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Driver Using Two Cell Phones Gets Year-Long Driving Ban
coondoggie writes "This guy is the poster-child for why cell phone use in cars should be banned in more places. According to press out of the United Kingdom, a man who was driving at 70MPH while texting on one phone and talking on another has been banned from driving for a year. Initial reports said that the driver, David Secker, was apparently using his knees to steer the car, an accusation he tried to refute in court."
Unless of course you are talking on one phone and texting on another. I think there should be jail time for this behavior regardless of whether they injured someone.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
"This guy is the poster-child for why cell phone use in cars should be banned in more places."
"was driving at 70MPH while texting on one phone and talking on another
If we have to make an abnormally stupid person a poster boy for average people, shouldn't he be the poster boy for why using multiple cell phones in a car should be banned in more places?
If what I just said sounded like a troll, it was probably just a failed attempt at humor.
How is not using a (non hands-free kit) phone while driving "extremely restrictive"?
I used to have a coworker who complained a lot about the price of car insurance. Then at some point he complained that he could not find insurance at all. I found it bizarre because I had no problem whatsoever with car insurance and we were practically neighbours.
Apparently he was "extremely unlucky" (his words) because idiots kept stopping without warning in front of him on the street so he got in accidents all the time. Obviously these accidents had nothing to do with the fact that while driving he was also watching movies on his portable DVD because he "wanted to keep his mind busy". I also remember him submitting a bug fix from his laptop while driving.
On a completely unrelated matter: this guy recently went back to visit his hometown... in China.
lucm, indeed.
It's not about having your hands on the wheel. It's about having your mind on the road.
Anyone who thinks it's okay to divide their attention when they are supposed to be controlling a lethally dangerous machine surrounded by innocent bystanders is a selfish prick. If that's how you drive it's sheer dumb luck which has thus far stopped you killing someone, and that may not hold out forever.
There are plenty of other examples involving death that could be used if you find this one objectionable.
http://knowledgebase.findlaw.com/kb/2011/Apr/310059.html
To me anyway the term nanny state should be reserved for use in cases where innocent bystanders are not dying.
Are you really trying to make the argument that having a conversation with someone while driving should be banned? How about listening to the radio?
You missed the point. The ban on using mobile phones while driving isn't down to people taking their hands off the wheel, it's because studies have shown that it causes drivers to take their attention away from the road, thereby causing accidents.
Yes, the extent of this particular guy's idiocy is thankfully rare, but your own apparent ignorance of the true danger of driving while using a phone only highlights the practical value of the ban (which already exists here).
Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.
I'm not a lawyer, and I'm not up on Massachusetts law. But I'll bet killing someone with a car due to negligence is a crime whether or not a phone is involved.
I would make the argument that any impairment past a certain level should be banned. The only arguments are about what that level should be. Someone drunk with a .45 BAC (roughly lethal level for an average person) be allowed to drive? After all, you are letting all the other distracted drivers on the road (conversations, radio, etc.).
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And that is a valid point, which is why I framed it in the form of a question. But specifically take away the holding a phone portion of the distraction of talking on a phone, and you're left with just conversation. I personally think that's well on the safe enough side of the line. I think that holding the phone is on the safe side too, but not so far from the line as just talking. Drunk (I don't know about what BAC levels mean in terms of impairment) is on the too dangerous side.
I'm curious if his car had an accident avoidance system? If the thought is TXTing is unsafe due to the accidents it cause wouldn't the new "accident avoidance systems" basically solve that?
In the end people will always do things that are distracting while driving, so the question is, how can technology solve the issue?
Certainly sounds like he's much more coordinated than me!!
a man who was driving at 70MPH while texting on one phone and talking on another has been banned from driving for a year.
If he managed to pull that off without crashing or injuring someone, my guess is he (would be/is) actually a fairly safe driver. I couldn't do that. Maybe they should get this guy to teach others how to actually drive. Minus the phones, of course. Couldn't possibly make most drivers worse, anyways. /p.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
If you can manage to get your car to move with a .45 BAC, nobody should stop what you are doing, Superman.
What about changing the radio station while driving?
If you think "didn't kill anyone before he was stopped" counts as success...
Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.
I think there are studies that show the *mental* effort of holding a conversation is enough to impair a majority of drivers, regardless of where their hands are. So it's not just "a couple of morons", its a far greater percentage of the population. And these come in all shades of varying degree of impairment and judgement on when to use it, so if you allow it all, the law very quickly becomes a question of how much impairment is okay? Is it okay if I only use it at stoplights? Or put it down while merging? Will my fine be lower if I score highly on a multitasking evaluation of some sort? Is it only a problem if I cause an accident? Or if a cop looks at me funny? I think most people would argue at that point that no level of impairment is okay, which is where we are today. The hypocrisy is clear, given the amount of fatigue and drunkenness we seem to accept as normal, but that is the argument.
Of course, you're right--the factions lobbying for electromagnetic shielding in windows and velocity-based lockouts are totally misguided, since those restrict the passengers as well as the driver. But the fact is the problem is somewhat bigger than you make it sound.
I'd rather somebody not be killed in the first place though.
And the sad part is ... the nanny state will use this an example of why we "need" extremely restrictive laws regulating how and when cell phones and other devices may be used while inside a car. A couple of morons with bad habits are going to ruin it for the vast majority who know better than to take their hands off the wheel.
