On driving

I'm not going to claim that I've never complained about other drivers. I won't even say that I've never been annoyed at other people driving slow - it's happened a lot. I am, however, getting a bit annoyed at people losing their minds when people drive "too slow" in freezing rain, as happened this morning.

First, I'm going to address the hazards of freezing rain. Ready?

• Water falls from sky.
• Water hits ground.
• Water freezes.
• Frozen water makes layer of ice.
• Ice is slippery, and makes controlling your vehicle hard.

Everyone with me here? Good.

Living in a city like Ottawa, they salt and plow the roads here. This means that the majority of the surfaces are generally not too bad when the freezing rain is light - again, like today. "Generally" is the key word there. Some of the road surface, for whatever reason, does not get turned to slush. So you get black ice patches. Even when the road is slush, snow, and water, hazard conditions are still present. The increase in vehicular collisions every time there is adverse weather is a fairly clear indication of that fact (secondary source).

It's almost like the roads get harder to drive on when there's ice falling from the sky. Weird.

So you get people out on the road who drive slower than they normally would. How much slower is a judgement call, in the same fashion that the speed you would normally drive at is a judgement call. As you have probably noticed, many people have different judgement. Slow speeds are aggravated by limited road infrastructure to create shitty commutes. None of this is surprising.

So now you have people complaining about other drivers being "bad" - presumably, because they are driving slower than you'd like. Now I ask, how much slower does one have to be going to be a bad driver? From an engineering standpoint, I would pick the speed that gives me a comfortable (5-10%) margin over where I would lose the ability to control my vehicle on the worst part of the road that I have to travel on.  I don't want to be the guy explaining to the cop that "the roads were just fine until that one patch of ice" while my car is sitting in a ditch / back of a pickup / front lobby of the retirement home.

Personally, if I had to pick someone to be a bad driver, it'd be the person in the ditch.

Now, the above is based on my own assessment of how bad the roads are, and my own ability to handle my vehicle. These are two separate items that are completely subjective. If I had a high opinion of other people, I would think they would choose my method to select their speed as it provides the optimum method of getting from point A to point B in a storm. Realistically, this is not the case, since more people keep ending up crashing their cars in storms.

Coming back to the concept of a "bad driver". So far we have established that "bad drivers" move slower than one would like. We have also established that this is due to differences in

A) Awareness
B) Handling ability

My personal opinion is that (A) is much more important than (B), probably because my personal experiences with car crashes have been because someone did something stupid when they weren't paying attention - I discount impaired driving for the purposes of this argument.

So what are the solutions to this? Bitch about it on Facebook? Effective. Alternate solution: More difficult licensing. This will have two effects: first, the drain on the system will be HUGE (you think waiting at the MOT is bad now?), with a commensurate increase in cost. On top of that, you will have many, many people losing their license.

That's not hyperbole. In 2009, there were 123,192 collisions that resulted in an injury, and 2,011 that caused at least one death. That's in ONE year. I'm going to assume that most accidents are caused by driver error, rather than mechanical failure (feel free to argue that one). There were just over 23 million drivers, and I'll assume that half of the drivers in collisions lose their license (it's not a terrible assumption; the odds and ends come out in the wash, so to speak). That ends up with a little less than a quarter of a percentage of the population who cause an accident EVERY YEAR.

If we assume that my magical new licensing system perfectly removes bad drivers, another way to look at those numbers is that about 75,000 people per year will not be licensed.

 But every time you do something dumb, you don't cause an accident. There needs to be some combination of factors, like another car getting in your way. I'm going to use an old industrial safety estimation here - the accident pyramid.







This pyramid is sort of based on statistical knowledge, so it gives an okay estimation of the relationship between "Oh, shit, that was close" and "OH SHI-". Looking above, the number of fatalities is closer to 1/20 accidents that cause injury, but it's close enough for what I'm playing with. Let's assume that, based on my Highly Scientific (TM) reasoning, for each 30 of those accidents per year that caused an injury, there were 600 incidents where someone did something dumb and avoided the consequences. So now we're up to 1,500,000 people every year who should not have a license. If you remember the above, that's almost 10% of Canada's licensed drivers in a single year. And I'm willing to bet that it isn't completely made up people who's main problem is driving slow.

Obviously, this system does not count for repeat offenders, so the entire population would not lose their license. Still, you can see how that would quickly escalate. You're looking at a huge swath of the population suddenly unable to drive.

But of course, not you, because you're not a Bad Driver (TM). So by all means, continue to complain about people driving slow in the freezing rain.

Just don't be surprised when they take your license away.