6 ms·

I live in a dense, walkable Boston suburb that is served by the MBTA commuter rail. But it's also full of "Masshole" drivers and adjacent to a couple of high-tr

by jpm_sd 5y ago

I live in a dense, walkable Boston suburb that is served by the MBTA commuter rail. But it's also full of "Masshole" drivers and adjacent to a couple of high-traffic major highways. I've observed a sharp increase in impatience and road rage, both on our 25 mph city streets, and on and off Rtes 1 and 93, in the last 2 years. Not to mention ever-more inattentive driving with eyes on phones. It's pretty alarming. I don't let my kids bike around the neighborhood anymore, I'm worried they will get hit. It does feel like the one-two punch of [Trump + pandemic] has led to people feeling more entitled to let their rage and impatience out in public. I don't know how we recover from this as a society?

ghaff 5y ago
I somewhat hesitate to anecdata this in the same general area. But... For a time, I might have been inclined to put it down to people just weren't driving and had "forgotten" how. But I think that's hard to argue for at this point. I've nearly got run off the road on a merge or had a horn blown at me followed by a pass on the shoulder because I was apparently only going at the speed limit multiple times in just the past month or two. Boston area driving has been quite aggressive forever. But I don't think I've seen it this actively bad/dangerous as it has been the past year or two. (And a number of people I know have said likewise.)
- hervature 5y ago
  As someone who has driven quite extensively in SF, LA, NYC, and Boston, I don't know why Bostonians are adamant that their traffic and drivers are as bad as these other cities. My #1 frustration with Boston traffic is how "polite" drivers are. Multiple times, I've had the last car in a string of cars stop at a green light to let me turn left which is probably the most infuriating/stupid thing you can do. What I will say is that Boston has a unique set of infrastructure that involves many lights and convoluted intersections (Davis Square - where 7 streets meet) where you are absolutely punished in terms of time and so I think people definitely push it around these intersections. That being said, I biked 2 miles as my commute this entire fall from Somerville to Cambridge and never encountered anything noteworthy.
  - emodendroket 5y ago
    Well mostly because I heard news reports where they told me they’d measured and found that to be the case. I live in SoCal now and despite all the bitching people do I’d much rather drive in LA.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    LA I don't really know. But SF and NYC (especially) are relatively challenging to drive in as well. I do agree that, especially pre-GPS, Boston/Cambridge/Somerville are most challenging by the almost complete lack of any sort of a grid and all the weird intersections. When I moved back to the area with a car after grad school--though not to the city itself--I think it really took me at least a couple of years before I felt comfortable navigating more or less by instinct rather than having to constantly refer to a map.
    - emodendroket 5y ago
      Even with GPS there are a number of confusing intersections and if you make the wrong choice you can easily add a ton of time to your journey with no easy way to go back.
  - dylan604 5y ago
    >(Davis Square - where 7 streets meet) This doesn't sound very square to me. I'm totally amazed at how some cities do not have protected left turn signals. During high traffic times, this means you can litterally never have a gap. Which leads to the situation where once the light turns red, 3-4 cars wanting to turn left run the red light. LA was the worst of the places I've experienced this.
    - ghaff 5y ago
      Pretty much all of the Cambridge and Somerville "squares" are really larger areas with nightmares of streets coming in and branching off at all sorts of random angles. Left turn arrows tend to be eventually installed at the worst of the unprotected lefts. (Or left turns are just prohibited.) Locals just learn to expect a couple cars to do a left on red--and for another 2 or 3 to turn as soon as the light turns green.
- lamontcg 5y ago
  The whole country has been aggressively pushing the virtues of selfishness for the past 30 years. The eventual outcome shouldn't really be a surprise. I don't know what its going to take for half the country to finally wake up and realize it can't continue along this course and the philosophy of selfishness has failed.
cmiles74 5y ago
I live and work in a home office in Western MA, the road outside my office is somewhat busy but is hardly the main road through town. Even so, the number of horns honking and brakes screeching has increased enough that I find myself wincing on calls when it happens. It could be that I'm simply more sensitive since the dramatic decrease of traffic during the pandemic, but my perception is that people are driving more aggressively and are quicker to anger.
- in_cahoots 5y ago
  Were you working from home prior to the pandemic to hear the noise during work hours?
  - cmiles74 5y ago
    Yeah, I've been working from home for a while. :-P I started about a year before the pandemic started.
QuarterReptile 5y ago
I've never seen Trump lumped into the scapegoating of recent traffic deaths onto grumpy motorists, but certainly the pandemic-despair traffic death meme is widespread. Strong Towns has a different explanation that is less dependent on the entire driving public sharing a mindset with a few journalists at big papers: much of the congestion, which acted as the only reasonable limit to speed on our very dangerous roads, has gone missing. Jeff Speck (Walkable City) also recently talked about how he got suckered into the same just-so story until he heard Marohn's explanation. In podcast form: https://podcast.strongtowns.org/e/driving-went-down-fatalities-went-up-here-s-why/ https://podcast.strongtowns.org/e/driving-went-down-fataliti... In article form: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2022/1/10/driving-went-down-fatalities-went-up-heres-why https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2022/1/10/driving-went-d...
