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So American drivers are aggressive towards those they think to be poorer than them? Why do you think that is? (genuinely curious)

• seanp2k2 4y ago
  http://www.temporarilyembarrassedmillionaires.org/ http://www.temporarilyembarrassedmillionaires.org/
• bluSCALE4 4y ago
  Americans are aggressive as hell. I'm willing to bet that cyclist are maimed and murdered hourly by aggressive drivers and get away with it. I was personally ran off the road by an SUV because I apparently angered the driver, because yeah, killing me totally teaches me a lesson.
  • fortuna86 4y ago
    US isn't even on the top 10 list of worst / most aggressive drivers. They at least respect lanes as drawn on the road.
    • masklinn 4y ago
      > They at least respect lanes as drawn on the road. Sometimes anyway. Ignoring lanes when making a turn (e.g. drift out on a multi-lane turn) is sadly common.
      • gnz11 4y ago
        Not to mention failing to stop at the clearly marked lines at intersections. They seem to stop either a car length behind the line or a car length over the line in the crosswalk.
        • masklinn 3y ago
          Also related to both, cutting corners (literally) when making turns, american drivers seem to have a real problem with tight turns. One reason why it’s risky to stop over the line incidentally, as a car making a shallow turn is very likely to step into your lane if they don’t take an over-wide turn instead.
      • fortuna86 3y ago
        [dead]
    • ricardobayes 4y ago
      Taking a school trip to Tunisia was a huge eye-opener how liberally people can interpret driving rules. Think of: tourist bus driving on the wrong side on the road to avoid traffic. On a highway, exiting from the left-most lane without signalling etc. Interestingly, they told us that this is still nothing compared to how it is in southern Tunisia - Sfax. I don't really want to go there, I value my life too much.
    • ShadowBanThis01 4y ago
      But they're too dumb to understand the passing lane.
      • fortuna86 3y ago
        [dead]
    • mcv 4y ago
      These are not necessarily the same thing. In Indonesia, people completely ignore lanes, and instead fit cars and other vehicles into the available space as if it's a tetris game. But they have a lot of mopeds and surprisingly few accidents, because when it's that crowded, they go slow. It's terrifying for a foreigner, though.
  • deaddodo 4y ago
    I mean, I've seen plenty of jackass drivers threatening or acting aggressively to cyclists in Europe. Even the Netherlands, of all places. The biggest difference is there are more protective laws / dedicated bike lanes and the critical mass of cyclists means you might be swatting at a bee swarm.
    • ricardobayes 4y ago
      Interestingly in Spain cyclists are well-protected and ordinary drivers who otherwise might drive pretty unsafely, take care of them. Coming from a different place it's so weird to experience someone driving 35 km/h behind a cyclist on a country road because there is a solid white line and a "no overtake" sign. Even if they do overtake (legally) they always keep at least 1.5 meters. There was a huge awareness campaign about this and it is working.
      • mcv 4y ago
        Is that true? 30 years ago I heard that Spain was notoriously unsafe for cyclists and some car drivers might intentionally endanger or hit cyclists in ways we now hear from the US. If that was true then, and now the attitude in Spain has changed so much, I dare say there's hope for the US as well.
      • thuridas 4y ago
        The law protects the cyclist but he/she has much more skin on the game. There are still accidents resulting in deaths and not all find the culprit car. Note that in Spain it is legal to cross the solid white line to take over a cyclist. Sure, It is sometimes annoying but having more cars would also created more traffic.
  • marcus_holmes 4y ago
    For some reason in Australia this got picked up by the media who made a small culture-war type conflict of cars vs cyclists. It's now open season on cyclists by car drivers (and very occasionally the other way around) - every regular cyclist has a tale to tell of car drivers being openly aggressive (I had a beer bottle thrown at my head by a passing car - luckily his aim was as bad as his judgement).
  • dotancohen 4y ago
    My sister moved to the US for her husband to study there, he was murdered by a NY city garbage truck white riding a bicycle last year. Apparently this is not uncommon, almost routine. The driver ran off, and the next day another person - not the real driver - turned himself in to the police. Apparently the Mafia has sone exchange program with the garbage companies, they do each other favors. Somebody will now sit in prison for decades, for a murder the detective knows he did not commit, apparently to repay some debt. And my brother-in-law's murderer is still driving garbage trucks on roads with cyclists.
    • bdowling 3y ago
      Why would the mafia use a garbage truck to murder someone?
      • dotancohen 3y ago
        He was not targeting by the Mafia. Rather, he was riding a bicycle and a garbage truck served into his lane, running him over, then sped off. I have been told that these NY garbage trucks _often_ intimidate cyclists. They are known for reckless driving and accidents. In any case, there are two reasons that the police are treating this as murder. One of the reasons is that the driver left the scene. I forget the second reason.
• iambateman 4y ago
  It’s complicated. If you lose your license for drunk driving, you can still drive a moped, so there is a reputation that the person driving the moped has a bad past. Plus, there just aren’t very many on the road so they stick out as unusual. And there is a cultural obsession with big vehicles being tied to masculinity. Which means that many (15%?) drivers would feel happy or even a little justified to blow past a moped on the road.
  • sparrish 4y ago
    They're called bikeaholics in Colorado. Easy to spot cause they're wearing jeans and backpacks, usually.
    • telchior 4y ago
      ... aren't jeans and backpacks the most typical pants/container? What the heck else would you wear and carry things in while scooting around? Not that I disbelieve you, it just seems odd. My idea of Colorado is a bunch of people in jeans and hiking boots.