Nanny state? Really? Dude, he was driving with no hands on the wheel. I don't care if he was holding two cellphones or both your mom's boobs, the "hands-not-on-the-wheel" thing is the problem, not the exact nature of the objects in question.
And a "couple of morons with bad habits"? OK, hardly anyone -- statistically speaking -- commits murder. Just a few n'er-do-wells. Really don't need a law for such an unlikely thing. Right?
I am not a crackpot.
Uh, GP never said that. You're taking a reasonable position ("distracted driving is dangerous") and taking it to absurd extremes. Nobody has ever proposed banning talking or radios, to my knowledge, and pretending that's even relevant to the discussion at hand is bad debate form.
No. Sorry, but you've got it wrong. Call it whatever dip-shit term you like, but taking people to task for willfully placing the lives of others at risk is something we should all be doing, every chance we get, including having laws against it. I'm still recovering from being rear-ended by an idiot who was fucking with his phone while driving. While my injuries were not severe, my vehicle was totaled, as was the idiot's, I suspect. I see accidents like mine, or near misses, almost every day. There is no excuse for it. None. The penalties should be on the order of those handed to drunks who chose to drive. The authorities in the U.K. got right. Good on them.
The road should be made as safe as practical. Restrictions on driving habits are warranted so long as they lead to an increase of safety that exceeds by some amount the costs they instigate. I think you are probably right, though, that the costs of restricting cell phone use exceed the safety benefits.
That you dont even have your license.
How do I know, because if you did you would know what it's like to almost be taken out by some complete dingbat talking on the phone and not watching where he's bloody well driving.
Damned right they should clamp down on this hard, IMHO they didn't come down on him hard enough, if there was ever a reason for the courts to crush someone's car this is it, and make sure the moron's phones are in the centre console.
However the saddest part is, this punishment will not stick, he'll be back on the road in a few weeks with an exemption license (whatever the UK equivalent is), the ruling overturned as being unfair or just plain driving illegally. This moron is going to kill someone and as sods law would have it, not himself and you cry "nanny state", now that is sad.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
You don't understand how infinitely more distracting than radio a conversation is ? Especially with someone not in the car with you, who doe not follow the environment's changes ?
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You missed the point. The ban on using mobile phones while driving isn't down to people taking their hands off the wheel, it's because studies have shown that it causes drivers to take their attention away from the road, thereby causing accidents.
So, uh, what about all the other drivers who don't pay attention to the road in the first place?
Yeah, this guy is a dumbass who probably should be banned, but I see moronic driving pretty much every day commuting to and from work and very few of the morons are using cellphones. Moronic drivers should be stopped regardless; or do you think that driving with his knees would be OK if only he wasn't talking and texting on his phones at the same time?
What about an IQ test for drivers? What about yanking out the radio for people on the lower end of the scale?
There are some people out there who can't talk and drive at the same time. There are people who are so dumb they get their ashtray confused with the window.
Maybe we should take those people's licenses?
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If the outcomes are really binary did or did not kill anyone, then yeah, I'm going to have to go with "didn't kill anyone" being success. In the real world you can observe (or not) such things as swerving, driving over the lane markers, following another vehicle too closely, etc. None of those, happening I would call success (and maybe would allow following too closely as well since seemingly everyone does that all the time phone or not). Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence, so I can't conclude logically that none of those happened, but I suspect if they had it would have been reported.
You obviously didn't hang out with a variety of people in college. I knew a few alcoholics, and they'd call 0.45 "warming up" or "Tuesday morning."
Learn to love Alaska
Your starting with the false premise that it is just "a few morons". The problem is that I see talking on the phone while putting on makeup, talking on the phone and texting at least once a mile on the drive to/fromwork every day. It used to be when a you saw someone driving eracticaly the question was "is he drunken?" then it became "is he on a cell phone", now it is is he on a cell and using a tablet or second cell phone?
Presumably you already have catch-all laws for careless driving which would cover all those things, just as we do in the UK.
Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.
I agree that it is an absurd extreme, but I didn't take it there. I am analyzing what cause there is for banning cell phone use. The poster said, "It's not about having your hands on the wheel. It's about having your mind on the road." If you remove the distraction engendered by use of hands, what distracting features remain of using a cell phone? All I can come up is conversation. If conversation is the only salient reason, since "it's not about ... hands," to conclude that banning cell phones is warranted, then drawing such a conclusion implies that, at least in terms of distraction, banning conversation in other forms is also warranted. I'm not bringing up irrelevant topics here, and I'm not attacking a straw man.
To me anyway the term nanny state should be reserved for use in cases where innocent bystanders are not dying.
I disagree. I don't believe in perfect solutions, and I don't believe in banning something simply because a few people abuse it (even if a few innocent bystanders die). I won't claim to know how many people really do die from using a cell phone while driving, but I was speaking in general. I'd say it's a nanny state if they ban something just because a few people use it and get hurt/hurt other people.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
Are you really trying to make the argument that having a conversation with someone who is not in the car while driving should be banned?
Fixed that for you.
Nice attempt to frame the argument but this is not black and white and you conveniently missed out the two most important points.
1) The other person is not in the car and has no awareness of the situation.
2) The driver has one hand off the controls.