- giantg2 5y ago
  "much of the congestion, which acted as the only reasonable limit to speed" Based on my recent experiences, I sort of agree - but more so as a negative control. My area does not have much bumper to bumper traffic, and never has. I have not noticed additional increase in speeding. The thing I have noticed is bad decision making or inattentive behavior. People pulling out when they shouldn't (possibly due to misjudged speed), or looking at their phone and drifting from their lane.
  - QuarterReptile 5y ago
    >The thing I have noticed is bad decision making or inattentive behavior. People pulling out when they shouldn't (possibly due to misjudged speed).... Possibly the result of the other drivers being able to drive faster, thus giving less space to pull out? > or looking at their phone and drifting from their lane. This one is much easier to connect to lower traffic levels. As the complexity of the environment decreases with the drop in traffic, drivers feel safer to do things like be on their phones. Being on your phone is very similar to higher speed in that it is a higher-risk response that many drivers would rather engage in if there is no apparent downside. I find this explanation to be consistent with the way people respond to weather by slowing down (and do so differently in different locales depending on their familiarity with that weather), or how , when I used to drive up to the SFO airport for Friday night red-eyes, it was rare to encounter cars driving less than 100mph on the pristine, nearly-empty freeway.
Steltek 5y ago
Boston drivers were cconditioned for perpetual bumper-to-bumper traffic. With traffic levels down, there was no bumper in front of them to slow them down so they just floor it until they find one.
- pivo 5y ago
  This made me laugh, and might even be true. There were a number of years where we had the highest number of of traffic accidents in the country and yet the lowest related fatalities. That was because traffic was moving so slowly that most accidents were “fender-benders”.
- atomicfiredoll 5y ago
  And then they complain that the car in front of them isn't "moving at the speed of traffic."
newaccount2021 5y ago
ortusdux 5y ago
I have seen many blame reduced police enforcement caused by low staffing and apathy. Does this seem like a factor in your experience?
- giantg2 5y ago
  In some areas it could also be due to policy aimed removing pretextual stops, like rolling through stop signs, not signaling turns, etc. The rules of the road were put in place as a system to protect people. Things like signaling a turn can be very important to pedestrians crossing a side street. I get that people want to remove pretextual stops to stop bias. But perhaps we should move towards uniform/consistent enforcement rather than simply ignoring the laws. The use of law enforcement discretion to charge some people but not others leads to the bias. This is on more than just driving laws. Then you end up with a minority population being negatively affected while the majority remain in ignorant bliss. If it affected all equally, then the population would be mobilized to remove bad laws from the books (on the basis that they or someone they know were affected by it).
agilob 5y ago
No matter how much you want it to be true, don't think Trump has anything to do with it as I feel the same about attitude on roads in EU countries where I reside.
throwaway0a5e 5y ago
>It does feel like the one-two punch of [Trump + pandemic] has led to people feeling more entitled to let their rage and impatience out in public. Well the fact that you're seeing what you're seeing in a very expensive Boston suburb seems to point in the other direction. Shouldn't that be the place in the country that sees the most pro-social behavior as a result of the pandemic and has the fewest people seeing Trump as something that should be emulated?
- jpm_sd 5y ago
  There are plenty of Trump voters around here, they tend to have big TRUMP signs and American flags in their front yards so they're not hard to spot. From my perspective, Trump acted as the human incarnation of rage and impatience for a substantial fraction of the US population, and he fed on and encouraged public displays of bad behavior. Setting that type of example from the White House can't be inconsequential. Pandemic fatigue is a real thing here too. Just because we have an above-average level of mask-wearing compliance doesn't mean people aren't heartily sick of the whole thing.
kbos87 5y ago
I can second that the level of aggression on the roads in the Boston area seems to have jumped substantially over the last 18 months or so. I also very rarely see enforcement happening, my partner and I have long noted that the likelihood you’ll get pulled over in Boston even for overtly bad behavior is next to zero.
refurb 5y ago
You’re blaming Trump, I have that right? That comment just screams “I live in a bubble”.
bequanna 5y ago
Blaming Trump for inattentive driving? All bad things I don’t like are caused by X group is a poor way to look at the world. Letting your biases creep so far into how you make simple evaluations like that is a red flag and it might be time for some deep introspection.
- sporkland 5y ago
  I think OP wasn't blaming Trump's actions directly, but rather that the combo of people hating Trump and the pandemic has unhinged people and they've started driving worse for it. So less about Trump and more about Trump's effects on liberals.

