Two days ago I was cycling along a rural road; slightly before an intersection (a road to the left, like this: -|) a guy behind me started to pass me on the left lane and a woman on the intersecting road tried turning right.
After he passed me, in what seemed like a few seconds I realized that they would surely crash - the woman wasn’t looking in front of her (looking to the left to see if she can enter), and the guy wouldn’t be able to go to the right lane in time. And so they did. A frontal crash, but no major injuries as far as I could see (they both walked out of their cars).
What’s interesting about this is that both are at fault: the woman should not just check her left, but also look where she’s driving. The guy shouldn’t have tried to pass me before an intersection - that’s illegal. But both made those simple mistakes and it resulted in major damage to their vehicles and endangered their lives. But as tempting as it would be to call them bad drivers and move on, this made me think a bit about safety and cars.
Is it really a good idea for so many people to be driving, from a basic safety standpoint? We require people to have a certain skillset to operate heavy machinery and exhaustive training in every other instance except for cars - where standards are so low even your average Joe Blow can pass the test. And this is in Europe, btw. Cars are just fundamentally unsafe for a general user. The deaths from car crashes are treated as an inevitable reality, when in other modes of transportation things were done to make them safer and it worked, similar things happened in many industries with industrial machinery. Only with cars do we accept this lack of safety and shitty outcomes.
The problem is we give a heavy, fast piece of machinery to people who are a wide cross-section of society and may be unqualified, or at times tired or distracted, and make mistakes. This can happen even to professionals, but if there were far less cars on the roads, the potential consequences of those mistakes would be far less severe. It takes small moments of distraction for a tragedy to happen, and it would be difficult to expect from people as a group to never make mistakes - but this isn’t accounted for when crafting traffic laws. Those don’t seem to effectively stop people from making mistakes, they just infrequently penalize them.
There are also medical conditions that happen so slowly, people don’t notice them. Here in Germany, no medical examinations are required for older drivers. You are 80, can’t walk properly anymore? The car lobby will fight for your right to still drive your SUV. Or else we would have to think about rural public transportation.
Before I had a cataract surgery, I thought my vision was not good but acceptable, just need new glasses. Only after the surgery I realized how bad it was (there are some weeks between left and right eye surgery, so one has a side by side comparison). Good thing that I stopped driving cars in 1995.
It would be a huge contribution to safety if cars weren’t ridiciulusly big, like SUVs. Where I’m from, Germany, once you pass the driving exam, your driver’s licence ist valid for life. There are neither, at least for cars, additional check-ups regarding medical conditions (as pointed out by @piper11), nor any mandatory refreshing lessons regarding changes in traffic rules or the overall ability to operate a vehicle.
The driver’s license is handed out with a leap of faith. If traffic safety would really matter that much, a general psychological test should have to be performed before obtaining a license. And that’s where the car lobby comes into the game: If people would have to pass a psychological exam, probably half of the drivers would not be deemed fit to be on the road.
Unfortunately, it’s the reckless drivers who are seen by the auto-lobby as potential customers for new cars. Those who are buying overly motorized cars are more prone to buy a newer model after a couple of years. Police will handle these kind of drivers with kid gloves. You have to be driving *really *recklessy when you would to be stopped by police. On the other hand, drivers of small cars are not to be considered good customers by the auto-lobby - as they are satisfied with what they have. They don’t replace their vehicle often. That’s why overly motorized cars and also SUVs exist: Asshole cars are marketed to asshole people.
