The Plus Four Wristlet Route Indicator, a British product from the 1920s, is a scroll-map navigator in the shape of a watch. It came with tiny interchangeable instructions that you scrolled manually to see which roads to take when driving.
People have been trying to invent the GPS for as long as people have been driving and I for one think that’s beautiful
Shitpost-level take: the true divide in this debate is between autistic people and people with ADHD.
If you can’t deal with lots of noise, touch, and people in general, obviously you aren’t going to like public transit.
If you can’t deal with sitting still and putting continuous boring low-level effort into keeping control of something, you’re not going to enjoy driving.
The other obvious divide is “people with carsickness” vs. not. I can’t read or look at my phone as a passenger in a car without feeling nauseous, but I can do those things in a train just fine.
(And yes, I’m an ADHD person who strongly prefers public transit.)
I’m autistic and anxious and buses are better than driving because I’m not responsible for avoiding collisions? I can usually reliably get a seat, often one with an empty neighbor and basically always with a courteous one. Usually the loudest thing by far is the machinery and nothing smells bad. I notice my stops. I avoid the one bus that’s always late. I was more annoyed by buses when I had a 90 minute commute, but now part is on a campus shuttle and so it’s more like 60 minutes with a nice indoor break in the middle.
Then again I’m probably atypically social in public for an autistic, probably due to not hanging out with people enough or something. I reliably end up thanking bus drivers and talking to cashiers about groceries and talking to miscellaneous people about weather.
Basically exactly this. My problem with driving is the exact opposite of “continuous boring low-level effort”.
I’m driving. The guy behind me is tailgating. I move to the rightmost lane. The guy being me is tailgating. Fuck. Time to panic.
I’m driving. I’m waiting to turn left onto a main road. The main road doesn’t have stoplights or stop signs. There’s lots of traffic. The traffic never stops. The guy behind me honks. Did I do something wrong, or is he just an asshole? Fuck. Time to panic.
I’m driving. It’s a red light, and I’m in the right turn lane. I can’t see oncoming traffic from this angle. I could pull forward into the pedestrian lane, but that’s illegal. I wait. The guy behind me honks. I pull forward into the pedestrian lane. A pedestrian yells at me. Fuck. Time to panic.
A lot of US traffic intersections are designed so that you can’t actually navigate them unless you break the law. Those are the ones self-driving cars have the most trouble with, unsurprisingly. And they’re also the ones I have the most trouble with.
It’s a many-sided optimization problem, and if I make a mistake, I die. There are so many situations in driving where zero options are perfectly safe, and I just have to choose one. It’s not even the risk of death. I’m perfectly fine risking my life in a taxi. I just hate being the one who’s responsible for not dying.
Agreed.
There are other reasons to want less car-centric societies, but my primary one is “it’s unreasonably cruel for a society to make ‘must be able to spend ~one hour a day, almost every day, making frequent fast-paced life-and-death decisions’ a requirement of full membership”.
(The actual controlling-the-car part, the continuous boring low-level aspects, I have no problem with (indeed, I have even been known to *enjoy* driving on a sufficiently deserted road). Operating the car is easy. Making *very, very* sure that you and another agent *never* attempt to occupy the same space at the same time is hard.)
Tags:
#reasons I haven’t renewed the learner’s permit that expired over a year ago #reply via reblog #death tw #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see
We had an IM conversation once: copingkin, psychological otherkin, and the distinction or lack thereof.
As for the test, it’s car: I’ve got a learner’s permit right now, and I’m going for my intermediate license.
For context, getting your intermediate is, in terms of practical benefits, a much bigger deal than getting your full license. The difference in driving restrictions between intermediate and full in Ontario is very small, and even smaller if you’re age 20+ (which I am):
“Carry only as many passengers as there are working seatbelts“ (wait, that doesn’t apply to everyone?)
Zero tolerance alcohol rather than 0.05 (I don’t expect this to be relevant)
The legality of driving in America is unclear rather than explicitly allowed (we might just have Dad continue doing all the American driving to be on the safe side)
If your license comes up for five-year renewal before you get your full license (which it might; you have to spend a year with intermediate before taking the test to get full, and my five-year renewal is the end of July next year), renewing is trickier and more murky. It looks like if I end up needing to, I *might* be able to arrange to start my next five years directly as intermediate, or I might be kicked to learner and need to take the first road test again (but the “spend eight months in learner before taking the intermediate test” doesn’t apply to your second time, so I could re-take the intermediate test as soon as they can schedule me in). Hopefully I’ll manage to pass everything quickly enough that it doesn’t matter.
(The Ontarian terminology for car license types is “G1”, “G2”, and “G”, but I’ve used “learner”, “intermediate”, and “full” here because they’re more widely recognised terms.)
Tags:
#driving #reply via reblog #my driving instructor told me not to drive myself home from a successful road test if I can avoid it #because people who have just passed a road test tend to be intoxicated by the glow of success #and as such are at rather increased crash risk #so one should drive as little as possible until one starts to get over the excitement of passing #not sure how much of that is practical with a motorcycle
KNEEL, SAYS THE DEMON LIGHT WITH ITS EYE OF COAL SAURON KNOWS YOUR LICENSE PLATE AND STARES INTO YOUR SOUL
THIS IS ALWAYS FUNNY
I’ve only seen this legendary post in screenshots
Omg
Tags:
#you’ve probably seen this before #in fact you’ve probably seen this *so* many times that it is a comforting point of familiarity #here is some comforting familiarity for you
I know there’s a lot of like, younger teenagers that follow me so check this out, if this is your first time driving in winter, don’t just stamp on the brake pedal to stop, if you’re on ice you’ll continue to slide for quite some distance and could possibly hit something/someone
ease into it, like small pumps on the pedal. And brake earlier, like give yourself some room because even if you’re driving slow and braking correctly you’re still probably gonna slide a bit
Tags:
#this actually *is* going to be my first time driving in winter #I already knew that #but I appreciate the thought
Brinens and Things 