• dumpsterlid@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    I never said it didn’t suck, but it only sucks because other people are terrible drivers.

    This is the least important reason driving sucks is because other people aren’t perfect at driving. The reasons driving sucks:

    -1. There are wayyyyy too many cars on the road

    -2. In order to try to solve 1, the entire landscape has been devoted to facilitating more and more cars which makes it depressing as fuck to go anywhere because where you are going is functionally the same as where you came from.

    -3. Owning a car is absurdly stressful, massively stressful so everybody on the road at a minimum is stressed about making sure their car doesn’t fall apart and they can’t get to work.

    -4. People spend massive chunks of their lives sitting in cars commuting to work for almost no reason, highways are filled with people everyday stopping and starting, stopping and starting over and over again in traffic using fossil fuels to move several thousand pound objects miles and miles all for nothing.

    It isn’t absurdly difficult at all unless you’re incredibly incompetent

    -5. This bring me to my last point. Just because it isn’t physically difficult to press the gas and brake pedals on a car and use the steering wheel doesn’t mean driving is easy in the slightest. It is one of the most difficult things human beings have ever been expected to do on a daily basis in terms of extreme life ending consequences for losing attention or control for only the briefest of moments. It isn’t hard to drive a car compared to say riding a horse, but driving a car is so mind numbingly frustrating and exhausting in modern life that there is a good chance one day you won’t be paying attention when that freak rare situation occurs and you need to respond instantly in order to not hit another several thousand pound object hurtling towards you with fragile humans inside (not to mention humans everywhere on the street, barely an arms length from your metal box traveling at lethal speeds).

    Driving is extremely difficult, look at how stupendously self driving cars have failed to tackle the challenge even when we created AI opponents that can easily beat the best Go players in the world years ago. The fact that wayyyyyy more accidents don’t happen all the time is actually pretty incredible in terms of the daily volume of sustained, unbroken focus it takes from every single person driving to prevent more crashes.