> "The majority of drivers are good, but some drivers are really bad."

I take issue with this. The majority of drivers are "mostly fine as long as circumstances are favorable", not "good". People for the most part do not even know about the concept of defensive driving let alone practice it. Even the best people are fundamentally complacent in basically everything they do. They zone out sometimes, they get too close, they don't always look where they're going. They don't get into more collisions because the world doesn't throw more obstacles at them, not because they're good at driving.

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seizethecheese 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I disagreed with you and went looking in the article for evidence (yeah bad, epistemologically). I actually found evidence for your point. The largest cause of fatal crashes is Generally distracted or "lost in thought" (daydreaming) at 64%. That happens to most people,.

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missinglugnut an hour ago | parent | next [-]

How many of those 64% had their accident because of phones/drugs/recklessness and claimed to be distracted instead? With all the liability and shame involved in fatal crashes there's absolutely no way people are going to honestly self report illegal behavior.

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Gigachad an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The human brain was not designed for a task which requires hours of siting down doing mostly nothing while being hyperfocused the entire time ready to take over in an instant on the rare occasion something happens. While running or cycling your brain is actively engaged keeping yourself upright and avoiding obstacles which keeps you alert.

	▲	tialaramex an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		That's true. Humans are bad at this task. On the railways they have a problem with this too, "Lookout" seems like a ludicrously easy job, but it's basically impossible because you must pay attention to an incredibly boring thing for hours or your friends might die. Getting rid of human lookouts should be a priority but it feels easy and so it's hard to motivate this.
	▲	nomel an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Seems at least somewhat comparable to walking through a forest full of predators, while, say, hunting/gathering.

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tialaramex an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

You can see it in what people say right after an accident, stuff like "He came out of nowhere".

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jcranmer 35 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

As a point of evidence in favor of this viewpoint:

Multi-dozen car pileups aren't particularly rare, with the common cause for a lot of these being "one car hits an icy patch, hits another car, car behind them tries but fails to stop in time due to the ice, rinse and repeat a few dozen times". And the root cause of that is every single driver in that collision driving too fast for conditions and unable to make the requisite emergency stop in time.

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Retric 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Good here is in reference to the average crash statistics.

Most drivers are safer than the average, because you can’t go below 0 and some people are really bad.

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ryandrake 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I know someone who's been at fault in at least 12+ car accidents, and she keeps driving (as someone else put it you almost have to drive in the USA). There are colossally bad drivers out there and we don't yet have a viable system for keeping them off the road.

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GrinningFool 2 hours ago | parent [-]

How is she able to get insurance coverage?

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nradov 12 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Most US states have some sort of assigned risk pool which makes minimum coverage available to even the worst drivers, as long as they still have a valid license. (I'm not claiming that this is necessarily a good public policy, just pointing out that it exists.)

https://insurify.com/car-insurance/knowledge/assigned-risk-a...

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BugsJustFindMe 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

1) What makes you think she has insurance coverage?

2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actuarial_science

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GrinningFool an hour ago | parent [-]

With that many accidents, I'd assume bankruptcy if she didn't.

re: 2) yes that was the point. She'd have to be paying multiple thousands in an assigned-risk pool policy with that record of at-faults.

	▲	phainopepla2 29 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		An estimated 1 in 6 drivers in Los Angeles don't have insurance. I know at least a dozen people who have been hit by uninsured drivers, and that's not counting hit and runs, who probably are also mostly uninsured. The victim's own insurance will pay if they have uninsured motorist coverage (you'd be a fool not to have it, living in LA at least), but there is basically no punishment for the uninsured driver, assuming a fender-bender. The police won't do anything. The insurance companies don't think it's worth their time to try to squeeze out something from someone who probably has almost nothing anyway.
	▲	jakzurr 30 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Unfortunately, if you make (or are born with) enough resources, you might skate for quite a while. Eventually you might get a lot of fines and even some jail time, but afterwards, some people just take their chances and drive anyway.

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saalweachter an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It looks like the median/mode is 1-2 car accidents (50% of drivers), and the average is 3-4. 25% of drivers have no accidents (as far as insurance companies are concerned, ie, no claims or police reports).

I'm curious how this looks with various ways of normalizing for amount driven; is that no-accident crowd the quartile of drivers who don't drive very much? The biggest factor in being in the opposite group (the 10% of drivers with 50% of accidents) is "drive all the time, commercially or otherwise".

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BugsJustFindMe 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

You cannot measure driver goodness (skill and vigilance) by looking at crash statistics, because crashes are definitively circumstantial. Most very clearly bad/dangerous/unskilled/unvigilant operations of automobiles do not lead to crashes.

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Veserv 44 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The fatality rate is 1.19 per 100 million vehicle miles [1], ~83 million miles per fatality. The mean driver averages ~15,000 miles per year. So, the mean driver encounters a fatal crash after ~5,500 years of driving. If you started driving when the Great Pyramid was built, you would still have another 1,000 years before you would expect to die in a fatal crash.

The mean driver in the context of the USA driving environment is shockingly safe. Being safer than even the mean human driver in the USA is hard and takes a shocking amount of data to verify. Anybody downplaying it as "lol humans are so unsafe" to argue the problem feels easy to solve or can be solved by the end of the year with a little bit of elbow grease is utterly clueless.

[1] https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...

	▲	davidgay 2 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r... has the US at 7th highest out of 22 countries (for which this data is available) for the most accidents per km driven. So it's clearly not that hard to be safer than the mean human driver in the USA. 3 of the 22 countries manage to have less than half the US rate.

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bad_haircut72 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The people OP is talking about, the 0.05% absolute worst drovers, are not merely complacent, they're doing things like getting hammered and going street racing (shamefully I can say, I was 19 once...) or speeding away from crimes etc

edit: someone else replied with data contrary to this, maybe they are right but Im leaving this here to represent the counterargument

	▲	BugsJustFindMe 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		It's a category error to say that everyone else are good just because they're not the worst you can imagine. It doesn't matter what your worst 0.05% do. It doesn't make most people actually good drivers.
	▲	ummonk 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		The other reply doesn't contradict what you're saying. Someone who was street racing is going to tell the cops / insurance company that they were lost in thought.