> Since then, the number of severe crashes has climbed. It is hard to say exactly why.
The article mentions some of the reasons but the one I find personally annoying the most are white LED headlights. What in the absolute seven hells is wrong with every manufacturers these days? White light may give you extra vision but it blinds everyone else. Eventually, everyone starts using it and then no one will be able to see properly at night anymore. Truly, a tragedy of the commons. A swift intervention at the Federal level seems like a must.
We live in a very rural area, and the most annoying thing is huge pickup trucks with giant light arrays over the cab or on the grill, especially the ones that just look like a wall of light. The blinding effect is tremendous, and it is doubly dangerous in our area because the deer population have exploded. I don’t know if these are legal or the cops just don’t care, either way people use them with impunity.
I think the use case is supposed to be hunting and camping, but these assholes seem to no blinding everyone around them!
Light bar money for on road use is misguided money - there isn’t a light solution that can beat night vision systems.
You get an infrared camera and on the screen a coloured bounding box is drawn over each identified pedestrian or animal etc. Green no threat, red sounds an audible alarm so you don’t need to drive looking at the screen to get benefit of it.
It sees things that just cannot be seen by projecting a light source from near you, no matter how bright.
Unlike sending engines for cryptographic cyphers across nation state lines, night vision is absolutely one of those things ITAR cares about. And the number of loops holes and exemptions Audi had to apply for made the project financially unprofitable to the point of moving to always on high beam DLP style headlights.
Retrofitting one system in my car which had the option code was a yak shave.
Most automotive systems get by this by limiting night vision to 8fps(!). Similar to how GPS was limited to 100m accuracy in the first civilian models.
What blows my mind is one can get Chinese models off Taobao
with 60fps for 1/10th the price of US products like FLIR.
There are three
types of night vision, and the consumer grade active illumination stuff using infrared light is covered by EAR (Department of Commerce’s Export Administration Regulations) instead of ITAR (which is still significant, but less strict). Which doesn't detract from your point, which is that night vision is hamstrung by regulations. With all the advances in technology, the consumer grade stuff should really be more accessible because it would save lives if drivers could see better in the dark.
That last part would indicate that the restrictions are utterly moronic if one were to reason. At the very least they need to be relaxed so technology that's readily available to end consumers worldwide isn't restricted.
ITAR blocks export, not import. It has nothing to do with TSMC building fabs here. $50B in incentives might have something to do with that.
And like sister comment says, ITAR is not about industrial or economic policy. It’s about maintaining a qualitative edge in weaponry. How is there a qualitative edge when you can buy the restricted components freely from China?
Just noticed the other comment on GP saying they’re restricted through a different list (EAR). It serves the same purpose so I’m leaving my response as is.
I was blinded to the point of nearly driving off the road by one of these over the holidays here in rural Iowa. It’s the first time I’ve ever encountered someone actually using the light bar at night while driving 60mph down the road. To say that I couldn’t see anything at all is an understatement. I tried to keep my eyes on the road, look down and to the right to avoid the lights, but the closer it got the more my field of view it took up. I genuinely thought he was going to hit us because I couldn’t tell where the truck was at or where my car was at, it was like a train coming down a tunnel.
That's wild. I wonder if you just have a couple of jerks in your area. I grew up in a rural area and my parents still live out there, and I cannot ever remember someone driving on the road with their light bars on. I used to have one on my jeep. Anyone who has them knows they're being a jerk if they're driving with it on the road.
In the Rockies you see loads of vehicles with light bars. Never see them lit up on the road. Maybe it comes down to local policing? Cops around here aren’t likely to appreciate non-locals driving with lights on. Could just be culture though.
I would like to think so but i saw the same crap driving through the middle of a Denver on I70 recently. I almost had to pull over it was so bright I couldn’t see but no one did anything as I have become accustomed to.
It's super common in the south nowadays. I grew up similarly, and had light bars on my trucks/all my friends did/etc. But we weren't driving around town with them on.
I was gonna mention the exact same thing. Wild times in big trucks. Their wheels and mirrors all stick out to the edge of the lane too.
I find the sales listings on these trucks hilarious tho. They are the ultimate custom McMansions, listed with extremely high premiums for all the custom work, that essentially never sell. If you are in the north a great description to add is “Texas truck” or really any state south of where you are. They also commonly have well over 200k miles. It’s a crazy phenomena.
The funny part is you can punch these truck owners right in the daddy issues just by pulling up next to them in a base model truck with actual dirt in the wheel wells and a ladder rack on. Using a truck to do actual work > aftermarket pageantry and they damn well know it.
Forgetfreeman isn’t talking about the blue collar Mexicans…
I will say tho, the base model trucks and just about any trucks aren’t made for work anymore. The boxes are like 6ft long as opposed to 10. The tow power on base models isn’t great. Work vehicles today are becoming more and more those vans. Not saying work trucks are obsolete, just they aren’t what they used to be.
Those are for navigating 4x4 trails in the dark, and are illegal to use on public roads. Where I live many vehicles have them, but I have never once seen them used on a public road.
From what I can tell (in the USA) it's not necessarily illegal to drive with the fog lights on at all times. The main requirement for all headlights anywhere is that they're positioned and aimed correctly.
Specific states or regions may technically have restrictions, but it seems pointless to enforce if it's a stock vehicle that meets the requirements. High beams are way worse than the typical fog lights. I don't think most people should have to worry about their fog lights unless they're aftermarket.
Reminds me of those signs that say "no engine braking". They're specifically referring to jake brakes on commercial vehicles, not dropping a gear on a normal car or truck.
If you're going down a long incline, trucks should use jake brakes. It sucks being behind truckers who only use brakes and the thing overheats so much you can smell it --they're the truckers who end up on the runaway ramps.
I think your comment is attracting downvotes because unmuffled engine brakes are loud, and those signs are usually placed when people live near the road and find the noise obnoxious. I think it doesn't apply to trucks where the compression brake has a muffler.
Fogs lamps are worse for the person using them than oncoming traffic. This is due to the way the light is focused. It's directed downwards to avoid the light reflecting straight back into your eyes off the fog or snow. This is what makes them different. However it affects your ability to see far even if you have your high beams on.
I remember reading about this in an article written by a rally driver in ADAC magazine maybe 20 years ago now.
If we're talking about our own vision rather than another driver's, yes, fog lamps might detract a bit from our night vision. The truth is, if you're using them in an actual fog, your distance vision is fucked anyway, and it's your regular headlights (which do not power off when the fog lamps are on) which are doing the damage to your night vision, since they're focused at eye level and reflecting back. The fog lamps aren't a big worry in that regard.
> I remember reading about this in an article written by a rally driver in ADAC magazine maybe 20 years ago now.
I've seen those arrays of fog lamps installed on rally cars, and I'm not sure what they're about but they're a pretty different paradigm than anything that comes installed by the factory on a passenger car.
They're not the same light pattern as fog lights (well, not all of them). Some are "pencil" beams that reach far, some are closer to fog beams for close-in. Coverage is the name of the game.
They need them because the goal is to be driving as fast as possible, so you need as much light as you can get onto and down the road.
The reason they're on pods on the hood is because they're removable. They only put them on when needed, because they're very expensive and you don't want them getting damaged when not in use.
Rally car lighting systems have more in common with aircraft lights. The landing lights on a 757 are standard GE units with 600w, 28v, bulbs, costing $50, that produce 750k candle power. Narrow beam. As bright as the sun. Wider beamed taxi and runway turnoff lights still use 450w.
Ah, this makes sense. I've heard about the phenomenon of drivers of regular (not rally) cars driving so fast that they outrun the range of the headlights, such that even with perfect reaction time they are not able to stop or react to something on the road ahead. Simply increasing the brightness of factory high-beams must only get you so far.
I use my (factory installed) fog lights only when the conditions are bad enough that I need a downward facing light to be able to see the lanes or obstructions. mine turn off if I turn on high beams, which do not have the very close reflections. they make a significant difference in specific circumstances. why I see some people drive with them on under all conditions, I will never know.
I discovered the fog lights on my new-to-me vehicle recently and use the lower ones (the upper ones are burned out and need replacing) at night to illuminate the near road better and make it easier to see and avoid holes in the road.
Many cars have both daytime running lights and fog lights in the same enclosure. And depending on settings (auto vs manual, etc), the DRLs might stay on at night. And cars vary a lot in configuration. It would take a lot for the police to accurately recognize and ticket people with fog lights on when there's no fog.
it seems to depend on state - some are no more than 4 headlights at a time, where fog lights would be main headlights plus fog lights, as opposed to main headlights plus brights.
most laws appear to be based on direction and aim.
>A small city in New Zealand plagued by “siren battles” – cars decked out in loudspeakers commonly used in emergency warning systems and often blaring Céline Dion hits – is calling on authorities to step in and end the noise.
>The battles are part of a New Zealand subculture where music enthusiasts cover their cars in up to dozens of industrial speakers, loudhailers and sirens, then compete to have the loudest and clearest sounds.
"The battles are part of a New Zealand subculture where music enthusiasts cover their cars in up to dozens of industrial speakers, loudhailers and sirens, then compete to have the loudest and clearest sounds."
Those people ain't "music enthusiasts", they are "noise enthusiasts". Music enthusiasts do not intentionally destroy their ears or those of others.
Is that what the US military dished out to Noriega in the Panama invasion?
No wonder he surrendered! It was alleged to be 'heavy metal', but is there acoustic evidence? I bet Celine would've got faster results.
I’ve always thought that we should have a reverse matrix LED headlight: it directs flashing high beam only to incoming cars with flood lights or high beam, while leaving those driving properly unaffected.
Because the people who compensate for ??? by buying a humongous mall-crawler truck will totally understand and be sympathetic when having their outrageous "lookit me" type behavior reflected back at them.
> Since then, the number of severe crashes has climbed. It is hard to say exactly why.
I (unfortunately) have been doing a lot of driving on highways at night during the last four years. There is a noticeable trend in people watching video while driving. It is really obvious at night. This has expected outcomes.
I was sitting at a stoplight and looked over at the car next door and saw there was some video playing on the dashboard in front of the instrument cluster. I thought it was one of those completely digital dashboards that was doing some kind of animation, but the dude just propped his cell phone in front of it and was watching some kind of content.
At least he was stopped. I've seen people watching Netflix on their phones on a mount or something while driving. Unbelievable.
I worked in the industry recently, with most leading carriers on how they generate LTVs for potential customers from expected frequency, severity, and lifetime.
During COVID shutdowns, there was a massive drop in frequency (obviously, hardly anyone was driving) but a significant uptick in severity. This was attributed to higher speeds with emptier roads.
After re-opening, frequency is significantly higher per driver than before. So is severity. Everyone I talked to in the industry was convinced this was due to loss of skill during shutdown as well as people driving much more aggressively. This is on top of the serious increase in parts due to supply chain issues.
I find it strange that this isn't discussed in the article when it's a pretty widely-held belief in the industry.
It seems fairly silly to think that Covid really changed how people drive. You didn’t drive for a month and you just forgot, and then in the intervening three years did not relearn it? That isn’t how humans work. I don’t doubt you that it is widely believed, it just doesn’t make sense.
More likely is that due to distracted driver growth since the advent of smart phones, we’re all just getting a little worse every year, so every year is a new high watermark.
> It seems fairly silly to think that Covid really changed how people drive.
As someone who has driven before, during, and after I think it's silly to think Covid didn't change how people drive. It's a night and day difference from 2019 to 2023 (first year of "back to normal") that cannot be explained by a gradual shift of people becoming more immersed in technology.
The attitudes in society towards law and order and what is acceptable day to day have massively shifted. Enforcement (at least where I am from) seems to be nonexistent too - and I think COVID laid that fact bare. People realized no one is actually watching or caring about what they do. Why not drive 55mph on the shoulder to get around that traffic jam if you know there are zero social or legal ramifications?
