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The End of the Road For Texting Truckers
crimeandpunishment writes "The US Transportation Department is calling for a permanent ban on texting while driving, for interstate truck and bus drivers. An interim ban has been in place since January. The government says it is doing everything it can to make roads safer by reducing the threat of distracted drivers. The Transportation Department says nearly 6,000 people were killed and half a million injured in crashes involving distracted drivers in 2008."
I would have thought private companies and municipalities would have already implemented protocols prohibiting texting while driving.
Yeah, they know well how that ends up
This post contains no rudeness or derision of any kind. All arguments are friendly. Terms and exclusions may apply.
Are you trying to tell me that people other than interstate truck or bus drivers are ALLOWED to text while driving ? That's crazy. It should be illegal for everyone, and as pointed out above, reckless driving is already an offense anyway.
His daddy died in a wreck about a month ago, and now he guesses that cell phone belongs to him and his mom.
Massive Federal intrusion into private industry! Not to mention denying the progress of evolution!
Truly we must resist this onerous regulation and the unfair burden presented by its unfunded mandate!
Yes, I did hear about this on Foxnews.
I remember when truck drivers aimed for 1 million miles with no accidents, usually because it ended with a nice pretty statue, name in most of the large trucking magazines and a nice wad of cash. Well that was before the semi-licenced idiots got on the road. Carry on...carry on.
Om, nomnomnom...
...we need to address the more troubling issue; sexting while driving.
All the studies show it isn't safe - it has been banned in several states. Why not everybody?
I hate being bipolar; it's awesome!
"...nearly 6,000 people were killed and half a million injured in crashes involving distracted drivers in 2008."
There is a flaw in jumping to conclusions of causality with statements like this, and it's disappointing to see it repeated here on Slashdot.
The presence of a characteristic in a given scenario does not make it an influencing factor. Individual "distracting" actions are not necessarily causal factors - many of them (driving "fast", using a mobile phone, etc.) can arguably be done perfectly safely in the right circumstances. The causal factor is bad judgment: not understanding when it's prudent to slow down, when to ignore a phone call or hold off on texting in favor of driving more attentively because the situation calls for it, etc.
We do our society a disservice when we ban or try to eliminate everything that CAN be a danger if done foolishly, rather than try to redress the foolishness. It leads to needless restrictions that limit self-determination with little to no benefit.
(Note: I do believe it's fair to say that drunk driving is a causal factor in accidents - the difference being that alcohol is a cause of bad judgment while things like driving too fast for the conditions are an effect of bad judgment.)
So how many deaths were attributed to CB radios at the height of their popularity? Is there a ban on using push-to-talk mics?
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
Timothy already posted this, it's still on the front page. http://tech.slashdot.org/story/10/03/31/2154207/Supertaskers-Can-Safely-Use-Mobile-Phones-While-Driving
This is not only a dupe of an article published 5 hours ago (still near the top of the front page), it's from the exact same submission. Perhaps samzenpus has been editing slashdot while driving and this is the result?
"A week in the lab saves an hour in the library"
Some taxi companies have custom texting rigs in the cars used for receiving dispatching info and sending status updates (usually sent by pressing one of the pre-programmed buttons). "On my way." "Picked up fare." "Dropped off fare." "Off duty." "Available." "Being hijacked/robbed!" (I'm just assuming that last one's in there.) Is that kind of thing also going to be banned?
You will never see that. Why? Because no one wants to ban radios or kids in cars.
book them if they were changing song or looking at their phone book. who gives a fuck they are still piloting 1 tonne of speeding metal without looking where they are going.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
I am pretty sure that these are more than 1-T trucks....
However by your view the truck driver who glances at the spedometer is guilty of reckless driving, right?
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
phones traveling greater than so many feet per second are disable for texting or phone needs to be in one place for longer than so many seconds before texting is enabled
I will side with Hatta that there are reckless driving charges - and these should be made to stick.
ThunderDan's point shows that something is wrong with the law in general, though, and that is people think more and more laws need to be added to ensure that courts can't re-interpret things in a different way.