by jpm_sd 5y ago

ghaff 5y ago

I somewhat hesitate to anecdata this in the same general area. But... For a time, I might have been inclined to put it down to people just weren't driving and had "forgotten" how. But I think that's hard to argue for at this point. I've nearly got run off the road on a merge or had a horn blown at me followed by a pass on the shoulder because I was apparently only going at the speed limit multiple times in just the past month or two. Boston area driving has been quite aggressive forever. But I don't think I've seen it this actively bad/dangerous as it has been the past year or two. (And a number of people I know have said likewise.)

hervature 5y ago
As someone who has driven quite extensively in SF, LA, NYC, and Boston, I don't know why Bostonians are adamant that their traffic and drivers are as bad as these other cities. My #1 frustration with Boston traffic is how "polite" drivers are. Multiple times, I've had the last car in a string of cars stop at a green light to let me turn left which is probably the most infuriating/stupid thing you can do. What I will say is that Boston has a unique set of infrastructure that involves many lights and convoluted intersections (Davis Square - where 7 streets meet) where you are absolutely punished in terms of time and so I think people definitely push it around these intersections. That being said, I biked 2 miles as my commute this entire fall from Somerville to Cambridge and never encountered anything noteworthy.
- emodendroket 5y ago
  Well mostly because I heard news reports where they told me they’d measured and found that to be the case. I live in SoCal now and despite all the bitching people do I’d much rather drive in LA.
- ghaff 5y ago
  LA I don't really know. But SF and NYC (especially) are relatively challenging to drive in as well. I do agree that, especially pre-GPS, Boston/Cambridge/Somerville are most challenging by the almost complete lack of any sort of a grid and all the weird intersections. When I moved back to the area with a car after grad school--though not to the city itself--I think it really took me at least a couple of years before I felt comfortable navigating more or less by instinct rather than having to constantly refer to a map.
  - emodendroket 5y ago
    Even with GPS there are a number of confusing intersections and if you make the wrong choice you can easily add a ton of time to your journey with no easy way to go back.
- dylan604 5y ago
  >(Davis Square - where 7 streets meet) This doesn't sound very square to me. I'm totally amazed at how some cities do not have protected left turn signals. During high traffic times, this means you can litterally never have a gap. Which leads to the situation where once the light turns red, 3-4 cars wanting to turn left run the red light. LA was the worst of the places I've experienced this.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    Pretty much all of the Cambridge and Somerville "squares" are really larger areas with nightmares of streets coming in and branching off at all sorts of random angles. Left turn arrows tend to be eventually installed at the worst of the unprotected lefts. (Or left turns are just prohibited.) Locals just learn to expect a couple cars to do a left on red--and for another 2 or 3 to turn as soon as the light turns green.
lamontcg 5y ago
The whole country has been aggressively pushing the virtues of selfishness for the past 30 years. The eventual outcome shouldn't really be a surprise. I don't know what its going to take for half the country to finally wake up and realize it can't continue along this course and the philosophy of selfishness has failed.

cmiles74 5y ago

I live and work in a home office in Western MA, the road outside my office is somewhat busy but is hardly the main road through town. Even so, the number of horns honking and brakes screeching has increased enough that I find myself wincing on calls when it happens. It could be that I'm simply more sensitive since the dramatic decrease of traffic during the pandemic, but my perception is that people are driving more aggressively and are quicker to anger.

in_cahoots 5y ago
Were you working from home prior to the pandemic to hear the noise during work hours?
- cmiles74 5y ago
  Yeah, I've been working from home for a while. :-P I started about a year before the pandemic started.

