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Comment by ikeyany | Hacker News Reader

Are empty roads causing people to drive recklessly? Or are the isolation and disruption to people's lifestyles causing it?

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People are driving like maniacs on what were previously clogged up city streets from what I've seen. Hopefully a novelty that wears off.

And of course there's this: https://www.wsbtv.com/news/local/dekalb-county/90s-film-tv-a...

And this: https://www.fox5atlanta.com/news/atlanta-police-arrest-dozen...

Atlanta's always had a problem with street "racing." Not finish line racing, but fast joy-riding in big groups, especially street bikes.

It's not a novelty.

True, but safe to say the frequency is way up as a result of emptier streets.

I'd say as a result of boredom.

Narrow, congested streets with not a lot of open space around it for run off are safer than wider, empty streets with lot of space around for when a driver might get off course. Why? Because a narrower street will keep the drivers focused on the road and potential dangers, whereas in the wider setting invites drivers to speed and drive recklessly in general, thinking that when they do a mistake they'll be safe anyways. This has been studied, however I don't have a link to the research papers at hand.

My question is not "are empty streets safer?" My question is "how do we know the amount of reckless behavior isn't influenced by a once-in-a-lifetime event (pandemic)?"

We know that removing traffic calming devices causes faster and more reckless driving. Poorly designed streets in high-density areas tend to rely on heavy traffic as their primary means of traffic calming. The pandemic could also separately be playing a role, but its certainly not the only cause if it is a factor.

Empty roads. I've seen empty roads in normal times promote this sort of thing. Similarly, city's that build narrower roads experience less speeding

I'm still not convinced. And it wouldn't be hard to prove either: there must be data for how much empty roads affects reckless driving during non-pandemic times. So if today's empty roads are causing reckless driving at a similar rate, then I would conclude that the pandemic isn't relevant. It would have been nice for the BBC to compare the two cases in their article.

2014: https://www.citylab.com/design/2014/10/why-12-foot-traffic-l...

Probably a little of both. I doubt the souped up cars racing each other are just acting out due to being stir crazy.

If that were true, one would expect reckless driving to scale indirectly with density.

"Less-density-and-easier-to-speed-and-be-reckless" vs "cheap-gas-so-let's-go-for-it" vs "stir-crazy-in-lockdown" vs ... "rage-over-losing-my-job-or-having-to-work-in-risky-situations-while-the-rich-folks-work-from-home-while-saving-even-more-of-their-income" -- I think the latter feeling would contribute a lot to risky driving.

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