I was driving quite a long time before Covid, and I drive about 50,000 miles a year. I’ve noticed a long, slow decrease in how well people drive, but I don’t think it has changed any more dramatically in the last three years. if you took the trendline prior to 2020 and drew it to 2023, it would get you to pretty much where we are today in terms of accidents and fatalities. They had already started increasing again before Covid.
And in any case, the plural of anecdote is not data. there’s just really no data to support the idea that everybody not driving for a month, and then driving less for a year or two, has made people worse at driving.
I wish I could find it, but I read a study recently about participation in the social contract that used a question like "would you run a rural red light with no one around?" as their metric. A lot more people say yes now than before 2020.
> Unless you're arguing that Covid had ramifications for everyone's brain
"Covid" can refer to either the worldwide pandemic, or the specific disease. "Covid", the event which was a world wide pandemic, did affect everyone's brain. You know how? Because that's where memories are stored. Memories are stored in the brain, and memories influence belief systems which affect behavior. What people remember, and what they have now learned, is that they can get away with a lot more illegal shit while driving than they are used to, and what they have learned through experience (which are formed through memory) is that people are super aggressive when driving after the worldwide pandemic, which causes them to change their behavior too.
> no reason to think that's anything but superstition.
Pretty ballsy to say that hard data of drivers getting more reckless (which is furnished in the article you're replying to) is superstition.
> had ramifications for everyone's brain, there's no reason to think that's anything but superstition.
Or people began driving differently when the roads were empty (even if less frequently) and continued doing that even the amount of traffic increased significantly
It was much more than a month my friend. Shutdowns started in March 2020, traffic in my metro area didn't return to pre-pandemic levels until at least mid 2021.
People who had to still had to drive through the pandemic could have gotten used to driving faster on emptier roads, and therefore are more frustrated and aggressive with the traffic/slowdowns today.
Or maybe it's because the population of drivers has shifted, there's still a lot of people working from home (either full time or part of the week)
Or maybe lowering of social empathy we've seen since the pandemic has bleed over into drivers' attitudes (people are notably more rude/less considerate in public)
I don’t believe people get significantly worse at driving after not driving for a month. I have gone on one month vacations where I did not drive, then I came back and gotten my car, and I don’t think I was any worse off, and even if I was, I was right back to where I started Very quickly.
I don’t think half as much for a year would make me any worse either. The average American is 40 years old and has been driving for 25 years. The average American who drives is even older. It’s hard to imagine them cutting their commute in half for a couple years. Will make them any worse than they had been before.
In instances, like this, there is neither nor logic, just subjective feeling, you can be pretty sure it is incorrect
Covid revealed a lot of things. Essential workers discovered they were disposable. That the rich would lock them into their jobs and out of public parks and spaces to protect themselves. Then to add insult to injury prices on all basic goods went up 30% so yeah poor people are angry and they are driving like they got nothing to loose. There is basically no hope of owning a house for anyone in the bottom 70% who doesn’t own one by now either.
Locally, I saw a marked difference in a small part of the population.
Roughly a quarter of drivers are maniacs, and drive until there is another car actually impeding their progress, or the get a ticket. Over covid, the empty roads taught these drivers to expect that that can drive 50 in a 30. Now that the traffic is back, these morons are still trying to drive 50 in a 30, and weaving around stopped or turning traffic to do it.
As in outsider of the auto industry this sounds like a classic blame-the-customer attitude that exists in many industries. The auto industry attributes the increase of severity and frequency of auto accidents to an external party so they share zero liability.
That doesn't seem like it follows though. Most people are driving the same car they were driving in 2019. It's not like the auto industry went and changed everyone's cars and repaved the roads or something. If this was some long term trend, then sure, easier to see how you could explain it with changes in headlights or ride height or some other factor of how cars are designed.
A dramatic increase in amount and severity of accidents after a major world-impacting event like the pandemic seems like exactly the sort of thing that would make sense to be some change in the way people drive. This isn't "Oh, the users just hate the new Slack design. What idiots." For 90+ percent of the US, nothing has changed about the cars or roads in the last 4 years any more than the 4 years before that, and yet the outcomes of driving have changed.
How do you imagine the auto insurance industry is driving this change in customer behavior and outcomes? I cannot imagine any way in which it's the fault of the insurers, but I know that this is merely a failure of my imagination.
Bear in mind that the auto insurance industry is quite distinct from the auto manufacturing industry.
Due to electrification, I imagine the average weight of a new car is increasing, which causes more damage. Previously non-severe crashes becomes severe crashes.
Due to increasingly pedestrian-unfriendly designs, like "grr I'm a bad boy" grills on trucks, crashes becomes more damaging to what they crash into. More, previously non-severe crashes becomes severe crashes.
I'm not sure I'm convinced that consumers came out of the pandemic with a large change in car types.
The purported timeline is: Pandemic hits, people stop driving, incidents falls drastically. Pandemic stops, people starts driving again, but incidents and severity increase drastically compared to pre pandemic.
The companies are saying internally "people forgot how to drive properly", which granted, sounds weird. But it also sounds weird that people upgraded their cars, while not driving them, or that there was a huge spike in car sales as people upgraded post pandemic.
Sales data doesn't suggest that consumers went out and changed their fleet [1]
>I'm not sure I'm convinced that consumers came out of the pandemic with a large change in car types.
Well, first of all it doesn't need to be what any person is convinced is "large", it just needs to be nonzero. Second of all, it's not about customers, it's about manufacturers. As your own data indicates[0], a nonzero number of people replaced their car during that time period, just like in every other time period. If more people choose electric than did decades ago, there will be more electric cars than decades ago. And there are[1]! Electrification is increasing, therefore weight is increasing, therefore crash severity is increasing.
So the timeline is, each year, more and more people are buying electric cars, and it looks like severity increased, too. Do we have data on people's ability to drive over time? Maybe, but I haven't seen it, so that's what seems unconvincing so far. We definitely have data on vehicle weight over time, though.
[0]: "Sales data doesn't suggest that consumers went out and changed their fleet" – by my viewing of the data, it shows that a lot of consumers, in fact, went out and bought a car during that period. Millions did, tens of millions even, and it only takes a single car difference to affect the population average.
Just anecdata, it really seems like drivers are significantly worse after COVID than before. Not just on main roads but on side streets and parking lots. I can't say if it's due to driving less during shutdowns or a confluence of other issues but people seem to drive shockingly worse.
Smartphone use. App use while driving, wearing airpods and the like, more vehicles with monitors, more integration between phone apps and car entertainment systems to fiddle around with?
I have defintely seen private drivers watching tiktok on the highway, and ride share drivers either trying to manage jobs across multiple smartphones, or spending their shift in a discord/group call with some friends.
I've driven in 3 major cities over the last decade (LA, SF, Seattle) and in all of them the local police departments have been ignoring a lot of traffic infractions that they would have pulled people over for before. The shift seemed to happen after there was that "Defund the Police" call and the BLM protests.
The same thing happened in Minneapolis, along with this:
‘The City Attorney’s Office will stop prosecuting tickets for driving after suspension when the only basis for the suspension was a failure to pay fines or fees and there was no accident or other egregious driving behavior that would impact public safety.’”
As someone who only drives in Minneapolis every few months the change that happened around 2020 was ridiculous. I regularly saw cars doing well over 100 in the city when I had never seen that before.
Disagree. BLM caused the politicians to throw the police under the bus before it was determined if they were actually in the wrong or not. Of course the police are going to be more interested in avoiding possible incidents and less interested in going after trouble.
BLM got what it "wanted"--there's a definite drop in police shootings where they were active. But it was a cat's paw result: The increase in criminal black deaths was far greater than the decrease in police black deaths.
Yeah Seattle I see so many people driving without plates now. Lack of enforcement is a real issue. They are simply not enough police as they all quit after the Riots
> Smartphone use. App use while driving, wearing airpods and the like, more vehicles with monitors, more integration between phone apps and car entertainment systems to fiddle around with?
These are all likely factors which is why I can't just claim everyone forgot how to drive during COVID shutdowns. At the same time the shocking incompetence I've seen (anecdata) the past year or two haven't seemed to involve people fiddling with distractions but just being hyper aggressive shitheads.
I don't feel there has been a difference where I live in Europe.
And my personal experience is that the driving culture in the US (east coast) is more aggressive to start with (except, maybe, sparsely populated remote areas).
I dont know. I only drive once every three months or so. and every once in a while Ill go on a huge roadtrip across the country. I have never noticed any loss in driving skill.
Assuming you are talking about a loss in your own skills, isn’t this exactly what the OP is describing? If people perceived a change in their own abilities, the problem would likely not exist.
Its a car. You turn the wheel and press the two buttons.
I've beaten spelunky 1, and 2. Im also sporty and coordinated. I know what good motor skills look and feel like, and what being bad at something feels like.
If there is a suspicion of skill loss in the population, i dont know why so many people in this thread would blindly accept that. We should all put our good boy skeptic scientist hats on.
Are the changes in chrash severity and frequency even for all types of people? Doubtful. In what age ranges and occupations are the biggest changes in.
"People crash more now because sudden population wide skill loss" doesnt even pass the basic sanity test. Im gonna need some evidence.
I don't think it's degradation any more than my skills at golf or basketball degrade in the 6 months between times I play either of them. I'm the baseline level of good enough that I'm competent, but I definitely don't have the skills of someone who practices either daily.
> definitely don't have the skills of someone who practices either daily
And that is exactly the premise of one proposed mechanism by which serious accident rates (and insured losses) may have increased during a period when a great many people who previously practiced something daily then did not do so: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39247101
We get the concept, theres just no given evidence and it doesnt pass the smell test. I havent ridden a bike in years i bet im exactly as "skilled" as the last time i was on it. Driving is just not a skill you get worse at if you dont do it for two years. Ive done it, and felt no difference.
What do you mean you doubt that. Thats obnoxious. this is simply a fact. Ive got a bike downstairs I could go ride it, one handed, no handed, pop a wheelie just like 15 years ago. My dad is in his fifties and i bet the same applies for him but hed complain about his wrists.
If the skill level takes ten seconds to reachieve I dont really consider that skill loss. Same for driving. Americans spend an insane amount of time driving, tens of thousands of hours from a young age. This is just not a skill that obviously weakens in any meaningful way if you dont do it for a year.
I need hard evidence, not just your unreasonable contrarianism.
I mean, maybe you're just better at it, but I was a competitive mountain biker 10+ years ago and the last time I tried to ride a bike a couple years ago, if I'd taken my hands off the handlebars I probably would have crashed in seconds.
We're all just asserting anecdotes here about how easy/hard things are. I tend to agree that the act of driving a car isn't so hard that people forgot how to physically drive over the pandemic. What I think is the much more likely thing that changed is the habits of awareness of other drivers. The instincts of which corners have low visibility or your general sense of how fast people drive on various roads. Driving is ultimately a social activity in some way. Most people who get in accidents aren't just failing to "hit the right button" on their car, they're trying to drive well and avoid something unexpected.
It seems entirely reasonable to me that some number of people kept driving daily during the pandemic on mostly empty roads with mostly absent rules enforcement and picked up some bad habits. Maybe that's speeding, or running red lights, or being on their phone while driving because there's less risk of running into another car. Then as people who didn't do that started driving again, their memories from 6-18 months before didn't match the current driving culture any more. Different people adapted in different ways, but the bounds of what's "normal" has changed somewhat.
I don't think I'm worse at physically driving now, but I have definitely been surprised by drivers running red lights or being overly deferential to cross traffic a fair bit in the last couple years. I've adapted, but I'm definitely driving with a different mindset now than I used to.
could be phone use, could be drugs, we dont know but i guess im wrong while skeptically agnostic about the given assumed cause of the issue despite lack of evidence. How about aliens. How about ghosts. I think ghosts have been crashing peoples cars.
What that sounds implausable to you? Seems unlikely huh? You require hard evidence?
How dare you disagree with me im a pro ghost watcher for ten years.
Not convinced? Sounds ridiculous. Exactly.
Youre not gonna convince me people lose driving skill over a year. You can speculate to infinity.
We need real evidence. If you dont have it, weve got nothing.
Right, and you dont have to be a pro stunt driver to make it to work every day without dying. I honestly dont know what hes getting at.
Actually I think most people are significantly safer driving in a way that completely removes opportunity for skill expression. Waiting for other drivers, going normal speeds, not doing something else while driving, etc. Driving should be pretty unskillfull and boring if safe.
> This, and perhaps parent's driving skill has just been poor for a very long time now. No drop, just sitting at the bottom.
I'm not trying to be mean, but the adage in poker of spotting the fool at the table here applies. And as a person who rides bicycles, motorcycles as well as drives cars, and has driven in the EU with much stricter driving requirements I'd say there has been a massive drop in aptitude over all.
So much so that I just want to live a life that allows me to be car-free now. EVs are nice, but having everything I want within walking distance is much more preferable.
Isn't that just reflecting that you have the exact amount of skill of someone who drives every 3 months? What OP is talking about is people who likely drove for an hour or more every day suddenly barely driving more than a couple times a week for a year or more, and are now back to driving daily. That's completely different from just not driving much all the time.
I'd like to see slow trucks drive in the right lane rather than the left lane, and I'd like them to stay within the lane lines whenever possible rather than randomly drifting across them.
Stupid question, but to this day I can't get the idea of overtaking. Any given stretch of the road has a speed limit. That limit is well below the maximum capability of almost any car on the road. From the POV of traffic regulations, you'd expect drivers on either lane to drive at that limit. What is, then, the point of overtaking? The cars are swapping places back and forth, but otherwise are (supposed to be) moving at the same speed. Is it a way for some to work around speed limits (by always overtaking forward, never being overtaken), or just a pointless dance to keep drivers from being bored and falling asleep behind the wheel?
Drivers are supposed to keep right (outside/slower lanes) except to pass. That's the law in WA state and probably in most parts of the country. As far as I know it's also the law in other countries too; offhand on the Autobon.
In theory, the lanes further left should be at about the speed limit and the lanes to the right could be for slower long haul or dangerous loads driving, such as large and heavy trucks which might have a lower speed limit on some sections of road. In practice, please keep right except to pass and don't cause a traffic hazard trying to enforce slowness upon speeders with a rolling roadblock.
I would conceed that keeping drivers awake is understated, though, the speed limits are too slow for modern cars. I comfortably do 15 mph over (freeway driving when road conditions support, I dont speed on surface streets), and id do 20-25 if it didnt move the penalty to jailtime.
I do this to save time, it cuts ~25% from my commute. My only recommendations are that slow traffic keep right (which is still me, traffic moves fast here), and be mindful of the flow of traffic. The most dangerous aspect of speeding is the speed limit, some people are inclined to follow the speed limit whatever it is, and become a serious hazzard when people are trying to cut through traffic at twice (or faster) that speed.
Speed limits are 55, sorry, sometimes I have a case of shiftwork brain. Northern virginia, if you watch those "idiots in cars videos" then youve seen these roads.
Overtaking doesn't happen as much on long haul stretches of highway, in accordance with what you'd assume. Mostly it's either passing a truck that's going under the limit, or because a truck is slower going up an incline. Once you're in a more occupied area though, a lot of overtaking is people going at the speed limit passing local traffic that's merging on/off the highway at lower speeds.
> This is on top of the serious increase in parts due to supply chain issues.
I understand you work in the insurance Industry, but I worked in the auto Industry before and after COVID and just went through 2 total loss claims with my insurance and handled a lot of these third party warranty policies for my customers and think I have a more nuanced perspective than your own as mine is multi-dimensional.
I can tell you that while it's true people may be driving more aggressively, not after but during COVID as police weren't pulling people as frequently due to fear of contamination coupled with emptier streets, but the real reason claims are being declared a total loss (resulting in higher costs) is exactly because of the disruption in the supply chain and the shortage of parts kept in inventory for even 5 year old vehicles.
After dieselgate, Mitsubishi US was absorbed by Nissan US, who has been undergoing a great deal of pain since the ousting of Carlos Ghosn who left it in economic shambles with bad financing policies that resulted in lots of cost cuts during and many more after the Renault feud. Trying to get parts for a 2017 Mitsubishi after 2020 in the US was futile as the two dealerships merged together.
It was often the case that you were better off purchasing parts from Hyundai for shared platforms as getting them from Japan were difficult if not impossible as they had severe COVID restrictions and the plants stopped and the catalogs/inventory seemingly vanished in a matter of months during the first year of COVID.
I have had many battles with submitting adjusted insurance claims for service/parts that made me think the burden of a owning an imperfect new car was best solved by selling it back to the dealership at the inflated offer they were paying back then and getting a 'good enough' used car from us or elsewhere given how much time was being wasted dealing with these policies. One customer I inherited had a 3 year old VW CC was using our loaner for over 6 months waiting for an ECU and a harness which was covered by parts and labour by VW, and this was in 2023!
My Italian motorcycle was broken into and it's main wiring loom was ripped apart in the process, and declared a total loss: the cost to repair and replace was projected to be about $1500, which is reasonable but the problem there was over a 2 year waiting list and it was unlikely to ever be found since the part was made by Ducati before it was absorbed by VW Audi Group and was impossible to be found in even the HQ in Bologna according to owners because demand for it was low as it was known to be a defective part and best to solve by swapping out with parts from more widely available Suzuki models but meant changing everything from the stator onward to work reliably which easily tripled the initial estimate. Add to the fact that this bike had low sales figures outside of Italy and I took the settlement offer and gave up on ever owning one again.
The same thing happened to my much less rare Japanese motorcycle, which was much older and less expensive but the same thing occurred: deemed fixable but no parts can be found so is declared a total loss.
My insurance rates just went up by 25% 2 months ago, despite them not having gone up during these two events (over 6 months ago and months after my policy renewal) or even after 2 tickets several years back as I have an otherwise clean record and I'm beyond the risk age.
The response given to me by my insurer was that 'everything is going up' and that servicing my policy was naturally also subject to a price increase but was not a direct result of the aforementioned reasons which makes me think that in fact no... insurance in the US is not too cheap but incredibly convoluted and subject to arbitrary price increases.
> I understand you work in the insurance Industry, but I worked in the auto Industry before and after COVID and just went through 2 total loss claims with my insurance and handled a lot of these third party warranty policies for my customers and think I have a more nuanced perspective than your own as mine is multi-dimensional.
I'm a dilettante who passes through industries for a few years at a time, so I have no doubt your perspective is more nuanced! I may have understated how much impact that supply chain issues are, I'm going through a similar issue.
Huge missing variable is cognitive impairment from covid. It may affect up to ~20-30% of people several months after getting it [1][2][3], but whatever the exact rate, it's an amount that is orders of magnitude more than the accident rate.
"The most frequent symptoms seem to affect memory, attention, and concentration" [4].
We generally suck at assessing our level of impairment (see drunk drivers), so if we're used to driving a certain way and no longer have the capacity to do so safely, eventually something's going to happen to some of us.
Given the magnitude of ongoing covid infections and the still very low per capita accident rate, this could be the single best explanation of an uptick in accidents. It's not a surprise it's overlooked though, as statistically we don't really track cognitive abilities except in education contexts and individually we tend to downplay or ignore any changes in how we think. Cognition is largely invisible as a measure.
I hadn't thought of that aspect but I strongly suspect this is the cause.
If a change happens gradually you're not going to notice it until there's some glaring indication of it. And you often won't notice that things haven't returned to baseline when you know there was a deviation. (Observation: Long Covid is more common amongst athletes. Really? Or are they actually measuring a baseline and seeing they aren't what they used to be?)
This is purely anecdotal, but driver quality seemed to go down during the BLM protests of 2020. Kind of like the “f** the police” was being applied to traffic enforcement.
Do you know if the timing was significant? Did anything significant happen with driving stats happen in June of 2020?
Because, in my purely anecdotal experience, drivers got much much worse in early June of 2020.
Not April 2020. Not July 2020. June (and very late May) of 2020.
Part of the issue was that lots of roads were blocked. Both protestors and police were blocking roads. Large portions of downtown were shut down. Bus services were mostly canceled. And the police were very very stretched thin.
So there are reasons other than “attitude” why these protests might be affecting traffic.
But it was shocking how bad drivers got so quickly. It didn’t seem gradual.
I see quite a few searing LED headlights that don't blind me because they're angled low enough, I think the biggest problem (so to speak) is when they're on towering pickups and SUVs. I suspect there's no good way to angle the beams on those to allow their drivers to see the road without also frying the retinas of normal-sized vehicles, cyclists, and pedestrians. There also seem to be quite a few iffy aftermarket LEDs, which apparently don't always allow for much fine-tuning when they replace halogens.
LEDs are often straight swapped into housings designed for halogen bulbs. Doesn't matter if it's a tiny sports car or a huge F350 truck, replacing bulbs this way to going to throw light where it shouldn't be. For vehicles with headlights higher up from the road, they're more likely to end up shining in the eyes of other drivers, but it's still a problem of wrong bulb, wrong housing. Larger vehicles can have LEDs that have a beam pattern that casts light the appropriate area but this usually means a whole new headlight assembly instead of a bulb swap and even then, many of the aftermarket products aren't designed with property beam patterns in mind.
While there are guides available on adjusting headlights, they can only help so much when there's a bad combination of LED bulb, halogen housing, and high headlight height. Merely angling the housing downwards won't solve the problem of improper equipment combinations. Wish places like AutoZone offered free or inexpensive a beam pattern analysis service like they do with checking batteries and error codes. Lots of people don't even know their bulb swap is causing problems for others.
Wait, are you saying aftermarket LEDs are road legal in US, no strings attached?
Throughout Europe it's either straight prohibited to retrofit LEDs in place of halogen bulbs, or it requires special certification where beam patterns are checked.
Theoretically things like that are supposed to be restricted to code but in practice it seems like enforcement ended a couple of decades ago. In the 90s, I knew guys who got tickets for having window tinting which was too dark or off-brand headlights but those are incredibly common now, and it appears that DMVs stopped checking for them at inspections and the police ignore it unless they’re looking for an excuse to search the car. If you’re a white guy in a vehicle which doesn’t radiate poverty, you’re probably more likely to get hit by lightning than stopped.
The policy is probably the de facto assumption that driving is a right: the United States has been rebuilt around the need to drive everywhere and the entire system tends to implicitly assume that anything which would impede someone from driving is unconscionable unless you get to the point of a serious collision or fatality.
This is the collective genius of everyone driving around looking at their phones. The government realizes that worrying about vehicles’ mechanical state is like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
I mean, we’re a big country, we can do both. There’s also a strong correlation between people who are unsafe in one dimension making bad choices in others so things which are easy to enforce would be useful for re-establishing the idea that use of public roads is governed by laws.
It's not for the government to save money, it's to make transportation affordable for poor people. Some of the states that require inspections do it for almost free, because they delegate the task to private mechanics to do, and they charge for it.
It’s been explicitly billed as a cost savings in a few places I’ve lived (nothing is easier for a politician than bashing the DMV without mentioning that the parts voters don’t like are ensured by your legislative decisions) but if access to the poor is essential, driving is already so heavily subsidized that we could have some kind of assistance program. Most of the people benefiting from lax enforcement are not poor - those luxury trucks and tricked out cars are a middle-class hobby - and the resulting injuries aren’t free to treat.
Ehh, I feel like if I go to a poor neighborhood and I see a lot more minor inspection issues than I see lifted trucks in suburban areas. Rust perforation, bulbs out, bald tires, worn bushings, bad shocks, missing panels, etc.
"The policy is probably the de facto assumption that driving is a right: the United States has been rebuilt around the need to drive everywhere and the entire system tends to implicitly assume that anything which would impede someone from driving is unconscionable unless you get to the point of a serious collision or fatality."
They take away driver licenses all the time in the US though. DUIs being the most notable, but even getting enough tickets can result in losing your license, or having it suspended. I know at least a dozen people who lost their license at some point.
To the best of my knowledge there are no DOT legal LED bulb retrofits. There are some entire housing units but not swapping just the bulb. Whether or not your local law enforcement / inspection scheme checks for this or not is another matter
Auto repair stores sell a lot of 'offroad use only' equipment that people use on the roads. There's no effective enforcement for proper headlights. You're unlikely to be stopped because your lights are too bright or pourly aimed. Many (most?) states don't do a periodic safety inspection, and if they did, you could swap in stock headlamps for the day and then back to your super bright things.
> you could swap in stock headlamps for the day and then back to your super bright things.
That's why it is penalized by driving license cancellation in some countries. And people do get stopped for too bright headlights, because it's so easy to notice and check.
For things to be illegal the laws have to be enforced…
Sadly this is not the case with headlights and most of things in the US… unless youre a minority, then you cant even walk down the street without being worried.
There was a big NYTimes article about this a few weeks ago, and somebody in the comments complain that the bright white LED headlights were ruining the proximity sensors on their Volvo and they couldn’t install optical filters without voiding the warranty. To me this seemed weird cause I thought those things worked on IR. I’m wondering if there’s some sort of CV solution to this? I don’t see how narrow color temperature of LEDs would affect IR sensors, etc.
It’s because headlamp housings are really expensive at like $500-$2,000 for mostly plastic.
So someone just trying to make it easier to see at night cheaps out and spends a fraction for a LED bulb replacement for a few hundies, tops.
You can buy brighter halogens but they burn out much faster.
I personally suggest everyone save up for the housing and do it proper if you’re gonna do anything. At least try replacing your current halogens first because they do dim over time.
Plus halogens melt snow with all that waste heat :)
> when they're on towering pickups and SUVs. I suspect there's no good way to angle the beams on those to allow their drivers to see the road
This is one of the main reason why I hate trucks. Their "I will walk on your face" makes their high mounted lights right at the level of my normal-sized car's rear view mirrors. When approached from the rear, this is blinding enough that I can't tell the difference between a truck and someone with full beams on. Same goes when crossing them. If it's raining or foggy, those new white lights are outright dangerous.
I'm wondering if they could simply mount them lower so that it's at a normal size car.
The good news is that its now legal for the US to have LED Matrix headlights. The new Model 3 has this (among others). You get the brightness of the headlights but it blocks only the area where oncoming cars can see it.
Also, for what you said to make sense you have to do better than speculating that brighter headlights allowing people to see further is outweighed by them causing glare for oncoming drivers. It's entirely possible this is a good safety tradeoff.
Still, from a very cursory bit of reading it seems that these are designed to detect other vehicle headlights only. How about pedestrians and cyclists (or even motorcyclists)? I'm really not convinced that these sorts of technical solutions are the best way to address the problem (in the same way that forward and reverse cameras - while helpful - aren't a proper solution to good old fashioned line of sight).
The only way to block line of sight is to erect a wall in the middle of the road so I'm not sure what you want. Pointing the lights is a tradeoff between seeing in front of you and shining the light on other people who are in front of you.
There's no reason matrix headlights can't block light for any reason, the Teslas and other ADAS systems see bikers and pedestrians so I don't see why that wouldn't be possible.
Tesla's can "see" humans, cyclists, cars, etc, independent of the headlights.
It's possible that this awareness is what's used as input for the matrix headlights. Either entirely, or in coordination with detecting oncoming headlights.
I'm confused about your mention of technical solutions. What would a non-technical solution look like?
Something like ensuring that headlights are lower. I'm not against technical improvements, but I think that simple, less error-prone improvements should be given higher priority.
They don't work. All the time I see what looks like flashing as the "clever" automatic headlight tries to work out if I'm there or not. Countless times I've had someone driving behind and hogging the lane to the right of mine and have their full beams shining through my mirrors. Moving into the same lane in front of them causes their headlights to dip, but I shouldn't have to do this (especially because being in that lane is against the highway code).
It's a whole different ballgame having a pedestrian blinded vs having a driver blinded. I'm not saying it's good for a pedestrian, but we have to consider the inherent risk of that vs t hem not being seen at all because the light gives no opportunity to reflect off of them.
I haven't done a whole lot of research, but this [0] says
> matrix headlights, consist of numerous small LED elements and mirrors that can control a light beam in complex ways. This allows the lights to be more precisely aimed, illuminating what the driver needs to see without blinding other motorists, pedestrians, or cyclists.
I suggest we make headlights be no higher off the ground than 2' and adjusted downwards. If your vehicle is so tall that your lights are under the grill, that's on you. People don't need to be blinded by bright white lights at eye level.
I have used automatic highbeams in a toyota and they don’t work. They will think a sign reflected by the headlights is another car and will cut out. Just what you need to happen when you see that deer warning sign on a dark road…
I mentioned this in another thread, but why can't we regulate headlight height? Why do SUVs and pickups trucks have to have headlights that are higher than buses and real trucks?
This is a global thing, and it's started to receive more attention in the UK [0]
One thing I find blinding is those "auto-dip/intelligent" full beams which people don't dip. They simply don't work as well, but people don't bother dipping.
I accidentality forgot to dip the lights in my 2005 yellowish micra the other day past going past some traffic. In times past I'd be flashed, but I wasn't. So I carried on. Not a single flash over 12 miles. To me that suggests that normal car lights is about the same level as full beam lights from 20 years ago.
Probably makes things worse but I've taken to shining my high beams back at those blinding white LED headlights. I need something to act as a photonic barrier just so I don't drive myself off the road some nights; there aren't too many street lights in my area so my eyes will be conditioned for relative darkness and then all of the sudden somebody comes barreling around a curve with their 6000 lumen tactical blinder headlights. My headlights are just old halogens so I barely stand a chance. I doubt my high beams even pierce through their LED headlights, to be honest. Those things need a dimmer switch.
Pretty sure it is, but maybe you can tell me how I'm wrong. It's by these very principles that people into tactical guns would choose a tactical flashlight for their weapon. The higher the lumens, and more focused the beam, the less likely an assailant's tactical light will shine through yours. It's maybe not using some physics verbiage correctly, but it is basically how light works in practice. I'm confident that I'm at least correct enough to get actual concepts across in a layman's dialect, so perhaps you can correct anything I said that was accidentally misleading.
I would highly suggest you conduct the same experiment at home, as you said it's quite easy to put together the test environment. Though you can also just google "photonic barrier" and read about it without the experiment. Again, maybe I'm not using proper word choices for things, so someone with a stronger physics background looking at my words through a pedantic lens might find issues with them, which is fair. But basically, if someone shines a light at you, and you shine a light back at them, you are blinded if they hold a significantly stronger light source. You are not blinded if you are holding a significantly stronger light source. And there's an array of in-between states depending on the exact light output of each. This phenomena is referred to as a "photonic barrier." Please show a scientific study or anything that refutes this, because looking around, I find nothing. A large group of people with actual experience running these experiments all had the same observation about photonic barriers, and you just saying "do the experiment at home" doesn't negate them or their observations at all. But perhaps you're on the verge of a break through if you know something we all don't. And I'll go so far as to say that it's possible that you do, but so far my observations have been the same as theirs. In my opinion, that puts the onus on you, not me, to make your case.
Photonic barrier doesn't seem to be a widely standardized or accepted term. The closest to what you're referring to seems to be something to attenuate effect of light on night vision equipment.
But back on topic: light cannot block light. First result on google. https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/456409/can-a-lig.... Though I'll concede you a point in that, if their pupils are contracted more because they're using a brighter source, then the impact of your beam on them will be lower than theirs on you. That being said, I'd wager to say that the difference would probably be marginal, given that we're talking about light reflected at night (which would leave you with a pretty big dilation in both LED and halogen) vs. looking directly at a light source.
IMO at night the white LED lights aren't the problem; the people who insist on driving everywhere with their high beams on all the time are. Maybe it's just me but it seems that more people than ever are driving with their brights on - and those people are by and large driving vehicles with halogen lights.
I’ve noticed a fair number of these cases where you can tell one of their low beams is burned out. “I can’t see with my half a low beam, and rather than fixing it, I’ll just turn on my high beams. There, I fixed it.”
I’ve also noticed this consistently in recent years.
Literally cannot drive 10 minutes without encountering a vehicle with high beams on (can tell by the location, not brightness alone). I’m talking about busy urban areas, not the boonies.
This happens far more often than cars with no headlights (which used to be more common).
At first I thought this was some sort of signal for drugs/etc. Of course that makes little sense…
However, in reality it’s probably worse than that…
I think some of those people just don't have their headlights adjusted properly.
I have noticed that in the last 5 years more and more people just don't know that your headlights are supposed to be pointed downward and not straight ahead.
This becomes more obvious when you look at bikes, the amount of bikes I have seen with their blinding LEDs pointed straight ahead 'because they want to be seen by cars" is insane. They don't understand that you don't need to be directly in the beam to see a light source.
What I thought was common knowledge seems to have been disappeared
Welcome to the generation of drivers that have never switched their headlights on or off ever. They'll drive in inclement weather with no lights because it's still bright enough to not trigger the dusk sensor. They'll sit on the side of their road with headlights shining fully for no reason. They basically don't know the lights are there. Why would they? Never used the road outside of a car. Never known any different.
Right now, emergency vehicles seem to be in some competition to get the most and brightest lights on them. It's near impossible to see while driving past them.
And yes, you should be driving past them slowly, but with everyone slowing down at once, that presents its own problem of trying to avoid slow downs and merges while being blinded by the emergency vehicles.
Or being blinded by them in a parking lot.
Lately, I've noticed a few turning from flashing into solid light, which is somewhat better.
In the early-2010s I was driving a budget car from 1995 (a ford escort). When white LEDs became the norm, I’d often be in the situation of trying to drive into the shadow cast by my car from the headlights of the other car.
I’m still shocked that regulations haven’t put lower limits on headlight brightness.
Truly ridiculous. When one of these cars is behind me, I get a shadow _in front_ of my car, that's how bright their lights are (my headlights are clean).
This is a regulatory issue. There are far better lighting used in EU and from the same auto manufacturers. They have pushed for these in the US but the regulations are slow.
Agreed, and also: vehicle size itself. As vehicles get bigger, people feel less safe sharing the road with them in their sub-compacts, so now they buy crossovers, which themselves grow with every generation. It becomes an arms race in which the environment and anyone not trying to get around not in a big metal box is the inevitable loser.
> the one I find personally annoying the most are white LED headlights
Those are the worst. Actually, I take that back. There was a trend a number of years ago of people putting in these super-bright headlamps that were usually tinted purple/blue. Those were the worst -- cars using them were basically telling oncoming traffic "I hate you and hope you die". But, at least in my state, they were made illegal.
But those superbright LED headlamps come pretty close.
Even with normal lights, many Americans don't seem to know or care about dipping headlights when appropriate. At least that's my observation as a kiwi been here for about 23 years. I get that some (many?) modern cars are supposed to do it automatically so maybe that's mine or my car's age talking but even 20 years ago I seldom saw anyone actively dip their lights when approaching on a mostly empty road.
Yeah, it's a problem but it's made worse by the fact that on a lot of cars there doesn't seem to be a huge difference between high or low beam in terms of brightness to oncoming traffic. I've seen cars dip their lights, but if you blinked you would have missed the difference. I used to be proactive about dipping my lights when I knew there was oncoming traffic but I learned that if I did that, the oncoming driver almost never dipped their high beams so now I make sure that they have a clear view of my lights before I dip them and it has significantly increased the reciprocation because I guess it signals to them that I did indeed dip my lights.
OTOH, I get flashed by other drivers often when I don't have my high beams on and I don't have after market lights. Ironically, it seems to happen less when I drive the car with the brightest lights (Land Rover LR3 HSE) because it seems to shape the beam best to keep the light out of the opposing lane. It happens the most when I drive my 2005 Mustang which by far IMO has the poorest road illumination of any vehicle I have access to drive.
I and people started noticing this like 7 years ago, glad that people start complaining it now. It's a combination of more aggressive lighting, bright LED, and taller vehicles.
Looking directly in my mirror now feels like a hazard rather than helpful.
The retrofits (probably completely unapproved chinese-made garbage purchased on Amazon) are awful, but the stock LED lighting on newer cars is too bright as well. Even if it's normally directed down, if you're approaching a car as it crests a hill you'll get a dazzling blinding flash. Older halogen headlights don't do this.
The reason is that cops dramatically reduced the amount of traffic enforcement they engaged in ( https://twitter.com/hknightsf/status/1537100042623848448?t=7... ). Turns out they don't want to risk a murder charge for $65k/year; I don't blame them, I wouldn't do it for $1m. Less traffic cops = more traffic crime.
I think this can be addressed by using speed cameras instead of chase cars to enforce speed limits. Tint and lights can be covered by periodic vehicle inspection. These are fairly common elsewhere, but the US chooses cops that give chase.
There’s no real evidence that that enforcement leads to lower accident rates. Most people simply drive at whatever speed they think is safe and the ones who think that’s a faster speed find the tickets worth it.
This happened at the same time screen's got distracting, so any correlation is likely coincidence.
Similarly the United States once introduced a maximum highway speed that lowered highway speeds everywhere. Fatality rates went down, but it turned out to be unrelated, Similarly the United States once introduced a maximum highway speed that lowered highway speeds everywhere. Accident rates went down, they just happened to do it at the same time legislators were responding to the unsafe at any speed era. They lifted the maximum speed, speeds went up, and rates of accidents and fatalities kept going down.
While interesting, that is not correlating traffic laws with reduction of accidents generally, it is saying that using short term bursts of “ highly visible enforcement” does. that’s well and good and I suppose perhaps that has been curtailed also due to police staffing shortages, I don’t know that there is any evidence that the pre-pandemic background level of enforcement really had much effect.
And from what I understand the level of accidents we are seeing now is basically on trend with what you would have expected if you just followed the trendline forward from 2019, even if the pandemic never happened.
yeah, because all this enforcement is somehow happening stealthily. All these cops pulling people over but flipping on their ninja switch so no one sees them.
No, but generally they do it so infrequently that you bake it into the cost of driving if you’re a frequent speeder. For many years I just considered it a cost of driving, but if I knew a lot of cops were enforcing in one area (like when I got 3 speeding tickets in under 24 hours in the same stretch of road) I’d slow down there.
There are known places where cops pull people over a lot and you’ll see people go from 15 over to driving the speed limit there, then accelerate right after.
They need equipment that makes objective measurements. Noise tickets and tint tickets are rarely issued anymore due to the social context of those most likely to attract such tickets. Police must use noise meters deployed at a standard distance from the source to issue tickets. That a vehicle's exhaust or radio is annoying isn't enough in the current environment. Same for tint, where a piece of equipment is required to determine a vehicle's light passthrough on its tinted windows. All of this equipment exists and most police have access to it but few want to bother with the hassle and the current social context even with objective measures. Headlights are just another one of these issues where being proactive creates too many troubles. They let the insurance companies fight it out in court over if an accident was caused by improper equipment.
The last part of your argument makes no sense. Even from a cynical view, it makes no sense for the police to condone something that inhibits their own operations by blinding them with light.
You can’t measure brightness objectively? You are right, though, about “social context”. If glaring headlights becomes a black-coded thing, the problem will get solved.
I was being flippant. Of course, I know that if superbright headlamps were identified as belonging to another "social context", that wouldn't solve the problem. It'd just lead to selective enforcement, the "right" people being let off with a warning, etc.
Again, is that what you see is happening with tinted windows and loud cars? We must live on different planets because the only thing I see happening with that is a whole lot of nothing. People just drive with tinted windows and loud cars, nothing happens, and the annoying/harmful circumstances of this just continue indefinitely.
True, because it's a characteristic of the privileged now. We both seem to agree that these laws are poorly enforced, but I'm saying that a bunch of these laws, whether headlights or tints, are not for safety but a pretext to stop people who weren't in a privileged class.
The whole point of the annual inspection the state makes me get is shit like window tints, and that's where it should be checked. I don't have a ready solution for aftermarket headlights (especially as I support right to repair), but a start would be regulating what the manufacturers do so it's not a safety issue by default.
In what way is it a characteristic of the privileged to use incorrectly aimed white/blue headlights, or to drive a loud car? There would be some small amount of argument for having tinted windows but in general fixing those things (removing them) costs money, not the other way around.
The problem is too far gone at this point to stop it via random stops. That would have been a good thing to do about 6 years ago. At this point the only solution is recalls and manufacturer regulation.
I’ve had police cruisers (Escalade/SUV) high-beam me from the oncoming lane and blind me for the last 50 feet because they didn’t like my (factory stock) low beams. It’s that normalized of a thing / that little of an issue here.
The more light tends to the blue end of the spectrum, the more it scatters in atmosphere. There's a reason the old timey fog lights were yellow/orange.
Add overly bright lights to the list of unenforced laws in the US along with speeding, excess noise (e.g. modified exhaust), and pollution (e.g. "rolling coal").
Its truly a tragedy that your eyes must be plagued by such a thing, a tragedy of the commons at that, its such an issue that I have never heard anyone complain about it before you.
Of course, this isnt a problem in countries that dont have such asinine rules around headlights, where an actual modern headlight can identify cars/pedestrians and selectively not cast light directly at them.
You are probably right though, forget about how these noble regulations have kept us in the automotive stone age, we have a big stick so lets use it! Its not like the government is going to get out there and fix the roads anyways, all they seem interested in is stealing money.
Car accidents are going up in part because some police departments simply do not have the budget to do traffic enforcement. I lived in a big city, and the police didn't have the manpower to fight crime and traffic enforcement. As a result, fatal car crashes were very common.
LED lights aren't a problem if they are adjusted properly.
Car insurance in California has price caps. And as many of us know from econ 101, price caps lead to shortages.
The California auto insurance market basically failed in December and it is now almost impossible to get auto insurance with less than 3 weeks lead time. Most of them have closed their brick and mortar locations and do not accept online applications.
Of course, California’s solution to a shortage is to try to mandate supply.
quote from commissioner that refused to allow price increases for 4 years:
> “These alleged passive-aggressive tactics by insurance companies to slow down drivers’ access to coverage are unacceptable, dangerous, and will not be tolerated,” Lara said in a press release Thursday.
This has become a significant political issue in most states, and auto insurance is regulated at the state level. Many insurance commissioners are elected positions, and if not they are closely tied to the governor. No one wants premiums to go up during inflation, so there is government pressure like never before.
What happened is that with the shutdowns, profits went from 2-3% to 20-30%. Some of that money was given back to consumers, but most went into an absolutely insane soft market where every carrier paid more than they ever had to acquire any driver they could.
This led to a lot of carriers having drivers on their books that they really didn't know how to price correctly. Everyone realized at roughly the same time that they had screwed up more than usual - and that was when drivers got back on the roads. Suddenly frequency and severity of accidents were up to historic levels because everyone forgot how to drive and is driving ANGRY.
So there's a double whammy, it's drivers they haven't insured before on the one hand and the drivers they do know how to price changing their behavior en-masse. So we've gone from once-in-a-lifetime industry profits to massive losses. For the first time, when the carriers tell the government the price is unsustainable they actually mean it. Hence the California shut downs - carriers are TRULY taking a loss on most policies they write and are trying to shut down new customer operations as much as legally possible. You'll notice a surprising lack of auto insurance ads on tv compared to 3-4 years ago.
Progressive's underwriters are so far ahead of everybody that they got a lot of their price changes submitted before everyone (the other carriers and the government) figured out what was going on. You can see that in many states where the prices are public, in an incomprehensible data format. So they have been one of the only carriers still getting new customers.
It's basically been a state-by-state showdown now between state insurance commissioners and carriers, and the commissioners are starting to give in. Premiums were up almost 20% last year nation-wide and it's only going up.
As a Brit the fact this position exists AND is elected is bonkers to me. It seems like the US talks about a free market but has done everything possible to add voting and red tape all over the place.
That is when you realize "free market" means "our buddies at the top can charge whatever they want, and you may not compete". Same with healthcare, telecom, financial services...
state mandated insurance shouldn't be legal unless either the states or the insurance companies themselves carry the entire risk.
Car Insurance in the US has turned into a tax on the poor.
I don't mind the idea of insurance, but I do mind the idea of insurance companies trying to lessen their risk by getting the state to mandate everyone needs to pay for it. If someone is paying insurance and the other driver doesn't carry insurance and doesn't have the money to sue for it, that's the risk of doing business as an insurance company.
It's regulatory capture, plain and simple.
And lets not even get started on police enforcing it and writing tickets or impounding vehicles of people who don't have insurance. Who doesn't carry insurance? Those who cannot afford to. The state is literally causing harm here.
Whether the other car has insurance or not is irrelevant to you. Your car insurance is going to pay or not pay based upon their internal policies.
What the other car having insurance does is give someone for _your_ insurance company to sue to recoup their money. Most individuals aren't going to be worth sue-ing, but other insurance companies will be. And most major insurance companies are going to have in-place agreements so that litigation isn't actually necessary (because it's more expensive).
The other vehicle being covered by insurance is absolutely _no_ guarantee that _your_ insurance won't decide to declare the vehicle a total loss. I myself drive a 2004 corolla that's had a salvage title since the mid-2000's due to someone hitting me. I chose to "buy" the salvage title from them and that vehicle has been 100% solid. They scrapped it because they didn't want to fix the body damage.
The insurance have had their cake and are eating it too. They're not required to cover you, but you're required to be covered.
I experienced once a minor car accident where another driver did some damage to my car (well, and his). There where no courts involved. Just one insurance company retrieving a bill (not mine because it was not my fault as the other driver and me agreed on (and used a form to confirm that) and paying the bill.
And my point is less about _who_ paid, but more about that _anybody_ pays. If two people without insurance hit each other, who's going to pay the bills?
if two uninsured people hit each other then they sue each other, they come up with an agreement on money exchange, or they both go about their business and pretend it didn't happen.
at least in the US, the only difference between two uninsured people hitting each other and one or both having insurance is the party doing the suing changes.
of course, injuries complicate matters but it's all roughly the same. Someone has to pay, which likely means litigation without a gentlemans agreement.
But if someone doesn't have insurance what's the chances that you suing that person is going to actually recoop your money? right, probably not going to happen. That makes it a business risk for insurance companies that end up having to fix their customers car but not being able to recoop that money. So they convinced law makers to require insurance so the chances of that happening are far less.
^ to better explain what I was trying to say before.
People will pay for uninsured motorist protection and _under_ insured motorist protection. under insured typically means an injury happened but the other persons insurance policy doesn't cover injury (liability) or the medical bills exceed what they do cover.
Think about that racket. They insure you but don't want to insure you without being able to fully recoop their money so they charge YOU to cover the case where the other drivers insurance won't cover it all.
it's a frickin' racket. If it's required by law it needs to be covered by the state or the insurance companies themselves need to be required to cover it. Anything else and it causes undue harm to everyone, most especially those who cannot afford insurance in the first place.
