ceargaest

[tʃæɑ̯rˠɣæːst]

linguist & software engineer in Lenapehoking; jewish ancom trans woman.

since twitter's burning gonna try bringing my posts about language stuff and losing my shit over star wars and such here - hi!


username etymology
bosworthtoller.com/5952

KaterinaBucket
@KaterinaBucket

i think driving fills people with a kind of temporary madness in which they view themself as a sort of living automobile and view other motorists as fellow members of their automobile species and view regular humans as a type of mushroom


NoelBWrites
@NoelBWrites

seriously I keep saying driving is the worst thing for everyone including drivers

the fact that we have a term for "road rage" should clue us in that maybe we should minimize the amount of driving people need to do??


NireBryce
@NireBryce

the whole driving ecosystem is designed, intentionally or not, to keep people at a high level of stress.

individuals are entrusted with heavy vehicles going high speeds, given minimal mandatory training, and held liable if they get distracted and hit someone.

If you scratch your own paint you pay a lot, whether then, or in money to fix the corrosion later.

if you scratch someone else' paint, or gods forbid, anything worse, often even if it was the other person's fault, you're now out a few hundred to a few thousand dollars or more, insured.

other drivers are similarly under-trained in general, causing the risk of these interactions to go up.

the commute means people sit in these things for hours, having to keep constantly vigilant on the car in front of them so the cars behind them don't get angry in stop and go traffic. And you can't just not go to work for a lot of jobs. The car is required to be employed, and in it's own way, a severe price cut because of that, a hidden cost. Gas + car cost + maintenance ain't cheap, and maintenance is especially expensive if you don't have a more recent car, or well maintained old one. Not that maintenance for new cars is cheap these days, with all the complexity built in.

cars are bad for everyone, but for drivers they're a perfect mix of hypervigilance and at the same time near-perfect security and survivability compared to any other type of road user they encounter.

They've got huge blindspots, and while you can setup your mirrors for full coverage, most people don't know how to.

I don't own a car anymore, I use an ebike for almost all of my trips. But I still think driving as it currently stands is basically engineered to make all but the moderately-wealthy very-high-end-of-"middle class" basically be dissociated + zoned out, and simultaneously hypervigilant. Drivers deserve better, not just because it means less dead road users.

Even basic drivers' ed. with a continuing education requirement to re-take it every 10 years would do a lot, but the way things are designed, No Body Has Time For That, and many don't have the cash to spare for it.