Boston drivers were cconditioned for perpetual bumper-to-bumper traffic. With traffic levels down, there was no bumper in front of them to slow them down so they just floor it until they find one.

This made me laugh, and might even be true. There were a number of years where we had the highest number of of traffic accidents in the country and yet the lowest related fatalities. That was because traffic was moving so slowly that most accidents were “fender-benders”.

And then they complain that the car in front of them isn't "moving at the speed of traffic."

I somewhat hesitate to anecdata this in the same general area. But...

For a time, I might have been inclined to put it down to people just weren't driving and had "forgotten" how. But I think that's hard to argue for at this point. I've nearly got run off the road on a merge or had a horn blown at me followed by a pass on the shoulder because I was apparently only going at the speed limit multiple times in just the past month or two.

Boston area driving has been quite aggressive forever. But I don't think I've seen it this actively bad/dangerous as it has been the past year or two. (And a number of people I know have said likewise.)

As someone who has driven quite extensively in SF, LA, NYC, and Boston, I don't know why Bostonians are adamant that their traffic and drivers are as bad as these other cities. My #1 frustration with Boston traffic is how "polite" drivers are. Multiple times, I've had the last car in a string of cars stop at a green light to let me turn left which is probably the most infuriating/stupid thing you can do. What I will say is that Boston has a unique set of infrastructure that involves many lights and convoluted intersections (Davis Square - where 7 streets meet) where you are absolutely punished in terms of time and so I think people definitely push it around these intersections. That being said, I biked 2 miles as my commute this entire fall from Somerville to Cambridge and never encountered anything noteworthy.

>(Davis Square - where 7 streets meet)

This doesn't sound very square to me.

I'm totally amazed at how some cities do not have protected left turn signals. During high traffic times, this means you can litterally never have a gap. Which leads to the situation where once the light turns red, 3-4 cars wanting to turn left run the red light. LA was the worst of the places I've experienced this.

> During high traffic times, this means you can literally never have a gap.

It is legal to enter an intersection (i.e. cross the white line) when your light is not red. Therefore at least one car can turn left legally per light cycle. Agree completely that this isn't good enough.

Pretty much all of the Cambridge and Somerville "squares" are really larger areas with nightmares of streets coming in and branching off at all sorts of random angles.

Left turn arrows tend to be eventually installed at the worst of the unprotected lefts. (Or left turns are just prohibited.) Locals just learn to expect a couple cars to do a left on red--and for another 2 or 3 to turn as soon as the light turns green.

The "square" presumably refers to the place (like a town square) and not the streets themselves.

Yes, just like Madison Square Gardens which is a round/oval shape building. People don't realize how silly words can be when one's inner child takes hold.

LA I don't really know. But SF and NYC (especially) are relatively challenging to drive in as well. I do agree that, especially pre-GPS, Boston/Cambridge/Somerville are most challenging by the almost complete lack of any sort of a grid and all the weird intersections. When I moved back to the area with a car after grad school--though not to the city itself--I think it really took me at least a couple of years before I felt comfortable navigating more or less by instinct rather than having to constantly refer to a map.

Even with GPS there are a number of confusing intersections and if you make the wrong choice you can easily add a ton of time to your journey with no easy way to go back.

Well mostly because I heard news reports where they told me they’d measured and found that to be the case. I live in SoCal now and despite all the bitching people do I’d much rather drive in LA.

Most of the complaints come from people who live in the fairly well off ring of suburbs from ~I95-495 and are used to lackadaisical, un-urgent traffic that tends to characterize these places.

These people have little reason to got Lowell/Leominster/Worcester/Fall River (one ring outward) or Providence/Hartford/New Haven/Springfield (one ring further still) so Boston is just what they complain about.

If Lexington or Sudbury is your frame of reference then Boston is a f-ing zoo. If Lawrence is your frame of your reference Davis Square (or Kelly Square) is same shit different day.

The whole country has been aggressively pushing the virtues of selfishness for the past 30 years. The eventual outcome shouldn't really be a surprise.

I don't know what its going to take for half the country to finally wake up and realize it can't continue along this course and the philosophy of selfishness has failed.

I live and work in a home office in Western MA, the road outside my office is somewhat busy but is hardly the main road through town. Even so, the number of horns honking and brakes screeching has increased enough that I find myself wincing on calls when it happens. It could be that I'm simply more sensitive since the dramatic decrease of traffic during the pandemic, but my perception is that people are driving more aggressively and are quicker to anger.

Were you working from home prior to the pandemic to hear the noise during work hours?

Yeah, I've been working from home for a while. :-P I started about a year before the pandemic started.

I have seen many blame reduced police enforcement caused by low staffing and apathy. Does this seem like a factor in your experience?

In some areas it could also be due to policy aimed removing pretextual stops, like rolling through stop signs, not signaling turns, etc.

The rules of the road were put in place as a system to protect people. Things like signaling a turn can be very important to pedestrians crossing a side street. I get that people want to remove pretextual stops to stop bias. But perhaps we should move towards uniform/consistent enforcement rather than simply ignoring the laws.