When someone is in the car with me, talking to me they know what I am doing and when I need to concentrate. A person on the phone has no such awareness. Secondly and more importantly, the drivers ability to turn or change gears is diminished severely due to one of the drivers hands being off the controls. If you drive a manual, you may as well just drive yourself into a telephone poll then answer your phone whilst moving.
How about listening to the radio?
If listening to the radio distracts you as much as being on the phone then yes, but I'd rather just ban dingbats who make analogies between radios and phones from holding a license as they obviously dont understand what is and isn't safe when operating a vehicle.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
And a "couple of morons with bad habits"? OK, hardly anyone -- statistically speaking -- commits murder. Just a few n'er-do-wells. Really don't need a law for such an unlikely thing. Right?
I'd say go after the people who hurt others. I don't think you should ban things just because a few people abuse them.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
The fact that some people are stupid enough to think that they can safely drive when they are not looking at the road is utterly ridiculous. These people should not be given their licenses back, because they won't learn. Some time ago I mentioned in a journal entry here a similar dipshit who did a similar thing in MN - 80mph the wrong way down the road while texting. To the cop it looks like a drunk driver and from a public safety standpoint it is just as bad. Both should be mandatory felonies on the first offense.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Infinitely? If there's a numerical scale of distraction, I think calling the difference infinite is exaggeration. But, yes I recognize that conversation is certainly more distracting that listening to the radio. I'm asking where the line is.
I would much rather make it merit based and treat cell phones in cars the same way we treat guns, as useful tools that are dangerous if not used properly.
You should be required to get a license or permit to use a cell phone while driving, and getting one should require passing a quiz and possibly a demonstration about how to do so safely.
As it is we already let cops and truckers use cell phones because we presume them to be competent enough not to fuck up.
It's been shown repeatedly that conversing on a phone requires substantially more attention than talking to someone face-to-face.
Plus, if the person you're talking to is physically in the car, they know instantly "crap something's going on I need to shut up to let the driver focus". Hell, they might spot a potential problem before the driver does and alert them ("watch out, that moron's trying to cut you off").
Having children in the car is roughly as dangerous as having a BAC of 0.08. Or did you mean the original limits for alcohol, the ones that were actually based on where the curve changed slope?
1 is a reasonable point. So I concede that talking to someone not in your car is slightly more distracting that talking to someone in your car. 2 is explicitly disclaimed because it's not about the hands. You bring up an interesting point, but could you please try to argue without accusing people who disagree with you of intellectual dishonesty an bringing in the ad hominems? And you completely missed the point with respect to radios.
A couple of morons with bad habits are going to ruin it for the vast majority who know better than to take their hands off the wheel.
He didn't just take his hands off the wheel - he took his eyes off the road. There is no safe way to drive without being able to see the road. Nobody that I know of considers it a good idea to have people who cannot see allowed to drive; but this person is for all intents and purposes blind while writing or reading a text message.
This is equally as dangerous to the public as driving drunk, and should be handled the same way the rest of the industrialized world handles DUI - mandatory felony for the first offense.
That said I am not aware of "nanny states" looking to use this to take away reasonable cell phone usage privileges from drivers. You can still talk on your phone, but for the sake of everyone on the road don't take your eyes off the road. Reading and writing text messages is simply not safe while driving. You can't read the newspaper while driving and expect to get away with it, there is no reason why a text message should be any different.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Personally, I find that if I'm tired or feeling a bit under the weather, having someone talk to me beyond necessary directions, or having the radio on is MORE distractions than I can cope with. That said, if I am having that much trouble concentracting, I probably shouldn't be on the road in the first place. It generally happens on the way home from some event when I wanted to leave some time ago but my husband couldn't drag himself away yet. :(
Sara
Designer, Gamer, Macgrrl in an XP World
The issue is that impairment can't be measured and the allowed minimum competency isn't set. How do you measure the impairment of a person after you've stopped them? A tired person who was asleep when the cop turned on the lights and siren could be very alert by the time they are pulled out of the car. The only solution I can think of that measures actual impairment is something in the car that monitors eye movement and such to see how often mirrors and such are checked. When they are checked less than once every 20 seconds, the driver is impaired. However, nobody could assign an actual risk to that level of impairment. And the driving skill of an unimpaired driver of minimum roadworthy skill is so low that most would think them unfit to be licensed. How is it fair to have an incompetent driver allowed with a higher risk than a good driver who is impaired by some socially undesirable (thus banned, like drinking or phones) impairment? The problem is that the politically charged issue is never about safety, but about what makes easy tickets and looks like being "tough on crime" without pissing off the majority of voters (because most voters are incompetent drivers with bad habits).
So yeah, you can word your complaints as a question so that you aren't having to put your personal opinion out for public critique. The real solution is easy to come up with and impossible to implement. Most of them require in-car monitoring of some kind. I could come up with 100 ways that would simplify the assessment of impairment and no one would want because when you focus on safely only, then you can't separate out sober and attentive incompetent drivers from those who are "impaired." But keeping incompetent drivers happy is more important than safety...
Learn to love Alaska
Unfortunately it's more the conversation than the holding the phone that's responsible for the marked increase in accidents in cell phone conversations.
I suspect the problem is you brain is spending a lot more power on interpolating from voice the subtle social cues we normally get from facial expressions and body posture, etc. And of course in expressing the same with voice alone.
I RARELY if ever see someone on a cell in traffic who's not showing clear signs of distracted, and therefore dangerous, driving.
