Societies thinking around cars really shows just how "unnoticeable" the influence of something becomes once it is ubiquitous. In a car-based world everything takes the shape of cars, and the crazy thing is, that many people won't even see how unusual that is.
I once lived next to a busy inrush road in a city. Once a week I could wipe black grime from my balcony desk. Every second night I would wake up from people speeding or trucks rushing through. One day I spent on the balcony counting cars. 100% of the SUVs had only one person in it. But the worst thing was the noise. I didn't notice back then, and I am not a sensitive person (I play in a noise rock band), but when I moved and was in a silent new flat, it felt as if someone had lifted a rock from my chest. And let's not think about the black grime.
Cities and cars are not a good mix, unless you own a car and don't care about the people living there. I especially dislike how naturally we are expected to yield public space to ever-bigger cars for only minor fees.
What I find most striking is that people with very rudimentary training are allowed to use machinery of 1.5 tons and more, in public, in the vicinity of unprotected bystanders.
This leads to about 43,000 deaths per year in the US alone. And for some reason this is considered normal.
In the meantime you have safety trainings for how to use a ladder properly in your org.
Don't get me wrong, work accidents do happen with ladders, and training/inspection can prevent them, but the risk stemming from ladders doesn't compare to cars.
The way society accepts risks tells a lot about that society.
If cars weren’t so ubiquitous otherwise in society, it would probably require several months of training to be licensed to drive a car in the workplace. And then you wouldn’t be allowed to drive faster than 15 mph except in special fenced in areas.
I mean I got my driving license in a country where the fast way of doing it takes 6 months and includes driving on a test pad where multiple dangerous situations are simulated:
- a wet road and you drive over a "moveable" section of road and as soon as your front wheels are over it jerks the rear wheels randomly to either the left and the right ans you need to recover
- a course that you drive through and randomly a wall of water emerges from holes in the street and you need to safely stop or avoid the obstacle (this teaches you about the safe stopping distance and problems that can emerge when you suddenly try to avoid things) with and without ESP
- driving too fast around curves on purpose
- trying to do similar things while multitasking in the vehicle to demonstrate how bad that influences your performance
I don't know what the level needed is in the US (I grew up in Austria), but even with that training I still feel cars are taken not seriously enough.
The level in the US is a written test on a subset of the rules, usually 6 months of mentored driving (need something like 50 hours with another licensed adult in the car), and a test that involves basically driving around the block and parallel parking. It sounds like a joke but it's true. Even most optional courses like driver's education generally don't put you on a skid pad or anything like you mention. I assume it's largely due to liability and lawyers - ironically they consider that type of training to be too dangerous even though you'll encounter more dangerous situations on the road and be unprepared for them.
The best thing I have found for this type of training is autocross (tire rack presents a special defensive driver course related to some autoX clubs too). Then snow/skid pad it's just finding a deserted parking lot cover in snow and ice for some low-speed recovery practice.
> Cities and cars are not a good mix, unless you own a car
Even if you own a car really. I've owned a car for the past 8 years because of how crap the public transport is. It's the only way of getting to many places. But I've never driven within my own town except for getting out of town. What I've always really wanted is an out of town car park I can cycle to with secure bike parking. That would completely eliminate the need to use a car in town. At that point I could probably do without actually owning the car and just grab one from a pool of rentals.
Unfortunately people don't know what they're capable of and insist on cars being parked right at their houses. So many people even get groceries delivered by someone else now. They are mostly just wheelchairs these days.
I am lucky enough to live in a european city with very decent public transport, so for the 2 times a year I actually need a car or a transporter I just rent it. I don't need to think about my car, where it is parked, what it needs in terms of maintenance, etc. I see this as a value that easily outweighs the benefits of having a car.
But that choice is easier if you live somewhere where you can both get everywhere using subways, busses, light trains and hop on a night train and wake up in the capital of a different country. I guess you have to experience this before you realize that a life without car is truly possible, when you shape your world in the right way.
Before I had a car I lived in a city and used my bicycle to get around everywhere. I could get to most places in the inner city far more quickly than my friends who had opted in to a disability: they now required cars to move around and their bodies had regressed into a blob-like form.
But this lifestyle became worse and worse over time and it was all due to cars.
Over 10 years I saw the roads become more and more clogged with cars. I saw cars get bigger and bigger and more and more powerful with the drivers seemingly less and less capable. I'd been using the road since I was 12. They'd been using it since they were 18 or so and only knew it from behind a dashboard. I saw more and more public money get poured into the car subsidy: "reducing journey times", making roads better for cars and worse for everyone else. Meanwhile train tickets increased, bike parking got worse or stayed the same and cars just seemed to get more and more affordable. I'm probably as experienced a cyclist as you can get but I now consider cycling on the road to be too dangerous to be enjoyable. Not to mention I started to question whether breathing diesel fumes and tyre dust in deeply was good for my health.
To add to that, just living in the city became unbearable. Car noise had become horrendous. I never heard my neighbours who lived in adjoined apartments. The only noise pollution to enter my own abode was from cars: the engines, the tyres and the sound systems (and I'm not talking about boom-boom subwoofers, just standard car radios). This really hit home one winter when we had weather bad enough to stop people driving for a week. Noise pollution is insidious: you only know it's bad when it's already driving you crazy.
Some cities have car-sharing schemes, where cars parked on the street (no particular place) are available to rent by the minute, hour or day. I use this in Copenhagen, though generally only a couple of times a year.
Green Mobility and Share-Now are the larger companies here.
I once lived next to a busy inrush road in a city. Once a week I could wipe black grime from my balcony desk. Every second night I would wake up from people speeding or trucks rushing through. One day I spent on the balcony counting cars. 100% of the SUVs had only one person in it. But the worst thing was the noise. I didn't notice back then, and I am not a sensitive person (I play in a noise rock band), but when I moved and was in a silent new flat, it felt as if someone had lifted a rock from my chest. And let's not think about the black grime.
Cities and cars are not a good mix, unless you own a car and don't care about the people living there. I especially dislike how naturally we are expected to yield public space to ever-bigger cars for only minor fees.