The coronavirus pandemic emptied America’s roadways. Now speeders have taken over.
(an article by Luz Lazo, The Washington Post)
Police agencies around the country are reporting a rise in speeding tickets.
May 11, 2020 at 7:00 AM EDT
Three months into the coronavirus pandemic, the United States faces another crisis: a surge in speeding and reckless behavior on the nation’s roadways.
Reckless driving has increased dramatically since March, leading to a disproportionate number of speed-related crashes and fatalities, according to law enforcement and traffic experts.
“We’re getting reports every week of dozens of drivers being cited for traveling over 100 miles an hour. That’s just insanity for our roadways,” said Michael Hanson, director of the Office of Traffic Safety in Minnesota, where 42 people were killed in traffic collisions in the first 45 days after the state’s March 16 stay-at-home order went into effect. By comparison, 29 people were killed on Minnesota highways during the same period in 2019.
“We have had half the traffic and twice as many fatalities,” Hanson said. “We have more available lane space for drivers to use and abuse . . . and people are really, really abusing.” Reports of drag racing, drivers chasing land-speed records, and more speed-related crashes began setting off alarm bells for police agencies across the country almost immediately after states began their coronavirus lockdowns in mid-March and traffic volumes fell dramatically.
In Atlanta, a police officer, who tested positive for the novel coronavirus and was supposed to be in self-quarantine, was pulled over by a state trooper who clocked him driving 130 mph in a 65-mph zone on Interstate 75 last month.
In New York, a police officer assigned to a coronavirus response unit was killed April 25 when a driver accused of drag racing on the Cross Island Parkway struck the back of his Harley-Davidson motorcycle, the New York Daily News reported.
And in early April, social media exploded with celebrations of a new coast-to-coast speed record amid the coronavirus shutdowns, following reports that a crew of three men drove from New York to Los Angeles in 26 hours 38 minutes. To make that time, they would have had to be traveling at more than 100 mph.
Indeed, traffic data shows average speeds have more than doubled in some cities and are significantly above the posted limits on roads typically known for their crawling traffic.
Police agencies from New York City to Los Angeles are reporting writing more speeding tickets. State troopers in Minnesota, Maryland, Virginia and California, among others, have clocked drivers topping speeds of 130 mph.
“The trend is very concerning,” said Catherine Chase, president of Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety. “At a time of national crisis, drivers should not be turning our roadways into racetracks.”
'Every mile is riskier'
Traffic nationwide is down 41 percent compared with pre-pandemic volumes, according to the transportation-data firm Inrix. Some of the country’s busiest highways have emptied, with volumes down by 50 percent in Los Angeles, 60 percent in New York City and 68 percent in Washington, Inrix said.
But traffic incidents, such as crashes, have dropped only 21 percent nationwide.
In some of the most congested areas of the country, average speeds have increased by as much as 250 percent.
For example, the average 5 p.m. speed on Interstate 405 in Los Angeles went from a crawling 19 mph to 68 mph, Inrix says. In Chicago, the average speed on Interstate 290 more than doubled to 62 mph from 24 mph. In the Washington region, average speeds during the evening rush rose from 27 mph to nearly 70 mph on the Capital Beltway, well above the posted 55 mph limit.
It is not surprising that speeds are up, given that traffic congestion during the commute has largely disappeared. But officials and experts say what’s troubling is people driving in excess of 80 mph on highways — and even worse, on neighborhood streets shared with bicyclists, scooters and pedestrians.
“With less cars on the road, we would expect that crashes and citations would be down. And what we’re seeing is an increase in dangerous speeding and dangerous driving,” said Jeff Marootian, director of the D.C. Department of Transportation.
What’s more, those speeding drivers are also more distracted. A study released Thursday by the data analytics company Zendrive found motorists are braking harder and using their phones more while driving. The analysis of millions of miles of driving data based on smartphone sensors found speeding is up by 27 percent on average, while hard braking climbed 25 percent. Phone usage on the nation’s roadways steadily increased in the weeks following the stay-at-home guidelines, up by 38 percent in mid-April, according to the report.
