alt Hacker NewsTo be fair, this is already true of driving in general. Often in commuter traffic you’ll see one guy driving extremely unsafely, darting in and out of lanes passing everyone as fast as they can. You know this person does this every day for years, saving time by putting everyone else in danger.
Replies
The solution is surprisingly simple. You just need moderate enforcement of fines that are scaled to the offenders income and that escalate exponentially with reoffense in a reasonable time period.
Fines should be designed to make it uneconomical to continue to reoffend.
This is one of those things that suffers greatly from selection bias and language games. The people unbothered by minor impolite stuff don't come on the internet and complain. The people who think everyone going 5-over is a crisis do.
If you define dangerous as "how dare that BMW not use a blinker" type moves, yeah that stuff is everywhere.
If you define dangerous as "Y likely to cause an accident given X exposure" then it must be tautologically rare because if people were behaving seriously dangerously get bit by it in fairly short order. I can't remember the last time I saw a "wow, that was really pushing it and in poor taste" move. Weeks perhaps.
Lucky to see one guy in commuter traffic. I need to drive few times per month during commuter hours and in Seattle area there are few types of such unsafe driving:
1. Trucks - not keeping the lanes, speeding (it's 70mph cars and 60mph trucks, trucks bypass me when I'm driving 70).
2. Old company vans and pickups - that's surprising to me, but I frequently see some old Gutter/Plumbing/Heating van darting in an out of lanes. I'd think they'd get fined or in accident sooner or later, but still.
3. Large pickups. They usually are speeding, going in and out of HOV lane closer to Seattle. Never saw HOV enforced on I90.
The enforcement was somehow increased this year, but only until heavy traffic (you can see it daily 5am-6:30am), but never during heavy traffic, which would be more helpful.