17 May

One of the last refuges for anti-social bastards is driving. I have to drive a lot of kms every week, and nowhere in society do people behave more appallingly than on the roads. Few follow a speed limit. They don’t understand that the main function of speed limits is not even safety, it’s to space out traffic, to allow it to flow. Vehicles increasingly force their way into moving traffic rather than wait even a few seconds. Road rage is a genuine epidemic. And all the while, people will claim to be magnificent drivers. But…they’re just not. They’ll tell you ‘good driving’ is being able to get the car erfectly into the apex of a corner, smooth the throttle application, use fancy up and down shifting etc. All things racing drivers have to do that are mostly irrelevant on public roads. Good driving is driving in a way that makes the road better for others. 94% of serious accidents are caused by bad driving, often by the same people who claim they’re magnificent drivers, ‘driving to the conditions’ (i.e. ignoring the rules, using public roads as a racetrack). This is the context for the rapid introduction now of more automated driving. The anti-social bastards hate it, because it will force them to drive socially and not anti-socially. Let them whine like the babies they are. You just can’t drive as well as a machine, for most driving. It’s why commercial aeroplanes never let pilots fly for most of their flights. Nothing is as relentlessly ‘on-task’ as a machine. Human attention is puny and easily distracted, and human emotion is a lethal addition.