On the other hand - the rising number of laws increases the complexity of the law in such a way that it might well require courts to make bigger or even more ridiculous judgement calls, based on different individual laws that maybe might make sense on their own, but show discrepancies when seen together.
Secondly, the constant addition of more and more laws - to clarify what is legal and what isn't - basically fucks our own 'moral compass'. How should you even begin to form a feeling what's legal and what isn't when law books become ever more complex to clarify more and more things that SHOULD be obvious to be seen as 'wrong' by even a casual observer.
Take an example - right now, it may be forbidden to specify age or gender (or physical attributes) of potential applicants in job ads.
That's all fair enough. On the other hand, I think we are approaching the situation where a company could actually place a job ad specifically to hire, say, a developer, female, age 30, at least 5'8" tall, slim, very attractive simply based on a companies attempt to support 'diversity' in its workforce (because right now, we don't have any good looking young women working for us - so we may actually be required to try and hire one, JUST so that to the outside it doesn't look like we're descriminating against good looking candidates).
Surely, this example IS exaggerated, but what has been around have been cases, where laws were created (in the name of equal opportunity), which specify a women's quota in specific jobs; and this resulted in a man being turned down for a promotion because the local administration still had too few women at the next level up. The guy had to go up all the way through the courts to get his way, after he could show that in the years before, his performance had always ranked better - but the law to 'clarify' that we need more women effectively barred him from getting ahead in his job. Is this still equal opportunity? No. The law 'requiring' the promotion of women, because there are too many men in higher positions right now, basically was a bad thing for women as well - as the promotion of a 'lower performing' women just to satisfy the quota can't be a good thing for women either - it will damage companies (which don't get to pick the best possible candidates; and it hurts women, if women in leading positions are seen as 'only having been promoted because of a law, not because of skill' - therefore enforcing the view that many women may be worse employees.
Don't get me wrong here, I am against sexual discrimination in the work place; women should not be barred from higher positions based on their gender. But they shouldn't be hired/promoted because of a law forcing it, as that would discriminate against men that might be better suited to the specific role at hand.
What we need is not more laws to 'clarify' the situation, what we need is more investment in education to fix and strengthen people's moral compasses in a way that the same kind of discrimination will not happen in the future. Or - in this case - that people KNOW any kind of distraction while driving is a bad thing, and should be considered reckless.
The only people who can really benefit from the law getting bigger, to me, seems to be lawyers, professional crooks, and rich people who might have pockets deep enough to figure out what loopholes have been created in the law, due to the addition of more laws.
So, you think passengers in a car or bus (or cab, or other commercial vehicle) must be prevented from texting too? Why?
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Negligent driving -- do we really need such granularity that we have a separate law for each object or activity that comes along? I always wonder whether having so many laws creates the mental masturbation that seems to be pervasive at all levels of government, or whether said mental masturbation results in such a ridiculously high number of laws and regulations.
Maybe they should look at other, more effective road safety measures, like installing limiters for trucks that stop them exceeding 56mph (like they do in the UK).
Being overtaken by a tractor/trailer at 70+mph is quite disconcerting.
your misrepresenting the situation. the driver has to glance at his speedo to tell if he is speeding. he does NOT need to be talking on his phone (without a hands free kit) while driving.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
I want to ban kids in cars. Not just juveniles, but those damned kids under 50 who can't drive properly.
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
There is more than enough evidence that texting causes crashes and isn't just correlated with them. And the causal relationship is such that if you prohibit the texting and people comply, you'll see fewer crashes.
You can still argue that texting shouldn't be prohibited, but you can't argue it based on correlation/causation arguments; causation is clear in this case.
Almost all of those crashes caused by texting involved only 4-wheelers.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
Half million injured and six thousand dead? Were are the troops? How come there's no Secretary of State at the U.N. waving vials of a broken IPod next to some charts? Where are the mushroom clouds behind the speakers at podiums?
-[d]-
So you have no problem with him talking on his hands-free cell phone, but he can't look down at the radio to change the station?
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP