Yeah well fuck insurers. We are supposed to get spied upon by our cars with their blackboxes, by our insurers, by Google, by national security services of various countries... and what do we get in return? Dinged for other people's bad behavior which we cannot reasonably control. Either you follow the car in front of you very closely and get hard braking events, or other people switch lanes in front of you and in the worst case slowing down during lane change, provoking yet another hard braking event.

Fuck all of that.

This is true - but it’s hard even for “good” drivers to always understand especially on roads they might not be familiar with.

Example: open space on either side of the road, tends to encourage people to drive faster.

Closing that space (whether by buildings, shrubbery, etc ) will slow the speed.

But I will say there are also “obvious” bad designs - the rare far to short on ramp to merge, where drivers don’t understand how to adjust.

Or the one I most frequently encounter are “blind spots” created by the speed of an intersecting road, where a mirror may be attached to a pole / tree, or a sign reminding people to look left right left, or even instructing where cars should be beyond for a safe pull out.

I know of one intersection near me that both has markers on the road(don’t pull out if cars are at or beyond this marker), and a reminder about looking, but still has a high frequency of accidents.

There's some that are purely due to space constraints, favourite pet-peeve example is a highway with an overpass crossing it.

In the rural case, the offramp will branch off first and the on ramp will be after the overpass and the drivers taking each never meet.

In the space constrained case, theres one extra lane that serves both, where the drivers taking the on-ramp cross paths with those taking the off ramp. This configuration is absolutely cursed!

Similarly, a road that is frequently travelled by risky drivers is a risky road!

Without wanting to paint with too broad a brush, I would say in my experience driving in 10x countries, U.S. drivers, being most habituated to spending their lives in cars, drive in the most distracted, least careful way. Especially in places where the typology is the U.S. default of low-density, car-oriented sprawl. Accordingly there are an appaling number of deaths and injuries on the road: 1 in 43,750 people dies each year in the U.K. in automobile accidents vs. 1 in 8,500 in the U.S.A.

Inb4 deaths per mile driven, I'd argue higher VMT in the U.S.A. only proves the point - too many cars being driven too much because of silly land use. High VMT is acutally a symptom of a dangerous mobility system as much as a cause.

Adding on to this, a common reaction I see to online videos of driving incidents is "why did this person just stop? of course you are going to crash into them. They shouldn't have stopped" and many people agreeing with it. It seems they are blind to the fact that if the following driver was using a safe following distance and speed, they should easily be able to stop, making the incident the fault of the driver following too close, not the one stopping.

I learned next-level defensive driving by bicycle commuting to work 5.5 miles each way on busy roads in rush hour traffic. On a bicycle you're invisible, and if you expect any less, you're going to get hurt. As it was, I had some very very close calls- at least one of them had the potential to be fatal. Ironically, the only time I ever crashed was my own fault.

But now even when in a car, I retain that "I'm invisible" mentality, which makes me much more aware of what other drivers are doing, and much more skeptical of their ability to make good decisions. This has saved me several times.

The landing page video's first incident is a car coming from behind and from the right, cutting off the filming car. The filming car didn't react at all when instant (but measured) braking would've been safer to start building a distance buffer.

One thing HPDE taught me is that most people under brake in dangerous situations because they simply don't know the limit of their vehicle nor the sensitivity range of the brake pedal.

The hard braking heuristic makes sense when estimating risk of road segments, but not as a proxy for driver competence.

One thing I noticed among dash cam videos is very often the person recording and publishing the video will keep on driving closely behind another car that is clearly driving erratically. Maybe he will honk, but he won't brake or leave any safety distance, and seconds later the idiot's car, which has been behaving weirdly in front of him the whole time, causes him to crash.

I realize this may come off as victim blaming, but I feel you should have an obligation to not endanger yourself even if by the laws of the road you are technically in the right. I would rather get cut off by and idiot and be at my destination thirty seconds later than having to deal with car repairs even when it is legally speaking not my fault.

At one point in my life I rode a bicycle 40+ km per day. I see things nobody else seems to and I think that has a lot to do with it. I cannot win the collision.

Much of being a good driver is just awareness.

One time my light turns green, I don't go. As my wife asks what I'm waiting for, a pickup blows the light. We weren't the first car at that light, and years later she still talks about how there's no way I could know. Well, I didn't get us t-boned at 80 so I must have done something right.

Cyclists too.

I do both and I am constantly surprised at the lack of situational awareness of drivers when I’m a passenger in their cars.

I think truckers probably get the same thing too.

I'm definitely a better driver because of bicycling. You gain new skills when you know that you're going to come out the loser in almost every collision.

A seasoned motorcycle rider should be unable to rip out any hair, due to safely wearing a helmet!

If they are not found at fault then indeed there's no cost for their insurance company?

The lights should be timed so that you don't have to do that if you are driving the posted speed, but I know that's not always true.

> Does it matter why? The important part is getting people to change behavior.

Yeah, if you want to do that, it would be helpful to know whether a financial incentive is required for the effect or not.

What are these apps or devices? Where can I get one?

I know way too many drivers who have exactly two modes: Full brakes and full accelerator. Like, they'll see someone in front of them, slam the gas pedal, and then when they get too close, slam the brakes to slow down. No in between. And they don't even know they're terrible drivers since they've always driven this way.