Online communities dedicated to criticizing cars and the people who love them have developed an insult that … kind of makes sense.
Posted because r/fuckcars is mentioned
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People don’t calculate risk correctly because we use the wrong baselines. Am I likely to accidentally kill someone while driving my car1? No.
But: the right baseline to use isn’t ‘How likely am I to accidentally kill someone with my car?’, it’s ‘How likely am I to accidentally kill someone by doing [activity x]?’.
When ‘activity x’ is ‘driving’, it’s obvious that I’m enormously more likely to kill someone with my car than I am doing almost anything else.
1 That is, my hypothetical car; I don’t drive.
I can give you a perfect example of car brain that even applies to people who try not to drive too much:
The other day I saw a dude complaining that they keep putting zebra crossings at roundabout exits and he insisted that this was just done to use pedestrians to slow down roundabout exits, but that what these city planners were doing was dangerous, since more than once he had almost run over a pedestrian or stopped suddenly and endangered cars behind him. :/
Then somebody actually asked: “Ok, so where the fuck do you suggest that the zebra crossings be placed for the people actually walking along the streets that cross the roundabout in multiple directions? Do you expect them to walk 20m further?”
sudden paradigm shift and some drivers actually became aware of car brain.
My city used to have concrete barriers separating some painted bike gutters and the main road. They removed them after a couple years because drivers were complaining that they kept hitting the barriers and denting their cars. Carbrains would rather make streets less safe for cyclists just to preserve their fragile plastic boxes. It’s infuriating
This is why I like the term “Windshield bias,” a very common issue is talking about a space/experience someone has only experienced from behind a windshield, and getting someone to have a different experience can help cure that
Tbf I think it probably would be better to move them out a bit or some aren’t well signposted as it is kind of dangerous. There’s a difference between deliberate ignorance and honest mistakes, this falls into honest mistake category
“Windshield Bias” is a term I think needs to be more widely-used, because it’s more of a description of the issue than an insult