The behavioral changes contributed to a 20 percent increase in collisions per million miles traveled since the beginning of the shutdowns, the report says.
“As a result, every minute spent on the road is riskier, every mile is riskier,” the report goes on. “The data shows our anxiety over social distancing and growing attachment to screens has carried over into our driving behaviors.”
In the Washington region, average speeds are up by as much as 50 percent on some routes in the nation’s capital, city transportation officials said, and there has been a troubling increase in people driving 15 mph or more over the speed limit. The problem is more pronounced in the Washington suburbs, where a string of speed-related crashes led police to step up enforcement and issue hundreds of traffic citations in recent weeks.
Maryland State Police beefed up enforcement on the Capital Beltway in late April after responding to crashes where speed was suspected as a cause. Police investigated five separate tractor-trailer collisions in one day, on April 30, at least three “caused by speed too great for conditions,” police said. Only minor injuries were reported.
State officials made a direct plea to drivers last week to slow down, saying the string of crashes was putting people at risk, including essential workers during the pandemic, and resulting in unnecessary road shutdowns and delays.
“Please avoid the temptation to speed on the unusual open road,” Maryland Transportation Secretary Greg Slater said in a statement. “If you do need to travel, please do your part and slow down.”
Although traffic is down 50 percent in the state, the number of crashes has been reduced by only 24 percent, while fatalities are down about 30 percent, according to preliminary data on incidents investigated by Maryland State Police.
Maryland state troopers have issued more than 1,000 traffic citations and warnings on highways in suburban Washington since March 15. On Sunday alone, troopers cited 22 drivers who were traveling at least 25 mph over the 55-mph speed limit on a section of the Beltway in Prince George’s County. One driver was caught going 136 mph.
Across the Potomac River, in Virginia, state troopers have caught people flying through 55 mph zones on Interstate 95 at speeds as high as 132 mph.
Virginia State Police spokeswoman Corinne Geller said troopers have seen an uptick in more “extreme speeding” on interstates that are less crowded during the stay-at-home directives, and they are more actively enforcing posted speed limits.
Traffic fatalities in Virginia dropped nearly 30 percent since the state of emergency went into effect in mid-March, according to preliminary crash data. But speed has been a factor in a larger share of serious crashes during the coronavirus emergency, contributing to nearly half of the 72 traffic fatalities in the state since March 13.
“We also remind drivers that an open road is not an open invitation to speed,” Geller said.
'It's a selfish attitude'
So, what’s going on? The simplest explanation for the phenomenon, some psychologists and public safety experts say, is that the roads are open, giving people room to speed. Then there’s the collective effect: If everyone in traffic is moving faster, individual drivers will drive faster even if it’s above the speed limit.
But other factors may also be contributing, experts and advocates say, noting that opportunities to speed also exist during normal times — at night when roads are desolate, for example.
Jonathan Adkins, executive director of the Governors Highway Safety Association, which works to improve traffic safety, said speeders may be under the impression that police are not prioritizing traffic stops during the pandemic. Others, he said, may be aware that some police departments are operating with limited resources because many of their officers are infected with the virus or because they have reallocated services to the health crisis response.
“People are doing it because they think they can get away with it,” Adkins said.
Psychologist Emanuel Robinson, senior study director at Westat’s Center for Transportation, Technology and Safety Research, said motorists speeding now may be doing so for the same reasons they do in normal times.
“It could be boredom, which is one of the reasons that typically comes up for why people speed. They want excitement; they want the adrenaline rush of it,” Robinson said.
People dealing with the stress of the pandemic and dramatic change in their lifestyles might find speeding a liberating experience.
“They get some excitement out of it as a way to maybe counteract some of the negative and stressed feelings that they’re having right now,” Robinson said. “This might be kind of an emotional release that we’re seeing up here. It’s just like we’ve seen risky behavior pop up in other situations when people are under stress. They turn to drinking or to drugs or in this case, speeding is a drug.”