IIRCC the impairment level is somewhere between DUI and DWI.
Mycroft.
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Yep, another person brought that up in another fork. I buy it as a reasonable argument. I'm not sure the "watch out" argument is pertinent since the person can do that irrespective of whether he's in a conversation with you.
Totally! And I've driven drunk a bunch of times (including right now) and never had any problems - drunk driving should also be legal!
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David Secker, was apparently using his knees to steer the car, an accusation he tried to refute in court.
If he did not want them to think he was driving with his knees when his hands were clearly unavailable, what the hell did he want to convince them he was using to grip the wheel ?
Nullius in verba
The driver was also driving without insurance which would have helped to get the driving ban.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Actually, I used to agree with you. But since California started doing hands-free only, the number of idiots swerving around in their lane has decreased tremendously. And the only people that still do it are the ones that are still breaking the law.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
What's critical is to what degree risking others' lives with a car is a crime. The fact that they actually died is important in establishing to what degree this behaviour is risking the lives of others'.
Banning children in cars would seriously make the road safer. You could then remove all the soccer moms, SUVs, etc from the road too.
Then we don't need one specifically for moronic behavior involving cell phones, do we?
Exactly. Someone driving recklessly is endangering someone no matter what. Someone who isn't driving recklessly isn't. Stop the root problem: driving recklessly. No one died because of a "distracted driver" or a "drunk driver" but they died because of a reckless driver, the person would still be dead if they were driving the same with in a completely silent car with a sober driver still driving the same way.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
It's always about "a couple of morons." Why do you think it's illegal to discharge a firearm in the city? You may have a range set up in your back yard and never miss the target of go over the wall, but you can be there's "a couple of morons" who will.
Or speed limits on the highways (in most places)? Most people would probably drive fairly safely, but there's always "a couple of morons" (in this case a whole lot more than a couple) who ruin it for everyone. And the problem in both cases is that the morons don't just kill themselves, which would make the world a better place. Instead they end up hurting or killing someone else. Yes, a lot of such safety-related laws are over-reactionary and probably unnecessary, but it is the morons who bring them about.
A couple of morons? LOL. I can't figure out whether you're simply ignorant or so wrapped up in partisan politics that you can't face reality.
On days with good weather, I take my bike to work. I pay attention to what drivers near me or doing because it's a survival skill. Easily 80% of drivers who do something outrageously fucking stupid are holding a cell phone to their ear. It might even be more than that. And this is in a province where hands-free cell phones are legal, but holding one in your hand isn't. We aren't talking about one or two people. There are thousands of them, and each one is stupider than the one before.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
The easy solution is self driving cars.
This is not the funny you're looking for.
Indeed! A person who was skillfully using two phones at once and didn't cause an an accident is certainly the "poster-child for why cell phone use in cars should be banned." Not causing an accident is clearly evidence of how, um, accident-prone cell phone use while driving makes people!
Liberty in your lifetime
I *DO* professional driver training. At absolutly NO point is using a phone at any time regarded as approriate. All good trainers and people that know how to drive (you dont or else you wouldnt have said what you did) know that ANY distraction while driving is not on at all.
I tell my passengers to keep it quiet, I also dont drive with a radio on. I have no gadgets. I do what I'm supposed to be doing and that's called driving.
Very few people kill people, should that be unbanned?
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How do you measure the impairment of a person after you've stopped them?
By their actions before you stop them. Crossing the yellow line multiple times, failure to maintain a constant speed, not noticing that the cop put his lights on until a minute later when he finally hits the siren. Breathalyzer or blood test if the impairment is alcohol or drugs. Those kinds of things.
Just as you can generalize and say that someone with a blood alcohol content of .10 or .08 is "impaired" in the eyes of the law, texting while driving is also impaired at any level, and simply talking on a cell phone has been shown to be just as dangerous (4x) as driving drunk, so it is easy to conclude texting is worse.
With the availability of hands-free options, there is no excuse to talk while holding the phone anyway. Or pull over. More importantly, there is never a justification for texting while driving. I'm a Libertarian at heart, but that goes beyond personal freedom and enters into the "acts that affects others", and needs a heavy fine, to discourage those activities.
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If someone is driving with their knees, they may not be obviously driving recklessly--the danger is only actualized when the driver needs to react quickly to an obstacle, at which point it's too late. That said, a cell phone is only one of many things that can cause distraction, and the law should be based on the observed behavior of the driver. I'm not entirely sure what that benchmark would be, but it needs to be written in a way that it can be fairly and consistently applied. That's why cell phone laws are so popular--a violation is easy to detect.
I used to drive with my knees while stabbing the passenger and getting blood all over the windshield making it impossible to see out of. Sometimes I would take their chopped off hands and put them on the wheel then drive that way... but NEVER WHILE ON A PHONE, that's just dangerous, it could hurt people!
This guy should be banned from using his mobile phone for a year.
Back in the late eighties, before all these fancy gadgets came into being, I had (to my eternal amazement) the luck to witness a woman driving 75 mph on 285 west of Atlanta in bumper-to-bumper traffic reading a book. We're talking five lanes full of writhing idiots jockeying for position in a rush-hour race to get there first. That road was (and definitely still is) a horror story in progress. It was only a couple months before that I saw a car wrecked on the median, propped sideways on the concrete median divider, its engine block a good 150 feet down the road. Seriously, they just flat could not stop rush hour traffic to clean up the car, and I suppose an ambulance had taken the corpse(s) away previously. They'd have to wait for a break in the traffic at about 2 AM to get the car and its engine out of there.
