I doubt if it’s the same 5% each year — particularly in fatal accidents.
All three are true.
You get better at something the more you do it, up to a point. The more you do it, the less quickly you improve. Different people have different asymptotes.
I’m a musician and I’ve seen this very strongly. Some guys get remarkably good very quickly, and keep getting better the older they get. Some work like hell and get moderate results, and very quickly reach the point where, while they are still getting better, they’ll never catch up to a really talented high school player, even after a lifetime of effort. I’m in the latter category!
I remember at age 20 hearing a 25-year old guitarist who was pretty decent. I had improved so dramatically in the last year or two, I was confident that by 25 I’d blow that guy away. As it turns out, I never got half as good. At least I play piano better than he ever would!
If you’d seen me driving, you’d say ditto for that too!
Some years ago I read Traffic. At one point the author suggests that the measure of a good driver is the rarity with which close calls occur. A close call represents a roll of the dice, so to speak - an incident in which very slight shifts in parameters would result in a crash instead of a miss. If you keep having close calls, one day the parameters will be slightly different, and you’ll end up in a crash.
A good driver is one who possess the skills, aptitudes, and situational awareness, and experience to comprehend a dangerous situation unfolding while there is still time to take evasive action, before it becomes a close call.
As for why we’re not all experts after thousands of hours of seat time:
-I expect a big part of it is because most folks aren’t focused on getting better and better. An artist or craftsman who is engaged in craft is motivated to excel because their results will be judged on a very analog scale. Driving (like cleaning the house or doing laundry) is just another chore for most folks, not something in which they would bother to strive for excellence. It’s just something that needs to be done, and as long as you reach your destination intact this time, you’re not likely to be judged on whether you drove beautifully along the way or just good enough.
-There are matters of aptitude. Some people are just plain shitty at judging speeds and distances, or keeping track of multiple objects in their field of view, or having that visceral feel of what their car is doing or will need to be doing to get around that next corner. Unfortunately, all the practice in the world won’t help these people.
-There are differing levels of risk tolerance. Some drivers are willing to risk calamity in order to obtain a benefit. That benefit may be arriving at work/home sooner, or it may be just the roller-coaster thrill of sporty driving.
-Some people simply don’t comprehend what is at risk. They may have never been involved in a crash, or have only been involved in minor crashes, so they don’t really grasp the financial and physical pain caused by a really bad crash. The measure of whether this is true for any given individual can be made by observing the degree to which their driving improves after a wreck that hospitalizes them.
I think it is because we are ‘good enough’ that there is no pressure to improve, what we do works fine with minimal effort or thought. Once that level has set in it becomes ‘muscle memory’ and that is what you are going to use.
Now if you were clipping curves on turns, the damage to tires and the bumping up and down, along with the embarrassment of that skill set not up to snuff would tend to have one attempt to improve the basic skill set.
And with the sheer number of cars on the roads driven around by imperfect humans, I do think there are a astoundingly low number of accidents.
People do become better drivers as they get older, to a certain point. That’s why insurance rates are lower for older drivers vs beginners. There are many factors that track which drivers are better than other and why, this is the basis of insurance rates.
Another part of the picture is the lack of agreement about what constitutes being a good driver. Some people think being a good driver involves never exceeding the speed limit, even in the left lane. Some people think it means staying right except to pass. Confusion and cross purposes about how we should behave on the roads creates driving situations that are more complicated than they need to be, and makes us *all *worse drivers.
Fatal accidents are such a tiny subset of all accidents, that they are of negligible value statistically. I calculated my own 5%, based on 10-million accidents out of 200-million drivers. There are, of course, going to be some involved in multiple accidents and some involved in none, but it is still true that an overwhelming majority of drivers remain accident free for years at a time, and only have a few fender benders in their lifetime.
I think the more compelling question is why are people so bad at driving?
Driving is easy. IMO it’s actually too easy. It’s so easy, people disregard the obvious and extreme danger of hurling themselves down a road filled with obstacles that are also moving at high rates of speed. The odds are relatively high that you will die in your car. It’s pretty much a guarantee you will be involved in a collision at some point in your life, your fault or not. And yet people obliviously spend way too much of their focus while driving on things that are not driving.
Rather than simply driving (and probably listening to the radio or maybe carrying on a conversation with a passenger) people now have a lot more to do while driving because of phones.
People can have conversations with people on the other side of the world, with only one hand on the steering wheel if they’re holding their phone in the other. Between driving with only one hand and one’s mind on a conversation with someone who’s not sitting, at most, five feet away, that’s not conducive to being a good driver. People can check and write email messages, text, watch videos – everything of which a smartphone is capable, all while driving. That’s certainly not conducive to good driving.
I remember, about 30 years ago, seeing televisions that one could install in a car’s dashboard – but the screens wouldn’t activate while the car was moving. It was impossible (and, moreover, unthinkable) that someone could be distracted by something on a small screen while driving. A couple generations of drivers is now on the road thinking that’s possible, and normal.
