Poll: Are people Ruder now than they Used to be?

[huck]

@RickJay

I’m not sure about Chicago, but across the USA, no, pedestrian accident rates are not going up in any meaningful sense. Rates did tick up in the USA and 2010 and 2011, but that was after an all-time low in 2009, and rates are still far, far lower than they used to be.

Why that is is a matter of some debate, but the notion that people are more rude when they drive isn’t supported by any evidence yet presented. In fact, it seems… well, I think it’s absurd, quite frankly. What world were people living in 20, 30 or 40 years ago when people drove really carefully and respectfully?

I didn’t say pedestrian/auto crash rates were going up; of course they have gone down as far fewer people walk today except in city centers. I said pedestrian/turning car crashes had risen. Those are the kinds of collisions that clearly have to do with a failure to yield the right of way. I actually see this every day in downtown Chicago–got hit that way myself once–the driver sees the pedestrian just fine in most cases but decides to go ahead and turn anyway.

but you’re right, I don’t have any evidence other than my own observations. I also observe that two days out of five on my way to the train station in the morning a driver pulling out of McDonald’s or a home driveway will decide to make an interval (causing me to hit the brakes) rather than wait for one. Again, they see traffic coming, just don’t want to wait for it.

I don’t think that drivers were all safe and respectful in the past but these are two specific kinds of rude (also dangerous) driver behavior I see very commonly now and did not see much thirty or even twenty years ago.

[donnie_darko]

I’m not really old enough at 23 to say first-hand if people have changed. I think that there was probably more of an emphasis on manners the further back in the past you go, and that “low class” society has become more emulated in recent years due to hip hop and the like.

But I don’t think modern people are any less moral than people generations ago were. It’s easy to think kids and teenagers are so horrible when you’re in your 30s/40s and beyond because you forget at that age you and your friends were just like them.

I do think things like not swearing in public company and dressing nicely have probably declined though, unfortunately.

[donnie_darko]

@Rushgeekgirl

I feel that over the past forty years of my life people seem ruder, angrier and more openly aggressive.

I live in the same neighborhood I grew up in so it’s not like the environment itself has changed.

Maybe it’s because you were a child and most people check their behavior around kids.

[donnie_darko]

@Cat_Whisperer

I think it’s generational, too, in that younger people don’t see the same things as rude. I think a lot of younger people think nothing of yakking away on their cellphones at top volume anywhere, because they and everyone they know do it. I do think it’s rude, because I don’t do that.

I ride public transportation, and it’s usually only one person or two people talking to each other than are loudmouths on any given bus ride. And I’m pretty sure I’m not the only younger person who is annoyed by it and doesn’t regularly engage in such behaviour.

[donnie_darko]

@madmonk28

I think it depends on how far back you want to go. A lot of rudeness was institutionalized. Jim Crow laws for example. Making someone get up and move to the back of a bus because of their skin color is pretty fucking rude, that fact that it was codified in law doesn’t make it less so.

Why do black people *still * sit on the back of the bus even though they don’t have to? Personally I like the back of the bus.