There is some truth to that theory, said Hanson, of Minnesota’s traffic safety office, recalling a case from two weeks ago when a driver who was pulled over while traveling at 110 mph in a 60-mph zone in the Minneapolis area could come up with only one answer to why he was speeding.
“He said, ‘I am just out for a joyride,’ ” Hanson recalled. “It’s a selfish attitude,” Hanson said. Especially during the pandemic, when hospitals are stressed, people are dying from the virus and a preventable crash would add another burden to first responders.
“We just can’t afford to make bad decisions behind the wheel,” he said.
Sam Schwartz, a former New York City traffic commissioner, said he is puzzled by the surge in speeding offenses in the city, which has been the country’s biggest hot spot during the pandemic.
“There is no logic,” he said, noting that speeding citations have more than doubled in the city over the course of two months. The average number of citations issued daily went from 10,800 in early February to 24,800 in April.
FDR Drive, typically one of the slowest in Manhattan because of congestion, has now been nicknamed the FDR 500 — as in the Indy 500, said Schwartz, whose firm analyzes traffic data.
“These people are not only creating a danger to themselves, a danger to others, but it’s at a time when New York needs every hospital bed it could get for a victim of the virus. This is just not only dumb, but incredibly selfish,” Schwartz said.
Traffic safety advocates are pushing for more enforcement and education, concerned that the bad behavior could continue as states reopen and more people return to the roads.
Adkins wants elected leaders to add another message to residents in their coronavirus briefings to the public.
“When you’re out socially distanced, wear a mask,” he said. “And when you get behind the wheel, slow down.”
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NOTE:
The above article appeared in the Washington Post Newspaper, but it confirms what I have been actively thinking for at least the past 6-8 months.
In my personal experience, I have found that given the possibility that our personal opinions can be erroneous, mistaken or divergent from factual realities, having one’s suspicions confirmed by another person (or an erstwhile ‘authoritative’ source like a newspaper) is always refreshing and gratifying, since otherwise it’s all too easy to feel that perhaps our own perceptions are misleading or otherwise in variance with factual reality.
Disregarding the fact that the Washington Post is one of the nation’s leading more ‘left-leaning’, progressively liberal daily news rags, the appearance of this piece nevertheless considerably bolstered my own individual discernments and impressions.
And since we have a Sacramento County Sheriff Deputy living just a few houses away from us, he has also recently affirmed and underscored my intuitive feeling that there are larger than ever numbers of insanely reckless and feckless speeders on the local (Sacramento) highways and roads, than ever before.
‘Eric’ tells me that he and his LEO colleagues have been writing substantial and ever greater numbers of speeding tickets over the past year…and also confirmed that his California Highway Patrol LEO counterparts (who have responsibility for our major highways hereabouts, Highway 99 and InterState-5) have also issued significantly more speeding and reckless-driving citations locally, often for stops in which the speeders were clocked at speeds in excess of 100 mph!
Since we live only two blocks from InterState-5 (and a block away from a major East-West ‘feeder’ to it), I find I am frequently awakened from a sound sleep (between 10 PM and 3AM in the early morning) by speeders who are red-lining their beefed-up ‘muscle cars’ mercilessly. The same holds true for powerful ‘sportsbike’ motorcyclists and given that I am a life-long motorist (including several years of sportscar racing at sanctioned SCCA road-racing/track events in the 80s) and have driven high-performance motorcycles for over 40 years (albeit sanely and responsibly), I am very familiar with the sort of noise these 600-1000cc+ machines produce when pushed to their absolute mechanical limits by their adolescent owners!
At such hours, in the expected nighttime stillness of the winter months, the sounds of these machines being driven to insane RPMs on the highway (and feeder street) carries loudly through the cold, crisp air, and despite having double-pane windows in our home that deaden a lot of extraneous external sounds, it’s impossible to not be rudely awakened repeatedly in this manner with annoying regularity.
