Be Excellent To Each Other

Yes, this is inflammatory nonsense.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2011- ... le-drivers



Here are the results, gamers are in bold, norms in normal text.



For the record I have never been stopped by the police, never use my phone while driving, and passed my tests first time. I must have been lucky! I suppose if I'd sold my Xbox, I wouldn't have been rearended nor had my parked car bashed twice last year!

I imagine that of those 2000, the 1000 that called themselves 'regular gamers' were probably all 17-30 and the 1000 that didn't were probably all 31-39.

17 year olds in 'bad drivers' shocker.

I got stopped by the police once. I hadn't done anything wrong, apparently I was just a 'young guy in a nice car', so they wanted to make sure those two factors were supposed to be going together in this instance.

Sadly, it was 3am when they stopped me, and I was only out on a drive because I couldn't sleep and was bored. I was wearing pyjama bottoms and a scruffy t-shirt, with trainers and no socks on my feet.

Heh. Amusing.

Maybe it just means gamers are more honest.

If that's true and the two sample pools were demographically consistent and appropriately controlled, I'd say this isn't inflammatory nonsense at all -- the gap between gamers and non-gamers on most of those metrics look significant to me.

Did you do this, Grim...?

So gamers take more risks, act more aggressively and run more red lights, but have half the accident rate? More people should start driving like dicks and then we'd all be safer.

I've been stopped by the rozzers twice.
First was in my old Lexus which had a private plate on it originally, which the owner kept when I bought it. Due to a combination of idiocy on the part of my insurers, and poor reading skills on my part, my insurance certificate still had the old private plate on.
Police were perfectly nice about it all, got given a producer and turned up at the station a couple of days later with a letter from my insurers explaining the mixup.

Second time I got stopped was when I was cruzin in me beemer wid me bitches in da back* and I had the audacity to pass a police car that was sitting at 70mph on the motorway (which they aren't really allowed to do ) I was the only one out of about 20 cars who got stopped, but I obviously looked sus

* Coming back from a halloween party at a friends house, in my old 530i, with my gf, her sister and a friend in the car.

I took it to be a joke by Grim...

Malc

"No".
As I work in the industry however, I could probably make very accurate guesses about how it was done.
With guessing.

I'm now worried about the quality of my jokes.

The stats seem to say that gamers have more bravado, but are safer drivers.

One of the major problems I'm having to overcome learning to drive is the whole "more timid is safer" mindset. I get into spots where I'm neither letting the other guy through or going for it myself, so it just ends up with no-one knowing what's going on. I can easily see that I'd be safer if I was a lot more assertive.

Yep, letting someone out is a tricky area that only gets easier to judge when you've been driving for a while.

You can slow down, flash your lights, wave your arms and beep your horn, but some people just won't be let out and will wait for a natural break.

That was always my problem too. Mind you, my method for overcoming it was a little drastic - I just stopped driving.

Or will finally pull out when you've ran out of patience and made the move yourself. Without looking, natch.

At the end of my bike test, I was waiting to turn right into the test centre. There were two cars coming down the road, so I was waiting in the turn lane with my indicator on. The first car passed me, and the second car, with nothing behind me stopped, and flashed to let me over. This caused a big problem as you can't really do that on a test, as a flash is "Hey, I am here!" and nothing more. So I waited. They flashed again and started waving me over. So I waited. They did it a third time so I went for it. Passed with no faults at all, and the examiner and I had a chuckle about it, and then i went to Fox's Diner and had a bacon sandwich.

People who stop to let others out when they have right of way and the roads are clear need a gentle slap. It really annoys me when you stop behind a parked car while another is approaching in the other direction, only for them to stop and flash you out. It wastes a great deal more time for the both of you than had they just taken their right of way and got on with it. I understand their intentions, and am grateful, but it serves no good.

Oh, and when it's night, and I have stopped to let you go past, the best way to thank me is not a flash of full beams in my face, thanks....

If there is loads of traffic behind me, I'll stop and let someone out of a side road, as I am, more often than not, in no real hurry. Other drivers on the roads don't really irritate me too much, anymore.

I'd play that by ear. If there isn't much oncoming traffic and the person you're stopping for has a reasonable chance of getting out, by all means. You can't just hold up a line of traffic for a minute or more, though; it does nothing for the congestion, and wastes many more man-hours than letting that person wait for a clear road.

But my complaint is definitely on quiet roads where someone gives up their right of way when you've already taken the steps to let them through. It just wastes time, as you'll inevitably each have much more of a wait.

Oddly, I was stopped by the police last night.

Apparently they decided to "randomly" run the plate on my dirty white van and it took a while to come back, so rather than continue following me (which they had already done for over a mile through half a dozen roundabouts), they decided to stop me and wait for the radio to come back.
About 5 minutes of chatting later, it still hadn't so the PC bid me a safe journey and sent me on my way!

Fortunately I'd changed that bald front tyre the night before, and he did have a quick look at them
Must have had some good karma due me.

Lucky he didn't look in the back and see Maddie struggling on the piss-stained mattress!