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If you want drivers to be safe (read: boring), your goal is to make sure their skills are as poor as possible. After learning to drive, I started to do the kinds of things that insurance companies/parents didn't want me to (sailing along straight, empty freeways at night, hard acceleration, hard braking, slight drifting on snow, but mostly very fast turns) because I felt 100% in control of the car the whole time. And I was. It's part of the hacker thing. You've given me a machine; I want to find out what I can make it do. And G-force is fun. I don't touch the things that you really don't touch (distraction, intoxication, trains) but the rest of it, absolutely, because I can. I built up to things slowly - what happens if I wait just a little longer to take my foot off the accelerator before making a right? And then I figured out what was just past the threshold of comfort, and backed down. Never with pedestrians around, and never with passengers, but enough that I felt like if it were really a bad idea, it would have caused problems by now. I lost control exactly once, playing with snow alone on a deserted street well under the speed limit, and was still nowhere close to hitting anything. When I see "maniacs" weaving through traffic or bikes not stopping at intersections, my response is usually to maintain course, because I know what they're thinking. They're thinking "I know exactly where I am, I know what space I occupy, I know what space I will occupy, and I know that I have a reasonable margin such that we're not going to collide." I'll often think that their appetite for risk is irresponsibly high, but I have a certain respect for their certainty and I do my best to make sure they're right, and usually that means maintaining speed. Drivers who are obviously distracted, on the other hand, freak me out. If someone is slow reacting to a green light, for instance, I will hate them intensely but I'll also stay the hell away, because they're probably still texting. Engineering is actually at odds with safety here: a car that handled better would only have made me more comfortable. If you want people like me to always brake/accelerate/turn slowly, then you actually want us to feel less in control and less skilled. Surveillance would probably work also, but I just found that marketing copy interesting. You don't want skilled drivers, you want drivers who are scared shitless and correspondingly conservative. I find some support for my theory in the fact that the road up to Pike's Peak in Colorado is, statistically, one of the safest roadways in the United States. There are tons of hairpin turns with no guardrails where missing it by a few feet would mean a 3,000+ foot fall. But people respect that, and are consequently extremely careful and attentive. |