Have a look at a few dash cam accident videos [1]. There are many maladaptive patterns of behavior, but a frequent one that the average good driver can improve on is limiting speed on two occasions: when approaching a blind spot, and when passing stopped or slow traffic.
That second one gets lots of otherwise good drivers. They seem to think that by limiting their speed vs slow/stopped traffic they'd be encouraging people to dart in front of them. Which is somewhat true. But with limited speed, that's an avoidable or less injurious accident. By gunning it past stopped traffic, you make the accident unavoidable and more serious.
Inb4 deaths per mile driven, I'd argue higher VMT in the U.S.A. only proves the point - too many cars being driven too much because of silly land use. High VMT is acutally a symptom of a dangerous mobility system as much as a cause.
I (an American) was on holiday and Switzerland and was explained the process of getting your license back if you lose it. It is a big disincentive to driving badly and putting yourself at risk of that, to be sure.
People don’t usually act erratically for no reason. Maybe they suddenly stop because they see a deer sprinting towards the road off in the distance, and the person behind them didn’t see it. There are tons of reasons that look like they “erratically stop”, which are actually genuine safe behavior that the other may not know about.
But now even when in a car, I retain that "I'm invisible" mentality, which makes me much more aware of what other drivers are doing, and much more skeptical of their ability to make good decisions. This has saved me several times.
please stop doing that geocrasher
One thing HPDE taught me is that most people under brake in dangerous situations because they simply don't know the limit of their vehicle nor the sensitivity range of the brake pedal.
The hard braking heuristic makes sense when estimating risk of road segments, but not as a proxy for driver competence.
35 years without an accident on my record isn't because I'm a magnificent driver, it's because I always try to leave a way out for when something unexpected happens, because the unexpected _does_ happen.
The fact that some people may have the skill to drive more aggressively means nothing in the aggregate as far as insurance companies are concerned. If you are skilled enough to drive in that manner, you are skilled enough to avoid it as well. It's simply statistics.
Then use it? Mandate reaction speed tests or other driving mechanics competency evaluation (not road sign comprehension) and watch insurance margins explode.
The driver in my example did poorly and scored top marks in the heuristic.
On any modern car, just push it all the way and let ABS and stability control figure it out, and don't let the vibrating brake pedal spook you into releasing it. That's just ABS doing its thing.
Really though, getting a license is too easy in the USA. We really need to require some sort of car control course, including obstacle avoidance in the rain. Would be really nice too if it included an obstacle avoidance course in two cars: A huge SUV or pick-up truck and a more reasonably sized sedan. So many drivers think they need a huge vehicle to be safe while being completely unaware of how well smaller cars can likely avoid the crashes to begin with. Would probably get really expensive really quickly, though.
I realize this may come off as victim blaming, but I feel you should have an obligation to not endanger yourself even if by the laws of the road you are technically in the right. I would rather get cut off by and idiot and be at my destination thirty seconds later than having to deal with car repairs even when it is legally speaking not my fault.