A book, for you youngins, is a stack of paper bound together with static text on each piece; when reading one, you are confronted with one to two thousand words at a time, and the words are all longhand. So, for the guy dealing with a couple hundred or so characters of text messages while yakking on the phone -- heh.
There truly is nothing new under the sun.
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This guy is the poster boy for why cell phone usage in cars should be banned in more places.
Shouldn't the poster boy be someone who caused an accident? Who was in charge of the nomination process? Surely there is someone out there who ran into a school bus full of special needs children while texting, or something.
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Unfortunately it's the conversation, not the holding of a phone, that causes the impairment. If you need to make a call, get off the road.
Being able to make a call on the road doesn't outweigh the risks any more than driving home drunk outweighs the cost of a taxi or designated driver or not drinking in the first place.
Mycroft
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I use my shifter essentially none while on the highway (when I'm most likely to be on the phone).
I actually use hands-free now, but primarily for ranged of motion, not the hand. I also would say "gotta go" and drop the phone, without even hanging it up, if I saw something like traffic coming up. I think a lot of people clung to their phone too much. For example, those that get in accidents looking for the phone they dropped (this was the story of a no phone evangelical's son). You should not be reaching down, under the dash, swerving your car off the road and into a phone poll, that's not the phones fault though.
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I don't think that's a very good analogy. You can't kill someone without killing them, but it's possible to drive a car (or use a tool) without killing someone. And their intention is to hurt people in the first place. We're not even talking about criminals here. Rather, we are talking about going after the few people who abuse it (read: abuse).
Not only that, but you could probably use the same logic to advocate the banning of cars (or practically anything in existence).
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
Furthermore, I'm none too fond of killing in most circumstances. So, even if I accepted that analogy, I would still be against the unbanning of killing simply because I don't like it. That's not hypocritical since they're two different things.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
Do you really care about impairment? No, you really don't. It's being used as a proxy. Impairment causes bad driving, which causes the consequences, like collisions, you actually care about. So you watch for the dangerous behavior like following too closely, speeding, swerving, etc. If you do those things, you're in violation, and it doesn't matter if it was because you were sleepy, talking to someone in your car, talking on the phone, getting serviced, or eating a cheeseburger. Conversely, if you're doing any of those things and driving perfectly safely, then good for you.
Dale Earnhardt Sr. drove with his knees while wiping mud off his Windshield.
And he won the race! Or something.
You do realize that NASCAR racing is statistically and functionally safer than driving on public roads? He is (actually was) in a group of professional drivers on a race track as opposed to a set of twisty narrow passages and intersections populated by the portion of the population that fits in the leftmost part of the intelligence curve.
And it still wasn't a great idea.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
If it's the act of having a conversation, then we definitely need to ban communication between passengers in vehicles.
As for reaction times? Car and Driver tested that a year or two ago - they took a guy in his mid-20's and a guy in his mid-40's and had them drive a course with no distractions, then while holding a phone and talking, then while drunk, then while drunk and holding a phone. Their results? Obviously the reaction times kept getting worse, but the surprising thing was that even drunk and holding a phone while talking, the guy in his 20's STILL had a better reaction time than the guy in his 40's did while stone sober without a phone - so the real lesson is that people over 40 shouldn't be allowed to drive, period (if you want to use reaction times).
Hell, it's not even about holding the phone - it's about being too stupid to realize that driving takes precedence over everything else and to say "Hang on" or even just drop the damn phone when necessary to focus on driving.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
Getting rear ended means it is something totally not your fault.
However I've AVOIDED several rear-end accidents that would also not have been my fault, simply by always checking to see if people behind me seem to be aware I'm stopping while braking. If not, I evaluate options and avoid them as best I can - twice now by going into the shoulder or median, a few times through quick lane changes even if it meant missing a turn.
You really should not take you attention away from ALL parts of the road, even if something is technically "not your fault" an accident sucks and if you can avoid it safely then why not?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Sorry, but that's some horrible logic. It doesn't matter if the person you're talking to can see if you need to focus more or not - it takes a fraction of a second to say "Hang on" or just simply not frakking respond. As for the hands issue - the post you're quoting was saying that HANDS FREE phones are bad because talking = distraction.
I refuse to drive a manual and before I had a car with bluetooth built-in, I just simply only answered the phone in an emergency (like being lost and needing directions) and then I'd drop it in my lap if I was on anything but a straight road without stoplights / stop signs.
I'd rather just ban dingbats who aren't capable of realizing that it's a matter of stupid people not paying attention to what they're doing instead of blaming it on "evil distractions". As the saying goes, "Every time you try to make something idiot-prof, the world makes a better idiot".
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
The point of these laws is that at some point the risk to others is too great to be justified. If we just limited laws to cases where somebody is already dead or injured that would greatly reduce the point of doing so as it would only apply retroactively.
With that approach we'd have basically no traffic laws, food safety laws, maintenance requirements on transportation or rules against other forms of reckless endangerment.
By their actions before you stop them. Crossing the yellow line multiple times, failure to maintain a constant speed, not noticing that the cop put his lights on until a minute later when he finally hits the siren.
