Are terrible driving habits on the rise?

People speeding and being aggressive is really getting to me these days.

I was parked outside a shop today, on a main road in a quiet enough town. A car pulled onto the main road, doing a safe enough speed, and some pr1ck already on the road, driving at speed had the audacity to drive up behind this fella and start flashing his lights.

The speed limit is 30. There's speed bumps all over this place. Where the f"ck are you going that you think you're being delayed by some lad driving the limit?

Another bug bear is constantly people changing lanes in traffic. Alright, fair enough sometime you need to, but the majority of time there is very little benefit.

I often pick a few cars in different lanes when I'm in traffic and gauge who's going faster. It's very unusual to lose sight of a car, where it gets so far ahead by constantly changing lanes. Totally pointless.

There are people that are just inherently bad drivers due to poor observational or spacial awareness skills. But then there are drivers that just don't give a damn about following the rules. Stand at a pedestrian crossing while waiting for the green man on any busy road and it wouldn't be unusual for one in three drivers passing to be looking down at their phone.

Pulled out of a spot in a local Lidl, and felt the beep of a lad. Hammering on it. He must not have seen me coming out.

Proceeded to flip me the bird. So I slowed down in front of him, still not main road. Put my hand up, what's your problem. He thought i was putting it up to him so followed me home..

Had a massive row with him. Window to window. Said it was 'his road,' and it was his right to keep driving. This is a public walkway too with a Centra, crèche, pharmacy etc. Kids running out all over the place. It is certainly not a road of sorts and it's certainly not his road.

The aggression was off the chart. Said I'd call the Gardai. But was shaking enough. He drove off, mouthing a few F bombs. Not from Ireland. Eastern Europe. I only mention that as he insisted that he knew the rules of the road in this country.

A lad will run a red light, full red and then absolutely lose it with you if you do anything other than say, off you go.

The aggro is OTT

There is absolutely no law or consequences for breaking it on the roads. Just something relatively minor but very obvious like dodgy plates is rampant.

Actually getting aggravated and aggressive when such minor mistake happen is a really bad habit. Especially when it happens in a carpark where you are supposed to move slowly and be careful for other drivers and pedestrians.

Assuming the post is 100% accurate (yes, I know) it's the other driver who is much more in the wrong by getting aggressive and taking it way too far by following the poster home. Over some supermarket carpark inconvenience, which is a place where you should expect these kind of inconveniences. Someone who can't control their anger is dangerous on the road, the poster might just be an annoyance. Think the OAP doing 60 on a 100 road vs. the driver who overtakes them in a blind bend.

Some of the driving i see these days is crazy, only the other day someone in a 07 BMW overtook me and squeezed himself between me and he lorry in front of me. Then a few seconds later pulled out again over a continuous white line approaching a corner and over took the lorry. Very dangerous driving.

After that happened i was thinking it would be great if more drivers had cameras on their dash and could capture some of these incidents. Maybe if there was a website to post these examples up on it could embarrass the drivers into changing their ways.

The OP is absolutely correct about red light breaking being an absolute epidemic at least in Dublin. From my own observations I found it's gotten particularly bad from the times of the COVID lockdowns.

I put it down to a number of things:

1. Changes to routing through the city. The number of one ways, no through roads at key junctions make driving around the city arduous. The bus crossover light on the north quays is possibly the worst implementations of a traffic management measure in the country.

2. Changes to sequencing of lights. Green time has been reduced to give more priority to pedestrians and cyclists. Nowhere is this more obvious than the red light breaking hotspot that is the north quays.

3. The reduction in road space afforded to cars - this has increased congestion.

4. The increase in traffic volumes.

5. Overuse of signalised junctions.

All five of these make progress through Dublin city an absolute ordeal which is obviously increasing driver frustration resulting in increased red light breaking. When lights have been sequenced where only two cars can make it through a junction on green or where a right turn is impossible unless on red then it's a recipe for disaster. In Dublin at least this all comes down to the current traffic management policy and the City Council's effort to make driving as unpleasant as possible in the City.

I can't say I've noticed the red light breaking phenomenon in other urban areas but I don't drive as regularly in other cities.

With regard to the OP, I've been driving 40 years and no terrible driving habits are not on the rise. They were just the same and worse when I started out. Read the newspapers of the 1950s/60s - full of stories of horror car crashes.

The main difference now is the amount of regulation surrounding driving. Maybe this just makes it seem worse as there's lots more rules and limits to break.

Whats your story? You need to let it go for the sale of your own quality of life

As I said I dont know how accurate the story is but seriously what's the point in engaging with someone in that manner? Life would be exhausting if you felt you had to react in that manner to every little indiscretion on the road. Flash your lights ot give a blast of the horn if it makes you feel better and move on

That's a very simplistic way of thinking about traffic management (and more broadly indeed human behaviour). People break red lights knowing that they will get away with it, but that's true of everyone - so actions and consequences are often a major factor, but not always. It is easy too, to blame the misbehaving driver but that doesn't solve the problem as it doesn't address the root cause, and that is frustration.

The frustration in Dublin at least has been caused by a relentless squeeze on the motorist by reducing their space and priority while at the same time maintaining or increasing the need to drive into the city. Cack handed approaches to traffic management (like the north quays bus crossover) in Dublin that are entirely ideology driven rather than being practical have gotten us in a situation where making steady progress through the city at almost any reasonable hour is impossible.

So like the pandemic, you could look and blame individual rule breakers but when a system requires broad compliance over an area that relies on cooperation rather than enforcement you really have to look at the system and environment that it is in. It needs to encourage compliance as a fundamental goal that ultimately also benefits you.