I think it is pretty typical for an American driver to drive over 100,000 miles in a row successfully, defining “success” as “without colliding with any objects or unintentionally leaving the roadway”. In other words, we’re 99.999+% successful at the task of driving an additional mile.
Considering that it is also pretty typical to have to do some of the driving in snow or heavy rain or ice, and a fair amount of it in the dark, and to spend a significant share on unfamiliar roads, sometimes while also searching for road signs or landmarks or destinations, and sometimes sick or tired or with some minor injury (like for example a bandaged hand), perhaps while also dealing with misbehaving children or maps and directions or other hard to avoid distractions, I think this is really good.
Now, it should not be the case that people are doing this while intoxicated on liquor or recreational drugs, or prescription drugs, or while eating or drinking (nonalcoholic things I mean), or while using cell phones or reading the paper or applying makeup, nor should people be speeding or fooling around with spinning their wheels or racing other drivers. However, this stuff happens every day as well, and the averages we are talking about here actually include these dangerous misbehaviors, making how really good the well behaved people have to be to make the averages what they are even more impressive.
In what other behavior do humans demonstrate more skill en masse?
The reverse is the question I would ask: What is it that makes a reasonably intelligent person become a complete moron when they get behind the wheel.
Interesting thought - could one theoretically become a safer drunk driver through practice? I know that raw skill or experience are not generally defenses to a charge of DUI in a court of law, but could one “build up” the ability to safely drive drunk over time in a practical, real-world sense? Week 1, you drive around the parking lot after 1 shot of vodka. Week 2, you drive around the block after 1 shot of vodka, and around the parking lot after 2 shots of vodka. Week 3, work your way up to 3 shots of vodka and add highway driving after 1 shot. A few months later, you are wending your way up I95 after 5 shots, successfully dodging the sober idiots. You would still be breaking the law, but could you learn to break it safely while protecting yourself and others from physical harm? We could call the program “.08 and Skilled and Safe”.
I can clearly rememeber learning to drive and over a period of decades being exposed to different driving conditions I had to learn to adjust to. Ice and snow I had never experienced until I was 40 years old. I felt like a new kid driving. It was fun attempting to become good at this. Mountain driving around sharp curves and narrow highways I grew up with and find it funny that sometimes back east drivers are very apprehensive on these roads. Mostly we all quickly adapt.
I’m not sure that’s true.
For one, insurance rates for older people are lower, but that’s true even if they haven’t been driving long. This is because young people have terrible risk assessment skills. That’s something that you grow out of with time and brain development, not something that practice improves.
Secondly, insurance rates are lower for people with more driving experience who haven’t had accidents. People who have demonstrated themselves to be dangerous drivers have much higher insurance rates, or are often completely uninsurable without some kind of government subsidy/requirement.
Changing insurance rates may have less to do with people becoming better drivers as they get more experience and more to do with those two factors.
The best teacher I ever had taught me that “Practice makes permanent.”
If you practice “wrong” you will perform “wrong”.
As with driving, people get to a level of competence they are comfortable with and they don’t push themselves to get any better. When they are ‘tested’, an emergency or difficult situation, even if they fail they don’t decide to learn to get better at driving on snow or what ever came up that one time because those are rare.
In other words, being an “OK” driver is fine for 99.999% of driving.
I think that as most people age, they get a better perspective on what’s risky and what’s not. So here’s the question that I’d pose: Who’s the better driver? The 20 year old with lightning reflexes and poor decision making skills, causing him to tail people, drive way too fast for the conditions, not signal, and drives aggressively, or the 50 something guy who never had great reflexes or hand-eye coordination to begin with, but who’s learned over time not to tail people, to use his turn signal, and drive defensively?
In a purely physical sense the younger guy has the edge by far, but in an experience way, the older guy behaves better. People usually do get better at that kind of thing with time… right up until the point when they’re 80 and going 20 in the right lane.
I enjoy driving, and see it as something important to be at least technically competent, skilled would be better, every time I get behind the wheel, I intend to perform to the best of my ability, and improve if possible…
Some say I’m not The Stig, nor am I any of his cousins, I’m just a guy who enjoys a good spirited (but within legal speed limits) drive
90% of my driving is on back roads and secondary streets, and I can expect to encounter the following there;
Pedestrians, often with dogs, dogs, cyclists, farm equipment (tractors, often towing haying equipment), wildlife ranging from frogs and mice all the way up to møøse, but white tailed deer are the most common…
Weather can range from clear and dry, to ice storms and blizzards, roads are often unplowed.
Add in the “other road users” factor of inattenive or otherwise crappy drivers, massholes (redundant, I know) and idiots on cellphones yakking and or texting… It’s in my best interests to stay alert and scanning for threats while driving.
To that end, I DO pay attention exclusively to driving, I don’t have the radio on, so i can hear what the tires are telling me for road conditions, I drive a manual transmission for enhanced control, and always have either good street tires on during spring to mid fall, and snows from late fall to early spring.
It’s my duty as an observant and safe driver to make it successfully to each destination, distractions are not welcome, I do my best to eliminate them and concentrate on the road 100%.