The fact that distracted driving now accounts for more fatal car accidents than impaired driving hasn’t made a dent in driving habits, says DiCicco, who sees the rise of “assertive” and now “aggressive” driving over the past 15 years as equally narcissistic and dangerous. It’s not unusual for impatient drivers behind a nervous novice trying to turn left to pull ahead and cut the new driver off, he reports.
Such “me-first” behaviour—disregard for traffic signs, failing to signal, lane-hogging, crowding intersections, sailing through red lights—has led to a culture of driving entitlement squarely at odds with the spirit of co-operation needed to navigate the impromptu societies that occur when motor vehicles share space. That has made driving, the most dangerous and behaviourally complex activity most people engage in on a daily basis, a cultural menace that affects not only drivers but pedestrians and neighbourhoods as the spillover effects puts cyclists on sidewalks and pedestrians at peril.
It is interesting in all our discussion on advanced driving we probably make an assumption that we are starting from a point where there is no distraction, we don't turn up for an IAM test with a bowl of cereal in one hand / the radio blaring / mid-text conversation - so perhaps our discussions are skewed yet in reality for many drivers on the road their issues are not about how they steer / when they brake / how they accelerate - but instead about how they are distracted - an interesting discussion - from Canada, but no doubt relevant universally...
Alasdair