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Utah Law Punishes Texters As Much As Drunks In Driving Fatalities
The NY Times reports on legislation in Utah which harshly penalizes people who cause fatal car accidents while texting. Instead of merely facing a fine, offenders may now get up to 15 years in jail — the same as drunk drivers.
"In effect, a crash caused by such a multitasking motorist is no longer considered an 'accident' like one caused by a driver who, say, runs into another car because he nodded off at the wheel. Instead, such a crash would now be considered inherently reckless. 'It's a willful act,' said Lyle Hillyard, a Republican state senator and a big supporter of the new measure. 'If you choose to drink and drive or if you choose to text and drive, you're assuming the same risk.' The Utah law represents a concrete new response in an evolving debate among legislators around the country about how to reduce the widespread practice of multitasking behind the wheel — a topic to be discussed at a national conference about the dangers of distracted driving that is being organized by the Transportation Department for this fall."
This appears to be the correct legislative response, for once.
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Good! Driving while drunk and driving while texting are both negligent choices. If that choice leads to someone's death, they certainly should be treated equally. If anything driving while texting is worse since your decision making abilities are not hindered by an altered state of mind.
Does this rag smell like chloroform to you?
The NY Times reports on legislation in Utah which harshly penalizes people who cause fatal car accidents while texting. Instead of merely facing a fine, offenders may now get up to 15 years in jail -- the same as drunk drivers.
Good.
So what's the point of this story?
Driving is a responsibility, and if you are irresponsible because you are texting - not merely talking handsfree, not talking hand-to-ear, but typing on a fiddly keyboard, you are going to be distracted. Kill someone doing this, and it isn't an accident, what's accidental about taking your mind off the road.
If you need to text on the road (and also if you need to talk), then pull over somewhere safe and do it there. Or don't answer the phone, and give yourself some "me time" in your own car.
Why shouldn't malicious and willful ignorance be punished harshly?
You know better than to get behind the wheel after ten or twelve beers, but some people do it anyway. Driving drunk, driving while texting, driving while playing a gameboy.... frankly, I don't see much of a difference.
Beyond the fact you can turn off the phone or the gameboy in a snap, whereas sobering up takes time. Given that, I'd figure the penalty would be harsher!
Does anyone know if traffic accident rates have gone up in recent years?
Irrelevant. Accident rates in general depend on too many other things, including safety features (new and old) in cars on the road, how many cars are on the road, and how the roads are designed.
It's not rocket science to deduce that taking your eyes and mind off the road make you a more dangerous driver. If it's not contributing significantly to the accident rate, that just means that a lot of people, believe it or not, aren't stupid enough to do it.
that ofcourse isn't necessary.. accident rates can go down, but the reason why an accident happens can change ofcourse.. So for example if there where a lot of accident because of blindspots on a truck in the past it could be that because of better mirrors/camera's on a truck those kind of accidents have dropped, but because of the rise of stupid people who are texting behind the wheel that kind of accident have increased (but maybe not yet as much as the blindspotreason), so in the end you don't really have an increase in accidentrates, but the reason of the accidents have been changed..
Seriously, if you want to text while traveling, take a bus/train! I don't know why people in the US are so deadset against public transportation. I can be much more productive while riding the train/bus than I can(and should!) be while driving.
Monstar L
I'm with others on this... Distracted driving like this is responsible for a lot of severe and fatal "accidents". As someone else said- it is willful misconduct that should be punished. Driving a car is dangerous, period. If you are driving a car- that should be ALL you are doing is driving. If you aren't focused on what you are doing- you are putting your life, and those of everyone around you, in danger. Why is that so hard for some people to understand? I have a 32-mile long commute to work every day, and EVERY DAY I see people swerving out of their lane and driving erratically while gabbing or texting on a cell phone. I almost get hit at least once a week by one of these winners.
Let's pass a new law for every single type of driving distraction that comes along instead of writing one law that covers the general case of distracted driving. That way we can make it look like we are responding to every new problem that comes along so we get reelected more easily.
It should not matter why you are unable to concentrate on what's going on in front of your car if you're responsible for the distraction. Whether it's drinking or texting, in both cases you made the decision that you want to drink/text instead of concentrate on traffic, you're responsible for the outcome.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I would not be surprised if the rates have not changed significantly. The problem is not the phones, the problem is the people who do not have enough respect for the 1 million or so Joules of kinetic energy in their control. People have always had things that could have distracted them.
