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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."
Reckless driving is already an offense in every state I know of. Why not just enforce that law?
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That's a good point, although this way you don't have to worry about developing a common law in every state's traffic court interpreting reckless driving to include texting while driving, or run the risk of some courts not interpreting in that way.
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...
Most trucks drive on state and federal highways, so state and federal legislation makes sense.
Of course, truckers can still look up contacts, dial their phones, look up addresses and map them, download apps, and play games on their smartphones while driving. They just can't text.
...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?
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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"
As any smoker/ex smoker would know, it takes more attention not to smoke.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
Yes, but at the same time, law-makers can say, "I took a stand against this, and voted for your safety!!!1one!" The alternative is to stand around, impotently, and say, "We _have_ laws on the books; it's tha po-lice that ain't doin' their jobs." Law-makers have to consider "Directive #1": get re-elected.
Truth, Justice. Or the American Way.
can arguably be done perfectly safely in the right circumstances.
I wouldn't call luck being "perfectly safe".
Seriously, do you understand what you have to do to text while driving? You have to take your eyes off the road completely and focus most of your attention on entering your text message.
Most of your job while driving is not keeping the vehicle running down the street straight. A six year old can do that (there are a number of COPS episodes that prove that). Most of your job as a driver is making sure you are not going to run into someone else, or that someone else is not going to run into you. It doesn't take a PHD in statistics to recognize that any activity that requires your entire attention, and requires you to remove your eyes from the road, is going to prevent you from doing your job as a driver. It isn't rocket science.
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.
There are a number of studies that show your judgment while just talking on a cell phone is nearly as impaired as being drunk. Can you honestly say texting is going to be better than that?
Common sense man, you don't need a scientist to tell you everything. Correlation does not prove causation, sure, but this isn't bizzaro world where correlation proves there is no causation. Correlation is strong evidence suggesting a link, and a little common sense points out the obvious factors. Distractions cause accidents, in fact very few things cause accidents except distractions and chemical or physical impairments (i.e. drugs, alcohol, or sleep deprivation). To take something as distracting as texting and say you can't assume it causes accidents is down right idiotic.
To sum it all up, you sir, are a dumbass.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
Of course, truckers can still look up contacts, dial their phones...
He would never find time in my truck. You need both hands, feet and plenty of concentration to double-declutch through the ratios on an 18-speed Eaton Fuller gearbox while keeping the rig moving in the right direction.
"Most of your job while driving is not keeping the vehicle running down the street straight. A six year old can do that"
Since we are talking about "interstate truck and bus drivers", actually it IS. And since most truckers and bus drivers are presumably more developed than a six-year-old, maybe it's not necessary to force them into highway hypnosis by making them do nothing else at all while keeping the vehicle running down the street straight.
"Correlation is strong evidence suggesting a link, and a little common sense points out the obvious factors."
Obvious != true. It is obvious that ice cream causes skin cancer, since places where people eat more ice cream have a substantially higher incidence of skin cancer. More to the point, it is obvious that talking on the phone while driving causes more accidents. Except that it doesn't.
No, of course we don't need a scientist to tell us everything. But we DO need to avoid the cargo-cult approach to passing laws. For most of my life I've lived in a country where we don't impose restrictions without measurable benefit merely for the sake of imposing restrictions. I would kind of like that to continue.
"To sum it all up, you sir, are a dumbass."
That was well thought-out, eloquent and appropriate. It is the kind of comment that adds value to the conversation, substantiates your point of view, and encourages others to re-evaluate theirs.
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.
Let's assume all of the Toyota problems are due to the computer. Now how many crashes have occurred due to the problems? A small handful? Now compare that number by how many crashes have been caused by human error in the same makes and models of Toyota cars.
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