Then how do you convict them. It will always come down to the cop's word against the acused, with the way things are done now. "I saw him cross the line 4 times, drift off the road and onto the shoulder, and could see he wasn't looking at the road because he was looking down." Defendant: "No I didn't." So do you convict or acquit if you were on the jury?
Learn to love Alaska
fine get the ass hat cop that is 2 inches from my bumper running a freaking windows terminal at the posted 70Mph speed limit
Conversely, if you're doing any of those things and driving perfectly safely, then good for you.
Because if they can't do them safely, then they are impaired. So you really are interested in impairment. You just have an issue with my wording. You are right that I'm not interested in impairment. I'm personally interested in risk level. Society has made a conscious choice that absolute risk is irrelevant and that impairment is a more important metric, so I addressed that. I'm much rather society abandon the Prohibition attitude toward drinking and the focus on "impairment" and instead focus on absolute risk. 75% of those with licenses shouldn't have them. But that includes most people, so they are against that because they don't like being told they are incompetent drivers (even if they are). So anyone focusing on real risk will get voted out.
Learn to love Alaska
Well then you're going to have to ban pretty much everything then, seeing as how just about every activity involves the possibility of being killed.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
A: Most states don't have juries in traffic court (I don't know any specifically that do actually) B: That applies just as much to "I saw him talking on his cell phone" Defendant: "No, I was playing music off my iPod"
Based on the calculations, not on breath.
Learn to love Alaska
Do you think the cost of preventing drunk driving also exceeds the safety benefits? Because that is what study after study has been showing; that talking on a cell phone impairs a driver about the same as driving drunk.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
The easy solution is self driving cars.
I don't think it would be all that easy, but in essence I agree with you. Self driving cars are the way of the future. The way of the future. The way of the future. The way of the future.
Unfortunately it's the conversation, not the holding of a phone, that causes the impairment. If you need to make a call, get off the road. Being able to make a call on the road doesn't outweigh the risks any more than driving home drunk outweighs the cost of a taxi or designated driver or not drinking in the first place. Mycroft
Interesting, got any links with information on that specifically? If that is accurate, then cars that seat more than one person represent just as much of a risk, I'd think.
. In all those cases, as with cell phones, you can stop doing those activities at any time to focus on the road.
The problem is, how do you know when it is time to focus on the road, when you are already distracted.
I believe the article you are referring to is this http://www.24-7pressrelease.com/press-release/study-says-texting-while-driving-is-more-dangerous-than-drunk-driving-184522.php. Despite Car and Driver considered to be a world renowned journal throughout all of academia, the study was not very thorough. Specifically, using only two test subjects for your test doesn't provide meaningful data.
Yeah. That argument sucks.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
The first time, I simply came to a stop on a 30MPH road where a guy was making a left turn into a shopping plaza entrance and a woman behind me in her minivan didn't stop
Maybe she was busy talking on her cell phone.
we all gotta die some time
We all gotta kill someone sometime too, right?
I know I am being trolled, but still!
I have no problem with the added risk of driving with a cell phone. Driving risky to begin with, and the phone is well-within many other risks that are far worse -- like improperly maintained vehicles, poor drivers, ill drivers, and poor conditions. The problem is the same problem as with most problems. People forget that they can solve the problems.
Banning it is not the solution.
There's a small indicator on my licence that says I must wear corrective lenses in order to drive.
What we need to do is to train people to drive while on the phone. Driving is no where near as dangerous has dozens of other things that we do every year. No one wonders if Mario Andretti can drive while talking on the radio at 300+. We fly, we skydive, we scuba dive, we bungee jump, risk money, we carry children, we play with fire.
There are no walls between lanes on the highway. It's risky; we get it.
What I want is very simple. I want the exact same road test that you took to get your licence in the first place. And I want the option to take the same test while using my phone. If I pass, I want another little indicator on my licence that says I'm permitted to use my phone in that way while driving -- because I've proven that I can, the same way I've proven that I can drive in the first place.
Certainly, not everyone would pass. Perhaps I wouldn't. But I'd have the opportunity to train for it. And that's the point.
Instead, what I see now is doubly stupid. I see husbands talking to wives, hands-free so it's legal; then something happens on the road that requires her to shut up. But he won't say that to his wife. And if he does, she still won't shut up. The alternative would have been to say nothing, drop the phone from his hand, and go from medium attension to full attension in 1.5 seconds. And since no human being can be at full attension for more than a few minutes -- life guards train for years to be able to reach 20 minutes maximum -- that's pretty good.
Now look, I give. In a sunny blizzard, in an old mini-van, with loud children in the back seat, the phone would be to omuch. But on a dry road, with inifinite visibility, in a modern sports car, with no children, and a calm passenger, if you still need your entire focus, then you sholudn't be driving in the first place.
So there exists a threshhold in the middle, certainly. But it's not at the ban-all-phones end.
It'd be a busy job I'm sure. There'd be probably dozens of people to punch in the face every day, all across the country. But at the end of the day I'd still feel like I had the best job ever.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
This why I love Slashdot.
Take off every 'sig' !!
Of course you don't need your knees to steer a vehicle when you are busy with two mobile phones. Just look at this bus driver who is talking on one phone and configuring a second phone, all the while steering a bus (public transport) with his elbows.
You should be stopped for driving while impaired, not for driving after drinking alcohol. The use of a specific limit - 0.8%, or 0.5%, or whatever - is a poor substitution for plain old good judgement. Some people are impaired while *sober* (like my grandmother, who was allowed to keep her driver's license far, far too long), others are fine at 0.1% BAC, or with a phone growing out of their ear.
Really, if you are sensible, what is the problem? Can't have two hands on the wheel? Watch anyone who drives a stick in city traffic - they usually keep one hand on the shifter. Can't talk while driving? How about with the other passenger. Worse: what if you drive a stick *while* talking to your passenger? Oh no! Now, talking on the phone *while* driving a stick - that is a problem, because you haven't got three hands.
The gp is absolutely right. Beware the the culture of zero tolerance, of substituting strict enforcement of rules for common sense and good judgement.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
If it's the act of having a conversation, then we definitely need to ban communication between passengers in vehicles.
No, because other passengers will be aware when a situation occurs that will require extra attention by the driver and will instinctively not distract the driver during those times. An extra passenger also means an extra pair of eyes to look out for dangers. This isn't to say that a driver will not get distracted by a conversation with a passenger, but it is not as bad as a conversation with someone on the other end of the phone.
...the guy in his 20's STILL had a better reaction time than the guy in his 40's did while stone sober without a phone - so the real lesson is that people over 40 shouldn't be allowed to drive, period (if you want to use reaction times).
People already take this into account. The older driver will tend to drive in a more cautious manner to compensate for their reduced reaction times. This gets to the extreme when you find the really old folk driving at a third of the speed limit.
But once again, the danger of this reduced reaction time is mitigated by people instinctively compensating for it. The problem is that many people do not realise how distracting talking on the phone can be, so there is no instinct telling them to slow down and be more cautious while driving.
I mean, the problem with people using their phones while driving isn't an issue of where their hands are. It's an issue of how much of their attention is on the road, and how quickly a distracted driver can react to, say, an oncoming minivan.
I think that's something most (all?) of us can agree on.
But it goes without saying that if the driver was simultaneously using 2 headsets to make calls (which is pretty impressive, in itself), that most people would not object to it, and it certainly wouldn't be illegal.
Clearly this driver is going to be very distracted, and if the driver of a minivan lost control and veered into his lane, he wouldn't be able to react (a) quickly or (b) safely.
So what is it about hands-free phones that makes people thing that they're somehow safer? And of course, by "safer", I mean "slightly less dangerous".
Did they also show that driving drunk has benefits exceeding the benefits of communicating with people while in a vehicle? If not, then no, that is not what is being shown in study after study.
Don't punish people for the act of driving while using a cell phone. Many many people are perfectly capable of doing so safely. Punish them if they hit someone. There's no need for these laws. Use the laws already on the books for things such as manslaughter. Wait til someone actually harms someone else to punish them.
...quicker, easier, more seductive the darkside is...but more powerful, it is not.
Are you really trying to make the argument...
Notice how those words are almost NEVER followed up by an accurate summary of the argument being made?
The cop car should have a camera that can be used as proof.
Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.
But once again, the danger of this reduced reaction time is mitigated by people instinctively compensating for it.
If only this were true. Most crazy traffic stunts I get to see are pulled off by middle-aged men, trying to prove themselves that youth is a mental state.
Pedophiles think of the children constantly, so I prefer not to. Don't wanna seem like one!
Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.
This is why copcars have a windshield camera.
Make a man a fire and he will be warm for a day, set a man on fire and he will be warm for the rest of his life
A person in the same car will notice a dangerous situation and stop chatting. A person on the other end of a cellphone call cannot do that.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
There is no direct harm to them done by doing so. The particular argument that I replied to seemed to imply that banning things when only a few people abuse them is alright (because, if not, why not make killing legal?), which I disagree with. There is no way to kill someone without killing them. However, you can drive a car without killing someone (but a car can certainly be used to kill someone or escape from law enforcement). The same can be said about just about anything. I'd say the particular analogy he used is flawed.
and it's considerably more than just a few.
Really? Could you give a citation for that? As I said in another post, I'm not sure of the numbers.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
No, he's trying to make the argument that having a conversation on your phone should. Given that study after study after study has shown this is much much more dangerous than having a conversation with a passenger or listening to the radio, I don't see a problem.
You'd think wrong. The studies into this show repeatedly that a conversation with someone there actually impairs you far less than a conversation on the phone. There are a couple of explanations for this thrown around...
1) The person who's there can see what's going on on the road and time the conversation to not distract significantly... You can also more easily tell them to shut the fuck up if you're hitting difficult stuff.
2) Your brain actually works harder in the weird situation where it's got to talk to someone who's not there – humans haven't really evolved to do it well.
These people are doing things like using two cellphones because they believe they are still in control of the car (90% of drivers rate their own ability as "above average"). Punishing them only for causing a wreck will not discourage them at all because they believe they will never cause a wreck. The government has the duty to protect the basic rights of life, liberty and whatever third thing your guys felt like listing (it's security of person in the Declaration of Human Rights) and that means preventing car accidents, not just punishing the (likely already dead) guy who caused them.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Following too closely isn't dangerous.
I got this far, and then realised you're either a) a moron or b) a troll, either way, I stopped again.
No, they're typically followed up by taking the same argument to its extreme and often disproving the point being made by reductio ad absurdum. Of course, in this case, it's deeply flawed, but that doesn't stop it being a valid discussion technique.