Definitely agree, and I also firmly believe that each property should get exactly one FEMA bailout ever. If you live in Florida and your house gets destroyed by a hurricane, FEMA should pay you for it. If you choose to rebuild on that exact same spot, and your house gets destroyed by a hurricane, you should get exactly bupkis.
This should carry with the property address - the next person who buys it should have to sign a form acknowledging that they aren't going to get a FEMA bailout if it gets destroyed.
Lots of Florida Republicans out there who complain about welfare but rely on some of the biggest welfare checks that get written to repair their homes because of the absolutely foreseeable results of their choices.
This is what building to code should address. If a house is built to a specific hurricane code, and is destroyed due to other reasons (a hypercane, for instance), then let insurance cover this and mandate rebuilding to an even higher standard.
: Dozens of modest homes along the Big Bend coast were heavily damaged in the floodwaters, but interspersed among the debris were residences left relatively unscathed, all because they were built elevated on stilts.
I could be mistaken on this, as I don't live in an area where such things are common, but my understanding is the issue is that if your house is destroyed by say, a hurricane, no insurance provider (or fema) gives you a bag of cash and says "move", reimbursement is predicated on rebuilding the structure where it stood.
Insurance makes you whole, not the property. You are perfectly welcome to pocket the cash. Although if you have a mortgage, you do have an additional obligation to maintain the value of their collateral or pay off the loan.
If you have replacement cost coverage (as opposed to actual cash value (=depreciated value) you typically have to use it to reconstruct the home if you want the full amount. This is typical.
"We will pay no more than the actual cash value of the damage until actual repair or replacement is complete." [0]
Not all coastal areas have the same strict building code. Homes not built with concrete exteriors and hurricane tie down anchors have a strong risk of being demolished in strong hurricanes. South Florida revamped their building codes after Hurricane Andrew wiped many of the homes and infrastructure in the 90s. However, not all coastal houses in northern Florida or on the gulf are built with concrete or on stilt foundations.
A secondary threat is prolonged flooding which can submerge entire homes with salt water for weeks at a time. That's very costly and not preventable with existing homes in flood zones.
This I never understood. Other countries didn't need building codes mandating such things - people always built houses that were intended to stand for many decades and that are suited to their local environment[1].
It defies comprehension that despite being somewhat poorer and enjoying milder weather, Europeans built their houses from brick and mortar while the US insists on erecting cheap cardboard boxes that even if they're not blown away or flooded, will probably rot away within the lifetime of their owner.
The US used to build using brick and mortar. It was abandoned because it was unsafe, most of those buildings were destroyed by environmental hazards that Europe does not have. Consequently, most housing in the US for the last century or more primarily uses wood, which does survive the hazards endemic to the US.
In most of the US, only wood or steel frame construction is safe. Wood houses last centuries.
Wood is used primarily where wood is plentiful. Northern Europe uses wood to build, especially Finland. Japan uses wood to build, although they import from Canada these days. Australia also uses lots of wood.
Wood holds up better in earth quakes and tornadoes than brick, but you could probably build safe buildings with bricks in the USA, they would just cost more and require similar or more maintenance.
The earthquake retrofits for brick buildings seem to essentially install a structural steel frame to which the brick is fastened. At which point it is not really a brick structure but a steel one. New “brick” construction is almost entirely brick facades over a steel/wood frame.
While steel-reinforced masonry can be made safe, it isn’t obvious to me that actual brick-and-mortar can be.
The design problem is more complex than you are portraying. I don’t need my house to last for 200 years if it comes at the cost of not being able to modify it (walls, windows, openings, floor plan) as infrastructure needs change.
Do you notice the awkward protruding wall plug, seemingly used by the lamp, on the photo you linked? It doesn’t have to be that way - I have put a receptacle or switch in to the perfect spot as a one day project many times, and we have reworked wall layout in several places.
And, the photo looks like it has single pane windows with snow outside? They might not have had functional multi pane windows when the home was built?
Needs and technical capabilities change, and a design that is less committed to mass walls has important flexibility.
> And, the photo looks like it has single pane windows with snow outside? They might not have had functional multi pane windows when the home was built?
That's water outside. After a storm. That's a waterproof house in a coastal area of Germany that tends to flood during storms.
Needless to say those windows are designed with another problem than just insulation in mind. I can't tell you whether they're multi pane. All I know is that they open towards the outside rather than the inside for obvious reasons.
I did not use the word "wood" once. I don't think houses with walls you can kick holes in qualify as wood houses. They're closer to cardboard than wood.
Anyways, the point isn't the materials - the point is that the houses are fundamentally unsuited to the environment they are in.
Very few houses are a total loss in the average hurricane. Indeed during most hurricanes there’s just lots of minor damage that you might see during a particularly bad thunderstorm, and people even continue to go to work.
Major hurricanes are a different story. But even then total loss is relatively rare except for storm surges unless you’re in the path of the eyewall.
There is no construction that can withstand storm surge, which is the biggest and most destructive hurricane impact. Even if the structure is intact, everything has to be ripped out of it. Most of them do survive winds short of tornadoes, though roof damage is very typical for major hurricanes and tree falls can cause problems.
We’re talking about the wind blowing up to 30ft of saltwater _miles_ inland. Given the comparative rarity of a major hurricane in any given geographical location and the oddities that determine the storm surge and where it comes in, the damage usually is worst in places it’s never flooded before - because places where it has are indeed required to build higher.
Are you just constantly kicking your walls or something? I don't get why it's such a big issue. I've only accidentally made a hole in a wall once and it was about an hour fix.
Drywall walls have never been a problem for me, in fact they're pretty nice. It's really easy to modify the walls. Need to do a new Ethernet run? Want another power run? Feel like moving a lightswitch? Install new access points on the ceiling or change up light fixtures? Easy to drop down the void and cut a new box. Want to redesign the layout of a room? Often not a problem, easy to change.
Meanwhile a concrete wall is a massive pain to modify. You get the runs you get. Good luck redoing a layout. Say goodbye to having good wireless coverage.
Even in places with lots of hurricanes the odds of the house "blowing away and falling over" are pretty slim. I speak as a person who grew up in a place that gets a lot of hurricanes. The biggest impact is usually flooding and roof damage.And now, once again, as someone living in a highly tornado-probe area, it's mostly roofing damage. The odds the tornado will destroy your house is still incredibly slim.
So do you spend significantly more for construction for a failure that's still extremely unlikely? Y'all are acting like every time there's a thunderstorm all the houses just blow down. You're entirely disconnected from reality of the actual risks versus massive increase in costs.
If a house is destroyed by any form of reasonably common widespread disaster it becomes illegal to build anything on that lot that would likewise be destroyed. You can rebuild after the hurricane, you must build a house that will stand up to a hurricane. (Yes, it can be done.)
I wouldn't apply this to flukes--your town does a Tunguska there's no reason to require asteroid-safe houses.
I would also make an exception for things which by their nature must be in the line of fire--such things must never be permanent habitation and can't have community-rate insurance against whatever happened to them.
A business can rebuild it's beach cabanas but would have to go to Lloyd's if they wanted insurance.
On the downside, when the next disaster hit and FEMA didn't cover it, it would look like FEMA doesn't want to cover low income housing, which isn't a good look.
But there does need to be some mechanism to convince people to abandon homes and towns that are not appropriate given environmental conditions. And it needs to be done carefully so it's not like kick all the poor people out, do some civil engineering that never happened while it was a poor community, then sell the land to developers who make a huge profit.
That is basically what governments are for, collective actions that make land more valuable: roads, schools, police, fire departments, and civil engineering projects.
Its quite unfortunate because it would be a great opportunity to accurate price the risk to encourage better building standards and fireproofing. In reality we don't need people to move to greatly reduce the risk.
In many wildfire events homes burn because brush/scrub burns all the way up to the house and catches the siding on fire, or because embers land on the roof or enter soffits and start a fire that way. These things are really easily improved. Insurance could require fireproof siding, no bushes/plants right up against the house, fire screens on roof/soffit vents, and fireproof roofing. Those changes alone would decrease the number of houses that burn in a fire.
Obviously there are some areas where the landscape, wind patterns, and nature of trees means if it burns it will rage and everything's gonna go up no matter what you do. But that isn't everywhere.
What I don't know right now: how much does CA law allow insurers to price this kind of risk? Is it a matter of law not allowing them to send accurate price signals? I can believe this is the case. I also don't know if CA law allows them to only sell in certain areas... there's no practical wildfire risk to the Bay Area for example so why stop writing policies there?
Or are insurers going into knee-jerk mode or even using this as an opportunity to goose profits (knowing that wildfires wax and wane)? I can also believe this is happening.
Like I said: it is unfortunate that CA law, insurance companies, or both are not using this as an opportunity to improve fire survivability in rural areas.
Much of the Bay Area is urban and suburban, with very little chance of a wildfire ever threatening those homes. Why stop writing policies in those areas?
If you recursively got everyone in dangerous areas to move, no one would live in California. If you live in a population center in California, the only reason why you aren't prone to wildfires is because of the people living around you that are.
It's a scenario where everyone paying the same actually makes sense. Your insurance is that others are accepting the risk of losing all their personal belongings or even their lives - even if insurance will cover them financially.
for long standing communities, ideally the government would offer voluntary buyouts if they can’t find someone willing to cover the insurance premium.
they already do the same in flooding zones.
but yes, people who live in fire-prone areas may take a loss. encouraging people to anticipate these losses is part of a functioning market. if they can live somewhere risky without financial risk, we only encourage future people to do the same.
As for those refunds, Californians are still waiting for about $3.5 billion of the $5.5 billion that Consumer Watchdog estimates policyholders are owed for pandemic-era overcharges.
The matter still hasn’t been fully resolved, say the state’s insurance officials, who argue that rate hike decisions aren’t interfering with unfulfilled rebates.
“These are separate processes,” said Michael Soller
TBF, that’s overcharged in a very insurance-specific sense, not a mustache-twirling fraud sense. Effectively they didn’t adjust prices fast enough to the actual changes in risk, which on the whole seems like something best dealt with ex post, not ex ante.
> Effectively they didn’t adjust prices fast enough to the actual changes in risk, which on the whole seems like something best dealt with ex post, not ex ante.
If the insurers could have it their way, they wouldn't have to adjust at all (for overcharging), while avoiding undercharging ahead of time. Oversight is necessary to counter misaligned incentives.
Right, this is a reasonable compromise between stability/profitability of risk-buyers and fair pricing for risk-sellers. Prices are unconstrained at transaction, but outsized profits can be clawed back.
How would they adjust prices for policies already sold and used, in the event the price for those policies was too low? Issuing refunds after the fact works in a way that issuing bills does not.
It is, it is just an adjustment in the cost of business (either positive or negative depending on whether it's coming from the business or the customer).
I live in one of the "any other states" (Washington) without a car quite comfortably. A lot of us can't or don't drive. It's nice to not have to put up with car insurance companies.
I'm impressed--no sarcasm. Would you mind giving us a glimpse of your day-to-day?Except in Seattle near downtown it seems like there would be tons of challenges.
I'm in a suburbia (not rural), but we have more of a trail system than a lot of other places in the United States. There really isn't much I can't do on a bicycle, and when I absolutely need to transport something myself, which happens maybe once every couple of years, I've rented a truck for a few hours. My e-bike does most of the heavy lifting when my total travel distance is over 15 miles and I need to transport stuff.
I get up, check the weather, throw on clothes for whatever's happening, jump on the e-bike, buzz half a mile down to a gravel trail that runs north-south through my city, and go do what I need to do. I use panniers mounted on a rear rack to hold stuff. For groceries I tend to go to Trader Joe's which is in a shopping area off the trail about a mile and a half from my house. Hardware stuff I get from a family-owned place that's 7 miles away, 5 miles of which is on trails. Electronics is from a store that's sort of like Radio Shack on steroids that's about a mile from the trail system, but that's more like 10 miles each way. I don't need to go there often. Work is 10 miles away, 9 miles of which is on a trail. I park in a bike cage, and there is a locker room with showers.
