Streetsblog’s Angie Schmitt brings to light a really important issue that we think about every day at Mobility Lab. She notes that Americans spend more time on average every day driving their cars than socializing with other people.
And this is likely skewing the ways people think about and care about other people as they are zooming about their personal business. If people do ever stop to think about the ethical ramifications of the ways they behave (often badly) while driving, it probably comes at a time too late – after someone has been hurt.
Perhaps because driving is so routine here, we tend not to give it much thought. For most Americans, driving is an unremarkable activity. It’s easy to turn the ignition and let our mental autopilot take over.
But we’re still making weighty decisions behind the wheel — we’re just not very aware of them. Our driving behavior can be a matter of life or death for ourselves, our loved ones, and total strangers. Around 40,000 Americans were killed on the roads last year, and millions more were injured.
Decisions like whether to hit the gas or the brake when approaching a yellow light. Or whether to reach for your cell phone on the passenger seat while you’re cruising down a familiar street. Or whether to do a shoulder check for pedestrians and cyclists before making a turn.
These are, at heart, moral decisions.
In Alcoholics Anonymous, participants are asked to take a “moral inventory” of their day. Most of us who drive don’t spend much time weighing the ethics of our behavior as motorists, but we probably should. Otherwise, by the time the ethical implications of our behavior are clear, it’s probably going to be too late.
Schmitt mentions Tom Vanderbilt’s new book, Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What it Says About Us), and his finding that part of the problem is that driving alone (which is what about 85 percent of drivers on the highway during rush hour are doing) prevents us and literally shields us from receiving feedback. That feedback could be valuable in changing or worst kinds of behavior, but we don’t receive it, so we just keep doing it and possibly getting even more hardened in our mindset that such bad behaviors are normal or acceptable.
She writes that walking her kids around her neighborhood sometimes gets drivers to threaten or insult them for causing their delay of a few seconds when walking in crosswalks. But she wonders whether those drivers even know they are behaving that way.
I can relate. As I walked my daughter and her friend home from pre-school yesterday along a busy street (which thankfully has wide sidewalks), their cute hand-holding and make-believing was like another planet from the drivers zooming by (most of them recklessly at high speeds with phones in hand) a mere five feet away.
For the sake of future generations and right now, Schmitt ends her article on a worthwhile call to action:
Now, speed-related collisions are responsible for about as many deaths each year — 10,000 — as drunk driving. We need to change how people view what’s right and wrong when they’re behind the wheel. What would it take for people to start thinking of common behaviors that pose grave risks — like texting and driving, or speeding, or failing to pay attention to people walking and biking — in the same moral terms that they now view drunk driving?
The post Driver speed, texting is the new drunk driving appeared first on Mobility Lab.