The use of law enforcement discretion to charge some people but not others leads to the bias. This is on more than just driving laws. Then you end up with a minority population being negatively affected while the majority remain in ignorant bliss. If it affected all equally, then the population would be mobilized to remove bad laws from the books (on the basis that they or someone they know were affected by it).

I've never seen Trump lumped into the scapegoating of recent traffic deaths onto grumpy motorists, but certainly the pandemic-despair traffic death meme is widespread. Strong Towns has a different explanation that is less dependent on the entire driving public sharing a mindset with a few journalists at big papers: much of the congestion, which acted as the only reasonable limit to speed on our very dangerous roads, has gone missing. Jeff Speck (Walkable City) also recently talked about how he got suckered into the same just-so story until he heard Marohn's explanation.

In podcast form: https://podcast.strongtowns.org/e/driving-went-down-fataliti... In article form: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2022/1/10/driving-went-d...

That might explain the speeding, but I've noticed an increase in road-rage incidents as well. Lots of honking, lots of swerving, lots of high-risk passing. I'm in the DC suburbs, so this isn't limited to Boston either. And I see it on roads that were never bumper to bumper or anywhere close.

"much of the congestion, which acted as the only reasonable limit to speed"

Based on my recent experiences, I sort of agree - but more so as a negative control. My area does not have much bumper to bumper traffic, and never has. I have not noticed additional increase in speeding.

The thing I have noticed is bad decision making or inattentive behavior. People pulling out when they shouldn't (possibly due to misjudged speed), or looking at their phone and drifting from their lane.

>The thing I have noticed is bad decision making or inattentive behavior. People pulling out when they shouldn't (possibly due to misjudged speed)....

Possibly the result of the other drivers being able to drive faster, thus giving less space to pull out?

> or looking at their phone and drifting from their lane.

This one is much easier to connect to lower traffic levels. As the complexity of the environment decreases with the drop in traffic, drivers feel safer to do things like be on their phones. Being on your phone is very similar to higher speed in that it is a higher-risk response that many drivers would rather engage in if there is no apparent downside.

I find this explanation to be consistent with the way people respond to weather by slowing down (and do so differently in different locales depending on their familiarity with that weather), or how , when I used to drive up to the SFO airport for Friday night red-eyes, it was rare to encounter cars driving less than 100mph on the pristine, nearly-empty freeway.

"Possibly the result of the other drivers being able to drive faster, thus giving less space to pull out?"

Not that I have seen. I have had numerous people pull out in front of me and my habits haven't changed. I'm even one to go 5 under when approaching two intersections that ate notorious for people pulling out at. Also, at the one intersection, people sit back instead of pulling up further, meaning the have to traverse an additional 15 feet, which they don't seem to amount for when pulling out.

"This one is much easier to connect to lower traffic levels. As the complexity of the environment decreases with the drop in traffic, drivers feel safer to do things like be on their phones."

True, i think this could account for some of the more urban areas. The traffic in this area hasn't changed and I've still noticed an uptick. Maybe carryover from habits developed on those urban roads, but maybe something else.

> never seen Trump lumped into the scapegoating of recent traffic deaths

Magical thinking is pervasive. Is it ironic that the subject himself seemed to engage in the same?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magical_thinking

https://www.npr.org/2017/01/22/510655254/trump-crowd-size-es...

I can second that the level of aggression on the roads in the Boston area seems to have jumped substantially over the last 18 months or so. I also very rarely see enforcement happening, my partner and I have long noted that the likelihood you’ll get pulled over in Boston even for overtly bad behavior is next to zero.

>It does feel like the one-two punch of [Trump + pandemic] has led to people feeling more entitled to let their rage and impatience out in public.

Well the fact that you're seeing what you're seeing in a very expensive Boston suburb seems to point in the other direction. Shouldn't that be the place in the country that sees the most pro-social behavior as a result of the pandemic and has the fewest people seeing Trump as something that should be emulated?

There are plenty of Trump voters around here, they tend to have big TRUMP signs and American flags in their front yards so they're not hard to spot.

From my perspective, Trump acted as the human incarnation of rage and impatience for a substantial fraction of the US population, and he fed on and encouraged public displays of bad behavior. Setting that type of example from the White House can't be inconsequential.

Pandemic fatigue is a real thing here too. Just because we have an above-average level of mask-wearing compliance doesn't mean people aren't heartily sick of the whole thing.

Blaming Trump for inattentive driving?

All bad things I don’t like are caused by X group is a poor way to look at the world.

Letting your biases creep so far into how you make simple evaluations like that is a red flag and it might be time for some deep introspection.

I think OP wasn't blaming Trump's actions directly, but rather that the combo of people hating Trump and the pandemic has unhinged people and they've started driving worse for it.

So less about Trump and more about Trump's effects on liberals.

No matter how much you want it to be true, don't think Trump has anything to do with it as I feel the same about attitude on roads in EU countries where I reside.

You’re blaming Trump, I have that right? That comment just screams “I live in a bubble”.