always blame the person in back in a rear-end collision, for just this reason. A rear-end collision should always be avoidable.

[SoftTalker]

Usually but not always. A common insurance scam is to pass a car, cut in just in front of it, then brake hard causing a collision. Dash cams video is a good thing to have to fight this if it happens to you.

[hananova]

No, even then. If a car cuts in front of you, you have at least a few seconds of time to start making space for them, and once they are in front of you, you should immediately make a safe amount of space between you and them.

Yes, in a country where safe driving is not internalized you will inevitable have someone rear-ending you while doing this, but if the options are "accident where you're at fault" and "accident where you're not at fault", pick the latter.

[IanCal]

I think you’re misunderstanding, the person pulling in front is not giving you seconds to make space - they are deliberately trying to crash into you.

[ip26]

Some degree of road safety depends on predictable behavior. I haven’t seen those videos, but suddenly executing a panic stop on the freeway for no good reason at all increases everyone’s risk, even if the car behind you is following at a safe distance. Obviously the following driver bears the most responsibility, but erratic drivers shouldn’t be held to be morally blameless.

[californical]

> erratic drivers

People don’t usually act erratically for no reason. Maybe they suddenly stop because they see a deer sprinting towards the road off in the distance, and the person behind them didn’t see it. There are tons of reasons that look like they “erratically stop”, which are actually genuine safe behavior that the other may not know about.

[tristor]

People act erratically all of the time on the road because they're on their phones while driving instead of paying attention.

[infecto]

People also don’t realize that just because you can does not mean the insurance will side with you 100%.

[geocrasher]

I learned next-level defensive driving by bicycle commuting to work 5.5 miles each way on busy roads in rush hour traffic. On a bicycle you're invisible, and if you expect any less, you're going to get hurt. As it was, I had some very very close calls- at least one of them had the potential to be fatal. Ironically, the only time I ever crashed was my own fault.

But now even when in a car, I retain that "I'm invisible" mentality, which makes me much more aware of what other drivers are doing, and much more skeptical of their ability to make good decisions. This has saved me several times.

[redanddead]

>I learned next-level defensive driving by bicycle commuting to work 5.5 miles each way on busy roads in rush hour traffic

please stop doing that geocrasher

[grog454]

The landing page video's first incident is a car coming from behind and from the right, cutting off the filming car. The filming car didn't react at all when instant (but measured) braking would've been safer to start building a distance buffer.

One thing HPDE taught me is that most people under brake in dangerous situations because they simply don't know the limit of their vehicle nor the sensitivity range of the brake pedal.

The hard braking heuristic makes sense when estimating risk of road segments, but not as a proxy for driver competence.

[ominous_prime]

It certainly makes sense as a proxy for competence across a diverse population for insurance purposes. You have a baseline of hard braking events that a competent driver may encounter under normal circumstances. If a driver routinely exceeds that number, they are either unable to correctly estimate closing distance and reaction times, which makes them higher risk for causing accidents, or they are driving abnormally aggressively, which also makes them a higher risk for causing accidents. If you consistently put yourself in situations where hard braking is required, it doesn't matter what your skill is, you've reduced your safety margins and an accident is statistically more probable. You said it correctly with "would've been safer to start building a distance buffer", that is the proxy the insurance companies want to use for risk assessment.

35 years without an accident on my record isn't because I'm a magnificent driver, it's because I always try to leave a way out for when something unexpected happens, because the unexpected _does_ happen.

The fact that some people may have the skill to drive more aggressively means nothing in the aggregate as far as insurance companies are concerned. If you are skilled enough to drive in that manner, you are skilled enough to avoid it as well. It's simply statistics.

[grog454]

> You said it correctly with "would've been safer to start building a distance buffer", that is the proxy the insurance companies want to use for risk assessment.

Then use it? Mandate reaction speed tests or other driving mechanics competency evaluation (not road sign comprehension) and watch insurance margins explode.

The driver in my example did poorly and scored top marks in the heuristic.

[avidiax]

I assume you are referring to this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEpHyMtDcPY

> building a distance buffer", that is the proxy the insurance companies want to use for risk assessment.

The cam car did not need to have a hard braking event (HBE) to start building distance.

Even if they did, the insurance companies are looking for a pattern of HBEs to assess risk. I agree that there is a theoretical high-risk driver that never has a HBE because they always try to maneuver instead of breaking. There are other heuristics for this (high lateral acceleration, high jerk). And the ultimate heuristic: failing to avoid accidents, thus having a claim history.

[Sohcahtoa82]

> One thing HPDE taught me is that most people under brake in dangerous situations because they simply don't know the limit of their vehicle nor the sensitivity range of the brake pedal.

On any modern car, just push it all the way and let ABS and stability control figure it out, and don't let the vibrating brake pedal spook you into releasing it. That's just ABS doing its thing.

Really though, getting a license is too easy in the USA. We really need to require some sort of car control course, including obstacle avoidance in the rain. Would be really nice too if it included an obstacle avoidance course in two cars: A huge SUV or pick-up truck and a more reasonably sized sedan. So many drivers think they need a huge vehicle to be safe while being completely unaware of how well smaller cars can likely avoid the crashes to begin with. Would probably get really expensive really quickly, though.

[pibaker]

One thing I noticed among dash cam videos is very often the person recording and publishing the video will keep on driving closely behind another car that is clearly driving erratically. Maybe he will honk, but he won't brake or leave any safety distance, and seconds later the idiot's car, which has been behaving weirdly in front of him the whole time, causes him to crash.

I realize this may come off as victim blaming, but I feel you should have an obligation to not endanger yourself even if by the laws of the road you are technically in the right. I would rather get cut off by and idiot and be at my destination thirty seconds later than having to deal with car repairs even when it is legally speaking not my fault.