Car Brain is getting worse

It's wild how quickly people will cheer for motorists intentionally plowing into people riding bikes.

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.

Click here to play video

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.