Additive identity, multiplicative cancellation, distributive multiplication over addition: pick any two (unless 1 = 0)
"We found a mobile phone in your car, you must have been texting"? Maybe you started texting before driving and paused in the middle because you had to drive. There's no way to prove this.
Traffic fatalities rates have actually been steadily going down in the recent years and are lowest they ever were. I think this is mostly due to better cars (for example, stability control reduces accidents by about 30%, we have better tires, fewer old cars on the road that can't make a good evasive maneuver).
In effect, a crash caused by such a multitasking motorist is no longer considered an 'accident' like one caused by a driver who, say, runs into another car because he nodded off at the wheel.
Except nodding off or passing out at the wheel is not an accident. It has a cause (medical or just simply not getting enough sleep.) It's one thing if you have a random stroke nobody saw coming. It's another if the doctor has said "you're at high risk for _______. You should not be driving."
If it's a case where you were simply too tired- well, we're not children and it's not rocket science why you "microsleep" or completely fall asleep at the wheel. It happened to me ONCE- woke up in a different lane than I remembered being in. Scared the crap out of me, and I've since learned to get my ass off the road to a rest-stop for a 20-30 minute nap if I feel any of the signs of being too tired, which are pretty damn hard to miss. And to make sure I get enough sleep if I'm doing a bunch of driving!
I see this all the time with bicyclists who are killed by drivers completely let off the hook. A woman local to Boston was killed in Seattle by an older guy driving his van. On a wide-open highway, in clear weather, in the middle of the day. He was charged with nothing- they said it was due to "inattentiveness." In other words, the fucker wasn't looking where he was going, killed someone, and he gets a free pass? How is that justice? How does that hold people responsible for paying attention to where they pilot a 2-ton hunk of metal at 70 MPH?
Methinks the thought of spending the rest of your life in jail for killing someone with your car would make people pay a little more attention than getting an occasional speeding ticket for doing 5mph more than everyone else, which is only a randomly collected road tax.
Please help metamoderate.
Driving is a responsibility. You are operating a motor vehicle and there is ALWAYS the potential
for 'accidents'. Anything you do that interferes with your maximum concentration while operating the vehicle, is something you should not be doing.
Messing with the radio, adjusting your mirrors(something you should have done before starting the car), putting make-up on, the list can be endless, all interfere with your job. Your job is to operate the vehicle to the best of your ability. If you cannot understand these simple things, you should not be driving a motor vehicle.
I would welcome such laws nationally. But make them mandatory time, not discretionary time. 15
years hard labor repairing the roads you did the violation upon. I would remove the word fatal from the legislation. Any such stupidity should not be rewarded. You wreck my car, you pay the price.
In actuality, more of these types of drivers Cause Others to have accidents. They should not get away.
If they truly wanted to stop multitasking behind the wheel there would be a lot more support for removing the human from the equation. We aren't that far off from cars that can accurately and safely drive themselves. Why aren't we funding efforts like the DARPA road challenge more? Lets get that wrapped up and out there. I mean I think its good that people who end up doing bad things, because of their poor behavior choices are being penalized for those choices, but if safety is truly the goal we'd recognize that in one way or another multitasking occurs for most drivers at some point and the only way to truly get rid of it and the risks they represent is to minimize the human role in controlling the vehicle.
Mod parent up.
Go watch it.
Some days it's just not worth
chewing through my restraints.
If you get caught DUI then there are "reliable" tests that can determine your blood alcohol content, which is then used determine legal liability.
How do you prove that a person was 'texting, webbing, reading, etc'?
A (busted?) phone that may or may not show an active message screen x minutes after an accident for the police to look at?
Eye-Witness reports? (looking down at radio vs looking down to text)
These lawmakers are chasing smoke. They want to look like they are trying to make a difference but ANY half competent lawyer could likely get those charges thrown out.
Laws already exist that cover crap like this:
Undue care and attention while operating a motor vehicle.
Unsafe operation of a motor vehicle.
Dangerous driving.
Dangerous driving resulting in bodily harm.
Manslaughter.
Most crashes caused by idiot drivers can get 1-3 of those charges applied, do we _really_ need to add more?
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
Is driving drunk acceptable then if accident rates go down?
Yes, cyclists who ride against the flow of traffic are dumb. A few more: fixie riders that ride in circles in front of the other lanes of traffic while stuck at a red light are dumb. Cyclists that try to sneak across at the start of a red light, and really most of them that run red lights generally, are dumb (I think it's perfectly reasonable for cyclists to treat red lights as 2-way stop signs when there is very little traffic, or when a light is controlled by a sensor that won't pick up the bike, but when doing so, you must observe the same caution you would going through a 2-way stop; I have never seen an accident or close-call result from this behavior). Cyclists that pass on the right near intersections are often dumb, as are cyclists that ride through intersections in the crosswalk at great speed (I have personally witnessed both of these behaviors result in accidents).