QuarterReptile 5y ago

I've never seen Trump lumped into the scapegoating of recent traffic deaths onto grumpy motorists, but certainly the pandemic-despair traffic death meme is widespread. Strong Towns has a different explanation that is less dependent on the entire driving public sharing a mindset with a few journalists at big papers: much of the congestion, which acted as the only reasonable limit to speed on our very dangerous roads, has gone missing. Jeff Speck (Walkable City) also recently talked about how he got suckered into the same just-so story until he heard Marohn's explanation. In podcast form: https://podcast.strongtowns.org/e/driving-went-down-fatalities-went-up-here-s-why/ https://podcast.strongtowns.org/e/driving-went-down-fataliti... In article form: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2022/1/10/driving-went-down-fatalities-went-up-heres-why https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2022/1/10/driving-went-d...

giantg2 5y ago
"much of the congestion, which acted as the only reasonable limit to speed" Based on my recent experiences, I sort of agree - but more so as a negative control. My area does not have much bumper to bumper traffic, and never has. I have not noticed additional increase in speeding. The thing I have noticed is bad decision making or inattentive behavior. People pulling out when they shouldn't (possibly due to misjudged speed), or looking at their phone and drifting from their lane.
- QuarterReptile 5y ago
  >The thing I have noticed is bad decision making or inattentive behavior. People pulling out when they shouldn't (possibly due to misjudged speed).... Possibly the result of the other drivers being able to drive faster, thus giving less space to pull out? > or looking at their phone and drifting from their lane. This one is much easier to connect to lower traffic levels. As the complexity of the environment decreases with the drop in traffic, drivers feel safer to do things like be on their phones. Being on your phone is very similar to higher speed in that it is a higher-risk response that many drivers would rather engage in if there is no apparent downside. I find this explanation to be consistent with the way people respond to weather by slowing down (and do so differently in different locales depending on their familiarity with that weather), or how , when I used to drive up to the SFO airport for Friday night red-eyes, it was rare to encounter cars driving less than 100mph on the pristine, nearly-empty freeway.

Steltek 5y ago

Boston drivers were cconditioned for perpetual bumper-to-bumper traffic. With traffic levels down, there was no bumper in front of them to slow them down so they just floor it until they find one.

pivo 5y ago
This made me laugh, and might even be true. There were a number of years where we had the highest number of of traffic accidents in the country and yet the lowest related fatalities. That was because traffic was moving so slowly that most accidents were “fender-benders”.
atomicfiredoll 5y ago
And then they complain that the car in front of them isn't "moving at the speed of traffic."

newaccount2021 5y ago

ortusdux 5y ago

I have seen many blame reduced police enforcement caused by low staffing and apathy. Does this seem like a factor in your experience?

giantg2 5y ago
In some areas it could also be due to policy aimed removing pretextual stops, like rolling through stop signs, not signaling turns, etc. The rules of the road were put in place as a system to protect people. Things like signaling a turn can be very important to pedestrians crossing a side street. I get that people want to remove pretextual stops to stop bias. But perhaps we should move towards uniform/consistent enforcement rather than simply ignoring the laws. The use of law enforcement discretion to charge some people but not others leads to the bias. This is on more than just driving laws. Then you end up with a minority population being negatively affected while the majority remain in ignorant bliss. If it affected all equally, then the population would be mobilized to remove bad laws from the books (on the basis that they or someone they know were affected by it).

agilob 5y ago

No matter how much you want it to be true, don't think Trump has anything to do with it as I feel the same about attitude on roads in EU countries where I reside.

throwaway0a5e 5y ago

>It does feel like the one-two punch of [Trump + pandemic] has led to people feeling more entitled to let their rage and impatience out in public. Well the fact that you're seeing what you're seeing in a very expensive Boston suburb seems to point in the other direction. Shouldn't that be the place in the country that sees the most pro-social behavior as a result of the pandemic and has the fewest people seeing Trump as something that should be emulated?

jpm_sd 5y ago
There are plenty of Trump voters around here, they tend to have big TRUMP signs and American flags in their front yards so they're not hard to spot. From my perspective, Trump acted as the human incarnation of rage and impatience for a substantial fraction of the US population, and he fed on and encouraged public displays of bad behavior. Setting that type of example from the White House can't be inconsequential. Pandemic fatigue is a real thing here too. Just because we have an above-average level of mask-wearing compliance doesn't mean people aren't heartily sick of the whole thing.

kbos87 5y ago

I can second that the level of aggression on the roads in the Boston area seems to have jumped substantially over the last 18 months or so. I also very rarely see enforcement happening, my partner and I have long noted that the likelihood you’ll get pulled over in Boston even for overtly bad behavior is next to zero.

refurb 5y ago

You’re blaming Trump, I have that right? That comment just screams “I live in a bubble”.

bequanna 5y ago

Blaming Trump for inattentive driving? All bad things I don’t like are caused by X group is a poor way to look at the world. Letting your biases creep so far into how you make simple evaluations like that is a red flag and it might be time for some deep introspection.

sporkland 5y ago
I think OP wasn't blaming Trump's actions directly, but rather that the combo of people hating Trump and the pandemic has unhinged people and they've started driving worse for it. So less about Trump and more about Trump's effects on liberals.