About half of Americans (49%) say people in their area are driving more dangerously than before the coronavirus pandemic, while only 9% say people are driving more safely, according to a new Pew Research Center survey. What publicly available data there is on the subject suggests that those perceptions may be right, at least in part.
There’s no one definitive data source for how common “dangerous driving” is, or even necessarily agreement on what specific behaviors that involves. Most data on people’s actual (as opposed to self-reported) driving habits comes from encounters with law enforcement – arrests, citations, accident reports and the like. Thus, the resulting data can’t be representative of the entire driving population.
Nonetheless, there’s a fair amount of data indicating that Americans’ driving habits have worsened over the past five years, at least in some ways.
If you ride a bicycle and hang out with cycling people that have been in the scene for a while, this is a fairly common topic of conversation. Drivers seem to have gotten more careless (phone use I’m guessing), more reckless (lowered concern and empathy for others), and more angry (this one seems obvious) over the last five years or so. Especially towards cyclists. I would say before five years ago, I would have someone throw something at me or be purposefully aggressive like, maybe once a year. Now it’s a monthly occurrence.
I avoid huge swaths of my city now, and most rural roads. After being buzzed (once by less than a foot) three separate times by three different trucks in three consecutive weeks on rural paved roads with assholes yelling at me and throwing a can at me out of the window, I traded in my road bike and bought a gravel bike. Now I stick to gravel for long rides. I’ve got more options to bail off the road, traffic is extremely infrequent, and I know if someone is coming behind me very easily. If it’s a lifted truck, I pull off and wait until they pass. Annoys the shit out of me to have to do it, but it’s not worth dying.