E-bikes certainly make it more accessible and I would highly recommend one if you are trying to drive less. Myself and many of my friends commute primarily by bicycle and get around fine on regular bikes, but our city is small and commutes are less than 5 miles.
I just bought a perfectly usable Class 2 e-bike with a rack for $1,100. I have several regular meat-powered bicycles too. Which one I take depends on how I feel. Sometimes I'm just not up for pedaling my way through a 20 mile round-trip errand and will put on my lithium legs.
It is pretty straightforward. My wife and I live in a condominium unit just east of the University District. We take the bus or walk everywhere. I'm sad the Safeway has closed, but we have easy bus access to groceries at QFC, the massive Magnuson Park, the smaller Matthews Beach park, and a short hop to the train.
I am fortunate to be able to work from home most days. I work for a medical group and we have doctor's offices across the city and King County. I can reach all but one by a one or two bus trip when I need to go, which is rare. We have friends who have moved up to Everett and it's a two bus trip to go all of the way from Magnuson Park to downtown Everett.
The only "hard" trip is to go see one of our kids who has since moved to Tacoma. We try to time it when the Sounder is running (a few mid-day trips would be great) or take Cascades if we feel like splurging.
As a car lite person, this comment is condescending. As much as I'd love if it were the case, efficient public transit is not a thing in most parts of the country. A car is a necessity. California needs to greatly expand transit or figure something out quick.
Usually telling someone to 'just move' is pretty rude. People have reasons to stay in the places they're at. Public transit is not viable in California at all. It's impossible. As someone who did 'just move' (and to the PNW, where transit is shockingly better), I recognize that this is certainly not a viable option for most people.
What a weird take. If you do live in WA, you’re well aware of just how rural WA is. You full well know public transportation isn’t a viable option. You should also know that Seattle’s public transportation isn’t something to write home about. And you’re fully aware that commutes of >30 minutes are not uncommon, in part die to how unaffordable the greater Puget Sound if.
A car is a basic necessity of life for the vast majority of Washingtonians. Congratulations on being the vast, vast minority.
> You full well know public transportation isn’t a viable option.
I do not know this. I have over a thousand taps of my ORCA card in 2023. My wife has more. We have been as far north as Bellingham and as far south as Portland on transit. We attended the wedding of a friend's kid in Yakima by riding transit to Issaquah and taking Greyhound from there.
I don't appreciate being told that my actual, lived experience "isn't viable", especially when I know several other people who do it just the same as me. Not all of us can or want to drive. This is even more true as people get older.
> And you’re fully aware that commutes of >30 minutes are not uncommon, in part die to how unaffordable the greater Puget Sound
According to AAA, the annual cost of owning a car is $12,000. We don't spend that money, so we can afford to live closer-in where transit is better. I am not here to judge people who choose to move far away but I haven't done it and I won't. But even if I did, I could just move to where I already have acquaintances in Lynnwood or Redmond or Renton or Burien and take the bus just the same as I do today.
> I do not know this. I have over a thousand taps of my ORCA card in 2023.
You're in the vast minority who can take the Sounder, etc. Your scenario does not reflect the reality for the vast majority of Washingtonians.
> I don't appreciate being told that my actual, lived experience "isn't viable"
Yet, it isn't viable for the vast majority of Washingtonians.
> We don't spend that money, so we can afford to live closer-in where transit is better.
Congrats on being wealthy enough to live in a place where ORCA has any value. Most Washingtonians do not.
You do, in fact, live in a transportation bubble. You need to acknowledge that your transportation bubble is not viable for the vast majority of Washingtonians, so your premise that being car-free is do-able in Washington simply is not a reality for millions of Washingtonians.
This is exactly the same blinders we see on r/seattle. Those who call for elimination of cars are privileged enough to live in Seattle and don't seem to recognize other's do not live in Seattle (or commute to Seattle from where most public transportation is not effective, viable, or possible).
Building your life around transit means making choices. Building your life around a car means making choices too. If the quoted TCO of owning a car at $12,000/year is accurate, moving some of that spending to housing could make transit friendly housing more viable.
I don't think this poster was calling for removal of cars or whatever, just pointing out that it's possible to build your life without them. For at least some people.
There's certainly tradeoffs. Where I live, I could do many things with transit, but hours of operation are very limited, and direct routes are very limited. Sometimes, I can take transit to the airport and it makes sense, but on my most recent trip, getting to the airport would have been very stressful as the ferry canceled most of the morning runs on short notice and AFAIK, there's no reasonable alternative route without a private car. On the way home, there's no transit on my side of the ferry on a Sunday, and even if there was, it ends hours before I get there. If I needed to build my life around transit, I'd need to fly only during limited hours and not have any scheduling mishaps, spend nights in hotels a ferry away from my home, or move to a more transit accessible home.
At the same time, I don't complain that NYC doesn't accomadate my life built around cars. I choose a life built around cars, and so I avoid built up urban areas whenever possible. I hate paying for parking, so going into the city needs a good reason, and I would never want to live there.
Some people, when you say “you know it’s possible to get by without a car”, take it as a personal affront. No amount of evidence is sufficient. Any evidence provided is disregarded as “sure maybe for you but real people can’t possibly live in such a weird way”.
The person you’re responding to is one of those people. Don’t waste your time.
But WA has 7.7M people of whom 3.9M live in Snohomish, King, or Pierce counties.
I agree a majority needs cars, but it’s hardly overwhelming — and worth remembering that half of people live in a narrow, urban bubble. A lot of WA’s political strife is caused by this.
What an incredibly weird take that makes a lot of assumptions. For reference, I live in Seattle now, no car.
Prior to Seattle, I also lived in Texas and Virginia. Also no car. I moved to VA being unable to afford a car or insurance.
In many situations it is doable. But it requires restructuring how you life and where you live. I spend more on rent, but make up for that by not paying for gas, insurance or the many other small fees that add up. People get trapped into this idea that they need a car that they never consider the costs it has.
Most WA residents live along the I-5 corridor in cities or surrounding suburbs, not in the rural parts. GP specifically lives in Seattle city limits, like about 10% of WA residents.
> Those who call for elimination of cars are privileged enough to live in Seattle and don't seem to recognize other's do not live in Seattle (or commute to Seattle from where most public transportation is not effective, viable, or possible).
I believe you fail to recognize that a lot of people who don't drive don't live in Seattle. Whether or not someone drives is not always by their choice. I have friends who are physically incapable of driving, yet because drivers tend to outvote and outweigh non-drivers politically, those friends are denied the transit service they would really like to have. And even when it is by choice, nothing says that Yakima or Spokane or Port Angeles can't have transit; most of them do!
I live in Seattle. My wife and I were born here and we will hopefully die and be buried here. It is our home. I have lived through decades of transit that would make a New Yorker howl in peril. It was not so long ago that our idea of a frequent bus route was every half hour, and the light rail (that began running after both of my children were born) stopped in downtown and at 11pm.
Seattle residents aren't a monolithic bloc but, generally, our push for fewer cars is because cars, and especially those cars driven in from places that do have quality transit to reach the city, cause a lot of problems for people outside of those cars. I really, really want to make it to retirement without being run over by someone driving into town who's late for a sporting event.
> Yet, it isn't viable for the vast majority of Washingtonians.
Not driving can be viable! It is viable, if not as convenient, in places you wouldn't think and might even consider are "too rural" or "too spread out." The fact remains, there are a lot of us in Washington who don't drive and, bluntly, I don't appreciate us being insulted or accused of having an excess of privilege or living in a bubble.
There may well come a day when you are not physically able to drive and I wish very much for you to have a robust transit and sidewalk and low-speed city setup that enables you to have independence and access throughout all of your days.
Yes. So it feels. In particular the 1989 earthquake and the years that followed were put to good use removing freeways in the SF Bay Area (and not replacing them - nobody complains that the Embarcadero shorefront freeway should be removed but it's fair to object to the lack of substitution) - And abandoning the idea of elevated and double-decker freeways instead of doubling-up wherever else it could be. Highway 85 completed shortly after that (but was in the works long before that). By contrast, it feels Los Angeles continued on an optimistic path, when the Bay Area turned back (and for example fought new housing as much as possible). This is also the time San Francisco turned against visitors and businesses - working to discourage people from visiting as much as possible. And then turned on its own inhabitants.
I'd say maybe a third of people I know don't have cars. In America. That's not a "basic necessity of life", especially when we're talking about well-developed regions like the west coast.
Even in large cities in California, it really depends on how much time you want to or can afford to waste on public transit.
Specific cases do work - or at least work better than the car-owning alternatives, for example major transit directions for short-ish distances in San Francisco. If your life revolves around a few of these, you are doing pretty well without a car ... and you still can't escape from that area without one. A significant additional "sweet spot" zone is where car usage has been made - deliberately and assiduously - unbearable. The choice is then about a lesser aggravation, rather then desirable service. And so we get the quality of life we deserve, and that's not great.
Nobody is arguing that YOU should own a car. If you are happy without one that's great and carry on. But that's rather specific situation.
fwiw Californian cities have some of the worst public transit of major metros that I have seen
like the Muni is cute and all but it’s a joke compared to the east coast systems i grew up with (wmata, mbta, nyc mta) many of which are in smaller cities.
Cause labor is cheaper in Nevada, people drive cheaper cars and there are less cars in Nevada on the road in general, so you are less likely to get into an accident. These are just the top reasons off the top of my head.
I live in California and my latest insurance quote was $7k for the year for a family of four, with no accidents or tickets. If this is cheap I'd hate to know what expensive is.
I have two cars, an outback and a golf. Yes we do have two teenage drivers which of course is expensive, but they've had no accidents or tickets. We drive maybe 20K miles per year all together.
Not just California. In Arizona, I was looking to shop around insurance recently and couldn’t even get a quote from my home insurer (who also recently raised my rates, mind you).
Last week I switched car insurance company and coverage was offered in the literal same day, all over the phone. In comparison, three weeks seems like an eternity.
three weeks of spotty or delayed attendance can lose one a job
most of the people with the option to remote work are working decent white-collar jobs, so add this to the long tally of policies that are designed to help but only hurt the poor
> three weeks of spotty or delayed attendance can lose one a job
Under what conditions will a person have a job that they are expected to be at, but not have car insurance to get there? I'm sure this exists (for instance for someone whose policy is revoked for DUI or accident or whatever), but in many cases I assume public transit or a three week wait to start is acceptable.
Just about everywhere in America requires you to drive to work. If you can't drive for 3 weeks, you can't work for 3 weeks. Do you see why this might be a problem
Grace and Insurance really don't belong in the same sentence. They are stingy enough to deal with as is, even when you have photo evidence of no fault in the crash.
Lol it's usually literally 5 minutes for me to buy a new car insurance. What's this weeks of lead time? This is not some physical good you need to manufacture and ship!
Which company please? [edit: Sorry should have specified: California. Anyone has an auto insurance company working quickly - or at all- in California currently?]
In most of the US, just about all of the large national direct-sales insurers operates sales 24/7 and will write you a policy in 20 minutes at 3am if you want: State Farm, GEICO, Progressive, Allstate, Liberty Mutual, Nationwide, Farmers, Travelers, etc.
Yes sorry, should have specified, in California? California is having this problem currently. I am also used to California auto insurance working fine and quickly but that's not the case currently.
This is the lead up to them exiting the state like in Florida (and California for other types of insurance). I believe state farm and allstate have already exited california, but I may be wrong.
Three weeks delay is just the most visible thing, they are basically pulling out all the stops to try to avoid covering as many people as possible.
But even 3 weeks delay in driving a vehicle you just purchased is considerable.