And if it’s not that, then it’s a small but incredibly noisy, local ‘side-shows’ being held impromptu at our nearby neighborhood shopping center (South Land Park Hills) that lies about 10 blocks from us. At such moments I often wonder, helplessly enraged by all this, “Where are our local police? Surely they can’t be unaware of all this?”
And yes, these are the same police, sheriffs and highway patrolmen that our bleeding-heart leftist-liberal progressives want to ‘defund’, needless to say and whom are placed on paid-leave whenever they are forced to shoot some perpetrator for acts of violent public misbehavior (usually involving weapons and active resistance, of course) in self-defense.
Today, a Saturday, I had occasion to travel down several of our local neighborhood’s major arteries to reach a muffler shop where I had arranged to have the exhaust silencer on my Chevy truck replaced. This led me down some rather notoriously seedy boulevards through the local ‘barrio’. En route, between my home and this shop, I encountered no less than three separate instances of reckless and inappropriately aggressive driving by drivers of modified, hopped-up and high-powered ‘street machines’. One came up behind me (I was traveling in the right lane at the 40 MPH speed limit) at what must have been about 70 mph (this on a city street that is largely residential!), then just as I was initiating a lane change to the left, signaling my intent well in advance and slowly transitioning so as to give following traffic plenty of prior warning, this jerk appears right on my tail.
When I checked side and rear mirrors, I had had at least 500 feet of free road behind me in that left lane (plenty of room to execute an announced lane-change, under 'normal circumstances...i.e. with turn signals blazing) , but just as I began to move over, suddenly this jerk appeared from behind like a rocket and forced me to back off from my well-advertised lane change. To not have would surely have caused a collision, such was the aggressiveness and needlessly high speed the idiot was displaying.
And of course, to add insult to illegality, this puerile asshole laid on his horn as he passed, as if I were the transgressor here! This was only one instance of three similar ones experienced on the way down there (in broad daylight!) and it really boggles my mind to find such brazenness passing for acceptable road manners, these days. Not a cop in sight, of course, which is doubtless further incentive for these cretins to engage in such grossly unsafe and highly annoying maneuvers.
When I returned home, afterwards, there were a few other encounters with reckless actions by others on the road (although none quite as overtly dangerous as this one was) and I remarked on all this to wifie, telling her that it seems to me that the roads and streets are becoming markedly more hazardous than I recall them ever being in previous years. She agreed completely, of course, and since I am an excellent, highly skilled and experienced driver of long standing (and so is she, having spent many years on the road as a traveling communications engineer visiting remote sites in the state),
I am quite confident that my driving is in no way reflective of the popular stereotype of your typical 74-year-old ‘geezer’ we all encounter every days in our driving interactions with others. In other words, although the streets are full of idiots these days, I’m NOT one of them!
One detail that the Washington Post columnist failed to single out in his opening remarks here is that almost all of these reckless and aggressive speeders are very likely younger people, since the point was at least made that many of them seem to engage in these antics for the sheer ‘thrill’ of it (the ‘adrenalin charge’, the author characterised it as being). That behavioral aspect is most profoundly NOT a personality factor of most people over the age of 40, of course, since according to accepted theories bearing on human growth, maturity and experience, ‘thrill-seeking’ behavior behind the wheel of a car is the preserve of the juvenile, immature ‘jerk’ and not typical of a truly ‘grown-up’, sober and mature (and un-distracted) driver.
But of course, he can’t state that openly, since he’s probably a younger person himself and it would be politically ‘incorrect’ for him to criticise his own smartphone-distracted age-group (what would his social media peers think…horrors!).
At any rate, such are my ruminations on the declining safety of California roads and highways this evening, as this particular, largely unforeseen and unanticipated effect of the COVID-19 crisis makes itself felt, to add to our collective pandemic miseries!
Next time you yourself encounter some young jerk engaged in such foolish and highly dangerous behavior on the road, remember what I said here and see if you also don’t agree!
