People readily agree that smoking in public areas is harmful, but the same sentiment evaporates when it comes to driving and car-oriented infrastructure. Driving’s negative effects are excused by the convenience they offer. I highly recommend the 2022 research project by Ian Walker, Alan Tapp, and Adrian Davis, Motonomativity: How Social Norms Hide a Major Public Health Hazard. Here’s what Dr. Walker had to say about the work:
One of the things you notice if you spend your career trying to get people to drive less is people don’t like driving less. [Our research team] said, well, let’s try and measure this. Let’s just demonstrate the extent to which the population as a whole will make excuses, and will give special freedom to the context of driving.
You might think cyclists are exaggerating when they use phrases like “murder machines” when describing their experience sharing a road with cars. But you’ll see where they’re coming from if you spend 30 seconds reading the comments on any social media post showing a driver slamming their vehicle into a person on a bike. The motonormativity, or car brain, is on full display.
We can argue about the psychological reasons, but there's no denying the casual acceptance of traffic violence.
Here’s a cyclist who miraculously got away with minor injuries after an impatient driver ran him over. (Minor, if you don’t include the mental trauma of the encounter.) Here’s a version posted on Facebook last year that includes several seconds leading up to the crash.
I posted a short version of this video a couple days ago, and like clockwork, people suffering from car brain rushed in with the color commentary. (I do wonder if the car brain reactions to this video would be any different if the victim was a 70-year-old wearing normal clothes.)
Here’s a taste:
As an avid motorist, I'm tired of close calls with people riding bicycles on busy roads. How hard can it be to carve out separate paths for them?! But seriously, it's so important to physically separate cars and bikes on busy roads.
I see that was a UK road and the car was at fault here. Many of the commenters don't seem to understand that the riders are well within their rights to occupy a space on the road and it is necessary to move away from the side to avoid being overtaken by a stream of traffic massively increasing the likelihood of being hit. I know of many people who have been knocked off their bikes and I had a few close shaves myself when I used to ride and it invariably comes down to lack of spatial awareness on the part of the vehicle driver. In the Netherlands bicycles have right of way and it works great - but again it is down to road competence. In my view that was reckless driving endangering life and the driver should be handed a 6 month driving ban as a minimum.
I think we’re witnessing a clash of cultures here. Our public tolerance for aggression has increased. That has been echoed in the superhighway of social media-- there’s a paralleled tolerance for verbal incivility. Without clear and consistent guidelines, this aggression is the result.