The cause was easy enough to identify: Data parsed by Kuhls and her colleagues showed that drivers were speeding more, on highways and on surface streets, and plowing through intersections with an alarming frequency. Conversely, seatbelt use was down, resulting in thousands of injuries to unrestrained drivers and passengers. After a decade of steady decline, intoxicated-driving arrests had rebounded to near historic highs.
… The relationship between car size and injury rates is still being studied, but early research on the American appetite for horizon-blotting machinery points in precisely the direction you’d expect: The bigger the vehicle, the less visibility it affords, and the more destruction it can wreak.
I dunno but can we turn down the brightness on some of these fucking headlights
They need to mandate that headlights cannot be installed > 2-2.5 feet off the ground. Putting them higher than that does not benefit you in any way, it just fucks with other drivers.
It absolutely does improve visibility, but obviously impacts others
Just my own experience and maybe due to frequency bias, but holy shit everyone seemed to lose their goddamn minds behind the wheel after Covid.
Yes! A TON of people have brain damage from COVID and have no idea they have brain damage from COVID.
https://twitter.com/yash25571056/status/174504830733511935880% of infected individuals have suffered neurological symptoms probably shouldn’t equate with 100% of those who experienced symptoms were found to have permanent brain damage.
Because our requirements for getting a license are basically nothing. You answer 20 is super basic questions half of which have fucking nothing to do with driving or have insanely retarded answers like “how many feet exactly should you turn off your high beams if there’s another car approaching” YOU TURN THEM OFF FUCKING IMMEDIATELY WHEN YOU SEE ANOTHER CAR!! Oh sorry I blinded you I was pretty sure that was about 500 ft my bad
And then the Practical test the vast majority of places do a quick little jaunt around the block on some insanely basic streets have you parallel park real quick and then you’re good to go. The drivers in America are more deadly because they learn literally fucking nothing from the process of acquiring a license
In my city, police have pretty much given up on doing any traffic enforcement.
Re the headline: Can someone explain to me - a German - when to use “deadly” and when to use “lethal”? Feeling pretty confident with the language, but this one just confuses the shit out of me…
Hmm, they’re pretty synonymous, but I think you’re noticing this slight, occasional difference in use: Lethal is active, deadly is passive. A thing can actively be lethal when used by you, but when it’s something that happens to you, it’s deadly. An accident is something that’s considered to have happened to you, despite the fact that it’s typically your fault to some extent.
I’m no linguistics expert but these are the definitions from Webster
lethal applies to something that is bound to cause death or exists for the destruction of life. lethal gas
deadly applies to an established or very likely cause of death. a deadly disease
They are synonyms and most people would probably use them interchangeably. I guess the biggest difference is lethal applies to something that is about to cause death, whereas deadly applies to death that has moreso already happened.
lethal weapons, deadly accident, etc …
Deadly Weapon is my favorite action flick franchise
I don’t think you can use lethal for a metaphorical situation where nobody can actually die. For example “Deadly smile” or “deadly fart”
There are a few examples where there’s a convention around using one or the other, such as ‘lethal dose’ but not too many.
yeah you can
You can definitely say lethal fart and nobody would think it weird.
I don’t think I’ve ever heard it used that way. Only deadly
They’re the same meaning just about exactly. Maybe lethal is a little more “fancy” if that makes sense. There’s a lot of pairs of words in English like that, where one synonym came from old germanic/norse languages and the other came from old french/latin languages.
That’s why wedding vows say “to have and to hold”, for example. More educated people back in the day would use “have” (from habere in latin) and more common people would use “hold” (idk exactly from where but i assume old german or something.) When there was a wedding they wanted everyone to understand what was being said.
Thanks for all the replies. I had a very grim interpretation where the driver being an active part was removed. This happens a lot in German media where it is rarely a driver killing someone but instead someone “dying in traffic” - as if it’s a higher power.
Glad it might just be interchangable or an alliteration…
Ah, just being an alliteration might be the case. I used to separate these by active/passive (as pointed out by some of the other comments) which is why this was so confusing to me.
I’m pretty biased on this one but I’ve been pretty outspoken that we print too god damn many driver’s licenses.
Someone I knew got their license as an adult recently, and they were terrified at the lack of an actual “test” in the driving test. They drove around the block, never got above 35mph, and encountered a couple other cars.
And once you pass that, as long as you renew it and don’t have any violations, you can drive until you can’t see the gauges or hold the steering wheel.
We should have driving tests like the Finns have.
I looked into similar data from the NHTSA regarding accidents during lock down on the hypothesis the insurance companies would have an interest in WFH. I was stunned to see accidents did not decrease. Anecdotally i was working in field service during this period, and observed what seemed like less traffic, and yet the data disagreed with my impressions during the time.
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Cars also got a lot faster than they used to be. Mostly due to many more gears in the transmission as well as much higher horsepower compared to cars even 15 years ago.
But also much safer and way more stopping power. But the best car is useless when the driver is browsing tiktok
While I agree 99% of people are fucking morons I am curious about something. I’ve been driving for awhile now and I’ve noticed that since 2019 it has gotten SIGNIFICANTLY worse. I’m curious if the increase in awful drivers is in anyway related to the current economy. We have nearly everyone working multiple jobs to stay afloat. Could this be causing people to be more reckless from a mix of exhaustion and the fact they feel forced to take risks and drive in order to maintain their relationships since they don’t have time to do it any other way? I am in no way justifying this behavior I’m merely just interested in if this is in anyway related. I really can’t express just how bad drivers have gotten in such a short span of time.
We’re practically a trustless country at this point. Lack of trust in others as well as government is highly correlated with aggressive shit driving.
In addition, as an often aggressive driver, boy is it irritating to be driving amongst the zombies that are all going 45 on the highway in the middle lane because they’re all staring at their phones.
Yeah…usually the statistical methodology has changed to suit someone’s agenda, when you read shit like this.
Is it so hard to believe that in an era where more and more people are distrusting authority and breaking rules, especially considering how the right wing Americans have reacted to COVID measures, that they’d also start disobeying traffic rules?
Not being vaccinated against covid-19 is the second best predictor that you will be in an accident, first being that you’re an alcoholic and they’re only twice as likely to get in car wrecks as unvaccinated against covid people. It seems like there is indeed a strong correlation between not wanting to get vaccinated to own the libs and driving like an absolute jackass
Sometimes it’s really obvious when the person talking is young.