  • deaddodo 4y ago
    > And there is a cultural obsession with big vehicles being tied to masculinity. This is definitely regional. In California, social status (/"masculinity") is tied to luxury brands. Especially in the metros, if you were driving a giant truck you're going to be laughed at (more often than not) as parking is going to be impossible for you and you're going to be spending 150usd/5days to fill up. In Cascadia/Northern California, eco-drivers (Prius, Tesla, etc) are seen as the self/entitled assholes. And in Colorado, it's people with AWD/4WD cars (especially, Subarus and Jeeps). "Trucks" as a social status signifier is confined more to more rural and Southern states.
• zamnos 4y ago
  America's really big. The part I'm in, ebikes are en vogue, with people giving up cars to get ebikes, and car drivers give them right of way. I'm sure elsewhere in the US it's different yet again.
  • pagnol 4y ago
    Where is that?
  • seanmcdirmid 3y ago
    Same here in the PNW. Except e-bikes are also en vogue to get stolen by our fentanyl addicts.
• yosito 4y ago
  As an American who grew up feeling annoyed and aggressive toward people driving motorcycles, but now drives a motorcycle regularly for the past 10 years, it never had anything to do with how poor someone was. Motorcycles aren't the most practical vehicles on American roads, so I always perceived them as a sport, not a necessity. And motorcycle drivers has a reputation for pulling stupid stunts and causing accidents on the highway. 19 year old kids would buy sporty motorcycles, drive 2x the speed limit on the highway, swerving between lanes of traffic, doing wheelies, etc. Or a gang of gnarly men would ride into town and parade through the streets on their Harleys. When these are your stereotypes of people on motorcycles, any time there is a motorcycle approaching you or blocking you, it's easy to feel annoyed and aggressive. Motorcyclists (and cyclists) are not seen as poor people choosing practical transport. They are seen as hobbyists pursuing a luxury at the expense of others' convenience and expectations. Of course, I don't see things this way anymore but I'm fairly confident that this is a common mindset.
  • bombcar 4y ago
    Cyclists (of both kinds) are also rare enough that people are usually “surprised” by them because they can be in a blind spot much smaller than a car. Anything that is “surprising” while driving cause stress and anger reactions.
    • hinata08 4y ago
      imagine having a car suitable for driving on a road I have a small city car, and cyclists aren't in a blind spot
  • HPsquared 4y ago
    Cyclists are perceived as the opposite: hobbyists who go too slowly and hold everyone up. By the simple act of riding down a busy street, a well-placed cyclist can necessitate hundreds of questionable overtaking maneuvers as each car has to pass them. "Trail of chaos" in other words.
    • alpaca128 4y ago
• ricardobayes 4y ago
  Everyone who's driving slower than you is an idiot and everyone who's driving faster than you is an asshole
• burnished 4y ago
  Theres this weird animosity, people in cars like to get outraged at people on bikes. I can't pinpoint why, but its almost like a xenophobic reaction? Some people see a bicyclist and launch into a tirade about how aggravating the 'bad ones' are. Real self righteous stuff. Conversely being on a bike there is a real sense that people in cars are out to do you harm. Theres the people who try to rattle you - honk their horn at you to vent their outrage, completely unaware of how fucking loud those things are, or run you off the road, that sort of thing. The real unnerving stuff is the people who come close to murdering you by accident, just not paying attention as they maneuver their vehicles. One time I made eye contact with a woman while I pulled my bike out from under her SUV (just a foot or two under, right between the wheels on the passenger side, real lucky break for me) as she sped away - people do hit and run but I never experienced it as a driver and don't think a car ever stopped to see if I was alright let alone exchange details when I was on a bike. I never got the impression it was a class thing. I think part of it is that a bicyclist is not at all threatening and rather vulnerable in fact. The other part I suspect is just regular old 'not one of us' shit - if you listen to people they'll basically tell you how they think they should be allowed to wantonly mistreat bicyclists because they felt mildly inconvenienced at one point.
  • dageshi 3y ago
    One of the unwritten rules of driving is to try and not hold up or inconvenience the drivers behind you. People get aggravated with large farm machinery holding people up but understand that machinery has a purpose and needs to get from A to B. The same people think Bicyclists aren't trying to get from A to B but are just out for a ride and happily breaking the unwritten rule. That is where the outrage comes from, they think the cyclist doesn't care about the irritation they're causing the drivers so the drivers decide to take it out on the cyclists.
  • xsmasher 3y ago
    There's also big in-group out-group thinking going on here. People generally see members of the in-group as individuals like themselves, and the out-group as some kind of monolith. They have some empathy for the in-group but none for the out-group. If a driver runs a stop sign, it reflects badly on that driver. If a cyclist runs a stop sign, it reflects badly on ALL cyclists, etc. It works the other way around too.
• mcv 4y ago
  This is a weird cultural thing about the US. I once read about an experiment were people were sorted from rich to poor, and were then given an amount of money to give to a person next to them, either just a bit richer, or just a bit poorer. In practically every country in the world, this experiment resulted in people giving money to the poorer neighbour. Only in the US did they give it to the richer neighbour.
  • khc 3y ago
    Reference?
    • mcv 3y ago
      I wish I still knew the source, but this was ages ago, and I don't keep notes.
• pards 3y ago
  Those e-bikes are often called DUIcycles[0 because one doesn't need a current driver's license to operate them. [0]: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=DUIcycle https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=DUIcycle