Can’t answer that, but last year’s trips through Texas, Arkansas, Tennessee, Ohio, N. Carolina, S. Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana netted a total of 6 actively patrolling* police cars. We were actually watching for them and counting.
Watching the insanity on the roads makes me feel like I’m in Jurassic Park, and the dangerous animals have noticed the fences are off.
*Not working construction zones. It seems that construction zones now have at least one stationary police vehicle with its lights flashing.
Sorta. Agree completely that the bulk of that cite’s data is about the early COVID days. But …
At least some of the data in that cite is from 2021 when most of the widespread COVID precautions had been dismantled or ignored in most of the country. I have sice read news articles about NHTSA’s data continuing to support the same high-accident trend into 2022. Their website’s organization and search facility is too broken for me to find the later-dated studies & press releases I recall reading about in the general press.
Little Rock adjacent here and I saw a traffic stop on 30 this past Sunday. I don’t see traffic stops daily, but they’re not an unusual sight around here. I don’t commute daily, but my wife seems convinced that drivers have gotten worse since COVID restrictions came to an end. I’ve noticed some problems, but fear I might have some confirmation bias affecting my conclusion.
No, I have not noticed an increase in enforcement here in Dallas.
But it does seem like since 2019, drivers have become more selfish, reckless, and disdainful of traffic laws and norms. It’s like people got out of the habit of driving like civilized people, and now drive like they’re extras in a Mad Max movie or something. It’s less of the patently insane stuff that we’ve always seen, and more of the extraordinarily self-centered driving. The “I don’t want to wait, so I’ll pull out into fast moving traffic and let the people behind me deal with it.” sort of attitude.
In Western Washington there are usually police patrols pulling over speeders. I don’t go to Eastern Washington very often, but there are places that have reputations for strict enforcement (Ritzville, WA for example)
The small town (500 people) has TWO cop cars/SUV’s. But they can’t afford to put cops in them. So the town just parks them on the road and moves them around every couple of weeks.
They even put mannequins in them to make it look like it’s occupied.
Sounds like a plan that Barney Fife would come up with doesn’t it. Well, I guess it’s better than nothing.
That town is about 5 miles away. The County sheriffs office is closed from 11pm to 7am (last I heard). So I guess we have the State Patrol if we need help. And I mean no deputies on patrol or available. Not just the business office.
It’s almost like a certain public figure that many people idolized has changed the zeitgeist from “Greed is good” to “Utterly selfish is good”. It just took / takes a few years for that attitude to soak into everyone.
COVID wasn’t the cause nor the effect. But it may have amplified the severity a bit by letting more circumspect people practice being selfish with little adverse feedback during the low-traffic COVID era and now the new habits have become thoroughly rooted in nearly everyone even though the adverse consequences are much larger now that traffic levels are normal again.
While I don’t see this a lot, I definitely see this more often than I did pre-COVID (FWIW, like the OP, I live in the Chicago area). It’s not uncommon for me to see drivers blowing stop signs, blowing through red lights if they don’t see traffic coming (or pushing through the yellow-turning-red light even more), passing on the shoulder, and general lane violations – it all comes across, to me, as more aggressive driving, among a minority of drivers, than was the norm previously.
Does this mean that accidents are fewer per-capita or more per-capita compared to pre-pandemic levels. I couldn’t quite tease out which way they were expecting them to go.
Last week I was in the left-turn lane at a stoplight. I was sitting still, and waiting for the left turn. I noticed an ambulance coming from left to right, and struggling to get through the intersection because of the heavy traffic in the same direction as it.
Eventually the people turned right, moved over, and generally got out of the ambulance’s way, while the rest of us held our positions to let the ambulance pass, regardless of what the stoplight said.
Up zooms some little sporty car from behind me somewhere. This asswipe gets to the intersection just before the ambulance, slows down, honks his horn repeatedly while slowed, and then enters the intersection, making the ambulance slow down.
WTF? I have never seen anything quite so brazenly self-centered before. It’s like that guy DGAF that there was an ambulance about to enter the intersection, he just wanted to go, so he honked his horn and went.
Southwest to south centralish idaho, I see the State Police pulling people over here and there, but my impression isn’t one of heightened enforcement. People are driving worse though. Stupid asshole worse and sometimes just stupid worse. I fall into the asshole category myself when I’m not driving for work, ain’t gonna lie.
I’m used to that from rural Texas, where you’d better be going 34 at the 35 MPH sign. The small town might only have one patrol car, but it’s in the Dairy Queen parking lot making easy revenue for the city. What I’m much less used to are little towns that will enforce the freeway speed limit, so +10 is safe, except on this little stretch that touches some city limits.
That’s good to know. If the highway is 75 or 80, I’m not going to be exceeding the speed limit by much anyway.
It looks like Oregon is going to be the annoying one, with 65 or 70 MPH speed limits. There will be real temptation to be doing 10 over, which in some places is ignored, and in others is a ticket.
As for just general driving aggressiveness, I’m seeing much more people using the HOV/Toll lane as a passing lane or moving out of it to avoid the toll camera. I saw it twice in the 10 miles I was on the freeway this morning, and traffic wasn’t even that bad, and I don’t think ever went below 55. It’s “up to” a $1000 fine for crossing the solid line in and out of the toll lane. I wish it was enforced, mostly because it’s very dangerous, not that I care if somebody wants to pass me.
Accidents per mile driven increased a great deal during the pandemic. i believe that total vehicle fatalities also increased. everyone expected that to drop back down as the pandemic eased, and traffic returned to normal. but it hasn’t. we are still looking at elevated vehicle fatalities and, iirc, elevated accidents as compared to before the pandemic.
i don’t work in auto any more, and i don’t have numbers handy. but I’ve seen a lot of slides of both industry trends and the trends my employer sees. personal auto insurance is a mess.
It’s difficult to impossible to paint a picture of what all departments are doing. Before, during and after Covid there was not one single way. Each department has what I can loosely call a different corporate culture. Neighboring departments could have vastly different ideas about traffic enforcement.
During the height of Covid I was working in one of the worst hot zones. We went to a new hybrid schedule which minimized exposure between squads and officers. It also meant we were severely understaffed on every shift. There were no traffic stops. As a supervisor I told my guys if I heard them on the radio pulling over a car the next thing I better hear is it was because they were shooting at you. After we came back off of that schedule many officers did not go back to pulling over cars. It’s wasn’t greatly emphasized in my department but some take it to extremes. It’s still part of the job.
In my state there is a law against requiring a ticket total for officers, even a perfectly reasonable one. That might have an effect.
Quoting myself for context from upthread ~2 months ago:
I have just learned of a multi-state initiative called “Operation Southern Slowdown”.
It consisted of concentrated speed enforcement from July 18 to July 22 2023. It involved local through state agencies in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, and Tennessee. It appears to also have been run in prior years, generally spanning a week-ish during in the summer.
I happened to be out of town over most of this year’s effort. I have maybe seen an uptick in highway patrol traffic stops on my local urban / suburban interstate before and after. Maybe.
The general speed of traffic seems unaffected by whatever efforts they may have expended.
Good bet the sporty “asswipe” saw he (probably he) had a green light and didn’t understand why everyone else was stopping. Modern cars are so close to soundproof that sirens cannot be heard, especially not with your tunes turned on, much less cranked.
None of which excuses blasting up on an obviously weird traffic situation without at least considering that the reason it’s weird has something to do with either a crash or passing emergency vehicles.
But I can see how the unimaginative person unwittingly finds themselves in the middle of an intersection with an emergency vehicle going crosswise at the same time.