Most (all?) dealers in California offer some kind of 24/48 hour insurance for you to legally drive home. The prices are sort of ridiculous when compared to normal car insurance ($50-$100 for a couple days of coverage IIRC), but thats just a function of the risk profile and the fixed underwriting costs of a short policy.
New Hampshire is the only state in the US that does not require liability insurance. If you drive through NH, make sure you have uninsured coverage. (and it is a good idea anywhere)
Yea but if the costs of accident exceed that bond you still have to cover it if your at fault.
Plus most medical expenses quickly will exceed those bond values these days. Maybe decades ago if you had a lot money to just set aside getting no interest on it it may have made sense.
However the costs of medical and even cars today make it quite a risky proposition
Laws haven’t kept up with rising costs, so the amount of coverage you are required to have in most states won’t cover the average accident, let alone catastrophic ones. Same with the amount you have to bond for.
Even if hospital costs aren't covered the average US car price in 2024 is close to $50k and a totaled car is definitely covered. Lord help you if you hit a Hummer EV or a Cyberbeast.
Yeah the minimum coverage is no longer enough. But that’s always been a problem if you hit a Bentley or exotic. People who drive 100k cars should really have to cover that extra repair cost with their own insurance but that’s not how most state laws work.
I looked into it as I prefer to self-insure for any non-catastrophic risk.
It makes absolutely no sense for me to post a bond for such a small amount when I can get ~10x the coverage, plus all the claims handling, for $1200/yr for two cars and two drivers.
It would make sense if I was a business who had hundreds of cars or some other weird corner case perhaps, but regular people who could afford to post a bond have a better option in the insurance market.
It's very similar to the dumpster fire that is PG&E electrical rates.
PG&E is a private company, but the CPUC has strict controls over it's operations. You can read the CPUC meeting minutes for yourself. Things like "PG&E would like to replace the chain link fence surrounding substation X at a cost of $150,000 - DENIED".
CPUC is a commission whose members are selected by the governor. They are the defacto decisionmakers. Yet Gavin Newsom will give quotes to the media on how "PG&E will need to be punished for it's mismanagement".
My only theory is that keeping PG&E private provides a convenient scapegoat for the utter mismanagement by CPUC.
Do they list the reason why they were denied? Something like: Utility attempted to charge $150k to replace $5,000 worth of fence with 10 hours of labor?
For example, PG&E wanted to replace gas service lines made "with Aldyl-A plastic that were installed before 1985" due to the risk of line failure.
The CPUCs decision was "PG&E’s request to replace unidentified services is denied. Moreover, the Commission does not find that PG&E has supported rounding up the number of services to be replaced by 73 per year."
It's a byzantine system of regulations that dive into the minutia of running a utility. Not to mention a lot of these decisions are by administrative judges since the regulations are written into law.
Geico will not give you a quote instantly and let you buy instantly.
you say you last bought coverage 18 months ago. i said the market failed in december. i encourage you to try to buy coverage now and see. i was also surprised since i expected the previous situation of instant insurance to still be in place.
not sure why i am being downvoted, i encourage anyone to try for themselves
Yes. I tried to get car insurance in July in California and barely succeeded — I had to walk in to an AAA branch and they quoted me 2-3 times the Geico price.
Geico will quote a price but forces a 15 days waiting period. Then they’ll send you snail mail and ask you to send in a picture of your car within two days, by snail mail. This is the car you don’t have insurance on, so it’s probably still at the dealer’s or at the seller’s house! I think they’re not allowed to actually refuse to sell insurance but they’ll do everything they can to make it annoying enough that you go away. State Farm and the others are all equally bad.
I eventually was able to get well priced insurance same day through “toggle” which is a Farmers subsidiary, even though Farmers is no longer offering online applications and has 14 days waiting. AAA also was available but like you quoted me 3x the price.
I mean, the insurance agent told me it was universal for all new customers of progressive in California. You are the only person on this thread who has said they had a different experience.
I am curious what makes it different, as I have no record and drive fewer than 2k miles a year.
I concur, bought insurance for a new car early January and got it instantly using esurance.com (Allstate) by just entering my VIN. Yes, I am in SF/Bay Area.
interesting. i forget if it was allstate or state farm but one of them refused to do online and also refused to do fewer than 14 days out - this was like two days ago.
To be clear: I already had my old car insured with them for several years, so I just removed the old car and added the new car. I am also 50+ with no negative record and a garage in a single family home.
Profit caps disincentivize companies to be efficient, meaning they'll just waste resources that could be used better elsewhere in the economy. Capping price or profit does nothing to address the root cause of the problem - lack of competition. Lack of competition could be addressed by finding ways to reduce regulatory hurdles to enter the market, or by breaking up monopolies with anti-trust action.
You got laid off because they dont need you. I understand how traumatic and life destroying it can be sometimes, but long term it destroys the future of overall population, to prevent firing people who are no longer necessary.
We’d all be stuck as farmers, tailors and wood cutters, if firing people was penalised or efficiency was punished, no one would want to make their company more efficient with wood cutting machines or sewing machines, or tractors for farming, etc.
In a small timeframe it is horrible to lose a job, but the state is responsible for protecting both the future generations balanced with comfort and safety of present population.
A affordable unemployment insurance is a much better idea tbh compared to profit caps or price caps.
Good luck tho!, may you get a great job soon. May god bless you.
The prohibition should stand. People should have a voluntary option to pay or not pay for services as they choose. Except I suppose in quite exceptional circumstances.
If a group of locals want to pool their cash and start up a local broadband service then good on them, best of luck. But taxpayers shouldn't be on the hook to help them.
USPS is an example. It's sort of a public utility that has some strange requirements, like it _must_ __offer__ service to everyone. In some places this is less profitable, and private postal / shipping firms might not even offer their own service (or pay USPS for the last leg instead).
However, because USPS exists, there is a ceiling to how much other firms can charge without differentiating their services to make it worth the difference in cost. It helps ensure the market functions with proper competition.
For any other market where distortion (dysfunctional market) is observed, the solution is not to mandate the impossible from the existing players, but to modify the market conditions where they are broken.
Say we have a Centiville, a conveniently sized community of 100 people. 90 of them want municipal broadband because they like the internet.
That 90% should be allowed to pool their resources, start a "Centiville Fibre" company, build out fibre locally and charge locals a fair rate. Then the remaining 10 don't have to be involved in something they don't want. Or they can pay market rate for it without getting a dividend, which is effectively a penalty.
No government involvement required outside maybe permitting. The people who want it pay, it probably happens faster and all is good.
> And they want their tax money to go to something actually useful for them.
They're going to have their taxes raised to pay for the installation costs. Doing it through the government doesn't mean there is more money (unless they're harvesting resources off people who think it is a bad idea / don't want it / can't afford it which is unfair).
I don’t have children but I still pay for the schools. The idea that your tax dollars should only get spent on something you use personally is laughable.
Well, yes. But that is a straw man because nobody argued that.
Taxpayers shouldn't be forced to pay for things that they don't use and don't think are good ideas. If you use it, you should pay for it. If you think it is a good idea, you should pay for it. But if people think something is a bad idea they should only have to pay for it under highly exceptional circumstances.
There is no need to force people to pay for broadband. This is a problem that a company can solve using voluntary action.
What straw man is constructed here? There are people who don’t think they should pay for schools with their taxes. There are people who literally are advocating to instead be paid to not use public schools at all.
Many people strongly disagree about the places their tax dollars go. It is maybe one of the single most common complaints people utter and this is an example of it? People are able to make decisions about where their tax dollars go but only in the abstract of collective action via legislation. It’s kind of how governments work on a fundamental level and most of politics is about where the tax dollars go.
If a strong majority of people choose to do something as a municipality, that is the system at work. Sorry to the 10% of people who think they’re getting a bad deal (and are also almost certainly wrong on an objective level unless they just don’t want internet at all).
The suggestion that instead a private enterprise should be spun up for it so they can choose to not subscribe is the antithesis of the entire point. The entire point is that the cost is already beared by the taxpayers in the first place and that it should serve them. It makes more sense to invest directly in the creation and keep it in the hands of those who bore the cost. We give billions out in corporate welfare and yet the companies who get that money are quite often the most reviled in the nation based on public polling (Telcos). It is almost like the incentives aren’t aligned.
The idea that your tax dollars should only get spent on something you use personally is laughable - I'm not arguing that.
> The entire point is that the cost is already beared by the taxpayers in the first place and that it should serve them...
Well, having the taxpayers pay for it is obviously failing. Maybe try not taking the money off people and letting them build their own broadband? If you've identified that something the government is doing isn't working, the first port of call is try privatising it. The private market is pretty good at providing things.
Getting local government to do something instead of state or federal is an improvement; but by golly you could just have the people who want something organise to have what they want without dragging the unwilling in to it. 90% vs 100% of local people paying for something doesn't really make a difference to the underlying economics.
> If a strong majority of people choose to do something as a municipality, that is the system at work. Sorry to the 10% of people who think they’re getting a bad deal (and are also almost certainly wrong on an objective level unless they just don’t want internet at all).
No that isn't the system at work, that is the system failing. Taking a system that could work with just a motivated minority organising it and changing it to a system where everyone has to vote on it at regular intervals is a recipe for failure. If a strong majority wants something, they have all the tools they need to do it themselves at their own cost. The only reason they even need a majority is to push any obstructionist permitting and whatnot out of the way.
> We give billions out in corporate welfare and yet the companies who get that money are quite often the most reviled in the nation based on public polling (Telcos).
A sensible take there is to not make paying them compulsory? I get what you're saying but I don't get how you aren't joining the dots. You start by saying that some people are going to have to pay for something they don't want. You then get to the conclusion and you've identified that people are being forced to pay for something they don't want and that is bad.
There is an easy solution to all this. Stop forcing people to fund things they think are bad ideas, then let the people who want broadband band together, set up a limited liability corporation to control the legal risk, and build themselves a broadband network. IE, get government out of the picture as much as possible. Then literally everyone gets what they want. If someone changes their mind later they aren't a shareholder and will end up having to give money to the people with more foresight.
Similarly. If someone wants to go off the grid there isn't any reason to force them on to it. Ditto water supplies if they want to try something alternative. And they shouldn't have to pay for a service they aren't connected too because that would be dumb. I'd probably advocate a law that you have to disclose being unconnected to major utilities clearly, obviously and early in the process when selling or renting a house.
I don't really see why anyone should be unhappy if Sam the Solar wants to power his own house. Good luck to him. He doesn't have to pay for my electricity and I don't have to pay for his. If it is much more cost effective for him he can come do my house too. There is literally no need to force them to pay or force them to consume a service that they don't think it a good idea.
And the closer the equilibrium can be pushed to a fully private free market the more cost effective it is likely to be.
Example: Germany’s mostly-public (Gesetzliche - more like, extremely strictly regulated) health insurance system putting a market-based cap on what private (more like, more lightly-regulated) insurance can cost and cover.
I was on the private system my first 13 years working in Germany. I was obligated (but didn’t try to fight) switch to public recently.
I'm all for government 'competition' so long as they play by the rules of the market. If government 'competition' means a money-losing (i.e. tax-supported) enterprise, then it's not competition, it's just price-setting with extra steps.
cost-plus has largely proved to be a busted business model. in industries where it is de rigueur, such as defense and space, traditional business models have driven efficiency improvements and new product development alongside price decreases.
I’ve always suspected that that incentivized health insurance companies to let hospitals inflate costs. If the government forbids me from increasing my percentage of the pie and I need to increase revenue I have to increase the size of the pie.
Yes, this and vertical integration. The insurance company may have limited profit, but if the hospital doesn't, and they're both owned by the same parent company, then the prices "inside the control volume" can be whatever fiction is most convenient to report to the government.
Looked up the largest health insurer, they operate hospitals:
> Kaiser Permanente operates 39 hospitals and more than 700 medical offices, with over 300,000 personnel, including more than 87,000 physicians and nurses.
