Over the past month or so I have not been taking public transport to work. In the middle of a pandemic and the non zero chance that there is a deadly virus in the world, I have been driving to and from work, in order that I don't become an unwitting carrier of the Covid-19 virus and accidentally pass it on to my wife who is immunocompromised. Driving a car to work across Sydney, some 30 miles, has given me one insight that I wouldn't have otherwise guessed.
You're all worse at driving than you used to be.
I might be tempted to say that this is because of people being in lockdown for several months but in general that should have returned to previous levels pretty quickly. Instead I am convinced that the reason why the average driving standards have fallen is because people are driving bigger cars than they used to and haven't adjusted their habits.
When you are driving a car on the road, you aren't occupying the space that your body does but the space that a thousand plus kilogram box does. This instantly tells you that spatial awareness isn't an innate ability but something that has to be learnt. Spatial awareness tells you how you relate to other objects in the world; which on the roads includes other cars and even where you are inside a lane.
It follows that if you are in a car, that your left leg which is right of centre, should also be positioned to the right of the centre of the lane. It should also follow that your sense of self preservation will keep you from crashing into a thing coming in the other direction when the closing speeds of you and oncoming traffic can on occasion exceed more than 100 miles an hour.
I think that most people, if they were ever taught this rather basic fact when they were learning to drive, have either forgotten this or worse, don't care. The amount of times that I have seen cars drift over the left hand side of their lane is shocking. I don't mean that in the metaphorical sense either. As someone who drives a relatively small car, watching a big SUV or ute, where the metal bullbars at the front are lined up with my head, is genuinely scary.
I never used to experience this at all. Back in the days when people still drove sedans and wagons, lane wandering was still a problem. Today though, traffic is somewhere between 6 and 8 inches taller than it used to be. Also, the number of small hatchbacks on the road has massively changed as well. The SUVification of everything on the road has all but eliminated sedans and wagons, and has transformed small cars into small SUVs and CUVs.
In the process of transforming every car on the road into an SUV, the automotive industry in its wisdom has also decided that along with various styling cues which reduce wind resistance, they has also mostly arrived at the idea of putting increasingly smaller windows on cars. If you are a small child in the Toyota CH-R, Mitsubishi ASX, Mazda CX-5 as well as utes such as the Hilux, Ranger and Triton, then unlike when I was a small child and staring out the back windows of a VC Commodore, then all you are going to be able to see is the sky. Not being able to see the world outside for reference, is a leading cause of motion sickness and horking your guts up all over the inside of a motor car.
Children not being able to see out of a car is only of secondary importance at best. It is drivers who now have to look out of postal pillbox windows that is worrying. Inside their insulated and cocooned box, the amount of awareness that there actually is anything outside of the windows, has fallen off the edge of a cliff. That's also magically combined with styling out the front of the car which ensures that drivers have no idea where there front of their car is either and so they have to imagine where it is. It is my experience that most people have very poor imaginations; much less their ability to imagine the world outside of their windscreen.
When I see learner drivers on the roads, they tend to be using hatchbacks that the driving schools still have, or if they are using the family's SUV, are being taught by parents and friends who never learned to drive on SUVs and have never learned proper spatial awareness or car control to go along with their new choice of automotive behemoth.
As spatial awareness isn't innate, then the amount of imagination and work demanded of drivers in newer cars is more than it used to be. Yet at the same time, we are giving drivers less of a chance to see out of their cars. What this results is in, is loads more cars on the road drifting out of their lanes, more moving from lane to lane without a clue that there's other traffic in the way and because drivers can't be bothered to indicate that they are moving, they just move without a thought that doing so has the potential to damage a lot of valuable stuff.
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