None of this excuses the callousness in the typical public attitude towards cyclists. In truth, if you're paying proper attention to the road you have almost no chance of hitting a cyclist, unless he's doing something dumb like passing on the right near an intersection. But many drivers, even responsible ones that I've talked to, seem to think car-bike collisions are a natural effect of cyclists being on the road. The fact is that at least one of them has to mess up for the accident to happen. If the collision involves running the cyclist down from behind (which is actually pretty rare) it's almost certainly the motorist's fault, and no sympathy should lie with him.
(source for some statements in this post is the book Effective Cycling)
Previously, the Mythbusters (and other scientific studies) has shown that talking on a cell phone while driving is worse than driving while legally drunk. Texting is far more distracting than talking on a cell phone, so this legislation seems more than appropriate.
What could possibly be so vitally important that it has to be texted right now, yet not so important that you can't pull over to do it?
Mod parent up.
Go watch it.
Won't work. I watched worse than this in drivers ed years ago, and the dead people I saw weren't actors. I still drove foolishly, because I was a young foolish man. The prospect of prison will influence some, I think. Actual, substantial punishment for reckless driving will influence more.
A problem with scare videos, and this one is a perfect example, is that they will influence the wrong people- like some girl who will be so afraid to drive after seeing one that she instead will ride with her young, foolish boyfriend, who will drive like a fool and get her killed.
While the accident and fatality rates might have been falling, what you miss is that without the cell phone they would probably have been falling faster.
There have been studies done with drivers in simulators that show they are far more likely to have an accident if they are sending text messages on their phone, or taking phone calls for that matter.
The drunk's judgment is impaired when the drunk gets behind the wheel. The texter makes an intentional, volitional, free decision to put other people at risk by texting while driving.
Stupid bastards forget that their cars are killing machines unless properly handled.
I don't think that I said anything which would indicate that I don't think that vigilantism isn't a crime or should be appeased, but one of the reasons that we have the luxury of thinking this way is that, in fact, our government is supposed to (and, often enough, does) punish people so we don't have to do it ourselves. This "disinterested third party" is supposed to mete out justice proportional to the crime in a less personal way than the victim might, but don't for a minute think that society would stand for the punishment being solely related to the action and completely disconnected from the outcome. Drunken driving is a punishable offense, but the punishment for killing somebody while driving drunk is always worse than if you didn't kill somebody. That is how it is and how it needs to be, at least until we evolve, and that is how it needs to be for texting as well.
When driving, your attention should be focused on driving. There is no exception and no excuse.
This should not be a difficult concept.
"How do you prove that a person was 'texting, webbing, reading, etc'?"
I'm not sure how it works in the USA but here in the UK phone providers hold logs of calls - I guess you must have the same or how else does the phone provider bill you for your phone calls at the end of the month? So if an accident happens and there's any suspicion that use of a phone was involved, the police can ask for the phone records. They check the logs.
I love you, Utah law-making people things. Have my babies. Please. A law like this should have been in my state so long ago that it's disturbing. I mean it. Maybe we'll copy you down here in America's dangly-bits.
A slap on the wrist for holding any sort of a conversation on the phone when you should be DRIVING has always hacked me off. Should be a baby seal club on the wrist.
I have a cellphone. I strictly refuse to hold a conversation while driving. If I have a family member in a vehicle with me when I'm driving, I hand them the phone and ask them if they recognize the caller (since it's usually family calling). If they do, I tell them to have the conversation. Otherwise, if it's just me, they go to voicemail or send a text.
If they send a text, I check it at the next place I stop at, like a store. If they leave voicemail, it's the same thing: Next time I make a substantial, vehicle-leaving stop, I'll check it.
My family hates it, but I tell them the same thing every time: "My attention is best served in avoiding all the other jackasses driving with BlackBerrys coming out of their ears and iPhones in their asses."
One of these days, I am going to flip out. When I flip out, I'll be back in five minutes.
And I do understand why it's forbidden.
But you're special and won't screw up, right?
It's amazing the rationalizations that people go through. Stop coming up with excuses and pay attention to the road.
You're not special, and you're threatening people's lives with your selfish stupidity.
If I shoot a gun in the general direction of a group of people, being careful to avoid hitting any of them (ignoring the small risk of someone running in the gun's path), and don't hit anybody, is it ok?