Whenever I get the chance to communicate casually with younger people (and the opportunity to discuss driving occurs), If possible, I try to share the fact that in the course of my own, earlier life I’ve traveled at twice the speed of sound (2.01 mph) and flown at altitudes at or slightly in excess of 60K feet.
Consequently, knowing that I’ve ‘been there and done that’ already, as a ‘younger dude’, my overall conclusion, after 7 decades of life, is that it makes far more sense to take it easy, slow down the pace and ‘stop occasionally to smell the flowers’ along the way...even if you're still young and full of thrill-seeking urges. I tell them, furthermore, that speed and reckless, risky driving further proclaims a profoundly unacceptable and quite selfish regard for one’s fellow drivers on the roads to the world, a world we must all share, as wisely and harmoniously as possible for mutual survival.
I am also wise enough to know that for many younger guys these days, who in all likelihood lack the sensibility, refinement, intelligence and awareness that ostensibly comes with age (as the theory postulates), exposure to the larger world & life experience, reckless driving practices in their grossly over-powered cars are about the only cathartic ‘outlet’ they (dimly) perceive as being within their reach to help somewhat relieve the necessary boredom and self-discipline that the COVID-19 pandemic requires of us all! And while risky behavior is an inherent characteristic of youth, and the youthful ability to conceive of a sudden violent end to their own life (or that of others) eludes most, it happens nevertheless every day to a great number of ‘kids’ who sadly could have gone on to lead fulfilling, productive lives, once true adulthood has been reached!
And there you have it: some lugubrious, gloomy, pessimistic and somewhat melancholy (butg nonetheless quite reality-based) ruminations on the f*cked-up ‘human condition’ that obtains not just in the Calipornia (sic) hick-town of Suckatomato, on this cold January evening, but all over the nation!
Remember! Only you can forestall and/or prevent ‘brain-up-ass’ syndrome (the sort of injury that so many of those unanticipated ‘sudden stops’ from a high rate of speed cause)!
As physicists are so fond of reminding us: "It's not speed itself that kills, but the exponentially adverse inertia of sudden stops that excessive speed may necessitate..."
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Postscript:
In the above paragraphs, I complained about the excessive noise generated by speeders and late-night side-shows that annoyingly wake us up while were trying to sleep. Today, a further part of the puzzle came together when I realised that another reason why 'goosed-up' performance (muscle) cars make so much noise when driven in the manner described is that speed-crazed kids and gear-heads still think that manual-transmissions are the only rilly kool set-up for an overpowered, under-muffled machine such as they prefer. Obviously aggressive shifting displays are as much of a necessary thrill for these puerile dimbulbs as the mere fact that they have so much excess horsepower!
Manual-transmissions are far noiser, of course, when driven to RPM extremes than automatic types, hence automatic-equipped machines are NOT a preference among these reckless, junior-racer retards. Power shifts and grossly overpowered cars go hand-in-hand! A bumper sticker I saw yesterday on one such car helped to underscore that fine point. It said 'Real chicks drive sticks'. Yeah, right... QED dumb-dumb chicks, maybe!
People whose transportation needs are far more pedestrian and conventional (especially work-a-day commuters more concerned with getting to work on busy freeways, of course) have very likely (if they're at all half-smart) found that on 'normal', highly congested, higher-speed thoroughfares (like freeways) manual-shifting cars are simply too frustrating to drive (especially at the lower, creep-along, bunmper-to-bumper speeds that busy commute hours impose on these highway users). In such unending stop-and-go situations, an automatic transmission is quickly found to be the only sane option.
Naturally, when the pandemic hit and freeway congestion suddenly became a thing of the past, the radically lowered traffic density proved a boon to the speeders and freeway/roadway boy-racers! Suddenly, high RPM (and noisy) speed-shifts in manual-transmission cars became feasible once again...especially late at night when there's now hardly any traffic on the freeways (except for semi-truck types, who must travel at all times of the day or night, regardless of pandemic constraints) or adjacent feeder streets.
This overall realisation came to me like a lightning bolt, when I was trying to make sense out of the whole deal and it certainly is a logical surmise!
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