So, do you think the guy in this case has been punished without evaluating how good he is at multi-tasking? May be we could put him on driving simulator, ask him to talk on a phone, text on another and simulate some dangerous situations, and measure his reaction time. May be this should be part of the license test?
Most crazy traffic stunts I get to see are pulled off by middle-aged men, trying to prove themselves that youth is a mental state.
Really? Well, maybe they are actually better at driving, because the accident statistics show middle aged drivers to be the safest age group.
I conceded the exact same point each time. Namely that there is a difference in how much one is distracted between conversation with someone present and someone on the phone. Several people pointed it ou,t and I felt a need to respond to more than one of those. That point answers the question I asked, which was "Are you really trying to make the argument that having a conversation with someone while driving should be banned?" The answer is "no" because there is a difference in degree. I don't think anyone should be embarrassed by being convinced by a good argument, so I realize that I should not be. Thank you for your considered and mean-spirited reply.
... then what body part did he use?
I think of teacher of mine phrased it best:
"So, you like listening to distracting music while I am teaching? Mostly fine by me, so long you get your homework done. But, lets be honest: Perhaps 1/10.000 will get increased ability to learn from listening to music, and by statistics we are quite sure you are not one of them. So please remove that headset while I attemp to teach you math."
Core point: Unless you can empirically prove that you are one of those 1/10.000, then frankly you are endangering the rest of the people on the road.
People already take this into account. The older driver will tend to drive in a more cautious manner to compensate for their reduced reaction times. This gets to the extreme when you find the really old folk driving at a third of the speed limit.
The older driver doesn't tend to believe they are invincible and nothing can ever happen to them. And the older driver has twenty years experience reading other drivers' behaviour, so he will know when the twenty year old is going to do something dangerous before the twenty year old knows himself.
Now, you might argue that this level is closer than where most people would place it, and I would then argue that you're part of the problem of why driving is the most dangerous activity mankind partakes in.
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
Don't punish people for the act of driving while using a cell phone. Many many people are perfectly capable of doing so safely.
This is brought to you by the same falsehood as 85% of drivers of drivers think they are better than the average idiot on the road. The issue is people don't know their limits. Yes there are people who multitask well. Yet there are far more people who think they do well.
Yet what you propose is for some person to get slapped hard after he's run over grandma? Well grandma may have mixed feelings about the situation staring down from above.
If you go down this road you need to make the punishment fit the crime. Manslaughter is no longer an accident is negligence and willful endangerment. When we see people going to jail for 10 years for killing someone with a car rather than a simple license suspension they maybe people will get the point. ... Well the 15% of people who know they aren't good drivers might, the rest just end up in the legal system.
The same studies also show that it's about the same level as talking with a passenger, as I recall. It is certainly equally distractive to have a baby whine at you because it has lost its dummy, believe me.
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.
in a country where it's perfectly possible to live without a car, this term is far too short. He should never be allowed behind the wheel on a public road again.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
I don't know why people feel the need to even use a phone whilst driving full stop, there's no reason they shouldn't be banned from all use whilst on the road.
There's no real circumstance where you HAVE to answer a call the second it comes through, or HAVE to make one immediately. It's not hard to pull over somewhere quiet, and make the call or call someone back.
I've never once felt the need to use my phone whilst driving. I don't know why anyone else would- I have as many important calls as anyone else.
The only pet annoyance I do have is that I can't understand why the fuck using a phone whilst driving is illegal, but smoking is not. Lighting a cigarette, or dropping one whilst driving and having to find it, or have your car go up in flames is far more dangerous, so I do agree that our laws in this respect are inconsistent but I have no problem with banning phone use whilst actually driving, there's no real excuse for it.
Do you think the cost of preventing drunk driving also exceeds the safety benefits?
Yes.
(Apart from it not being a "cost" for the state... Indeed, in both cases, the fines actually bring in revenue, rather than being costs...)
a conversation with someone there actually impairs you far less than a conversation on the phone
Kinda depends how you do it. Several people I know appear to require eye contact with the person they are talking to, face-to-face. So while they may be hopelessly impaired while talking on the phone and driving, at least their eyes are on the road. When they are talking to someone in the passenger seat they are (most times) looking AT THAT PERSON and not at the road at all. I once had a particularly scary ride with one of these individuals who was carrying on a conversation with the person in the back seat .....
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
And if one of those "few innocent bystanders who die" was your kid or your partner, would you still say there doesn't need to be a law?
ahh... I thought so...
And the people shall be oppressed, every one by another, and every one by his neighbour Isaiah 3:5
people have gotten distracted, walked into glass and died.
By your logic we should all be in self-contained bubbles with proximity alarms whenever we move.
Why did you ask the question if you were basically going to answer it for me? Anyway, I can't say exactly how I'd feel (since that is probably a "bad" situation to most people), but even if I did change my views for some reason, that would not mean that my original views were wrong. If anything, it would indicate bias on my part.
But, to be honest, I don't see myself ever supporting the ban of something simply because a few people misuse it.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
I don't know about where you are, but in the UK the driver in an emergency vehicle isn't allowed to fiddle with the MDT while driving.
That's fine if you're using a hands-free kit. If you're trying to hold the phone with one hand and drive with the other, you are a danger to yourself and other road users because you don't have proper control of your vehicle. If you're trying to dial a number or look up a contact list, you're not looking at the road.
You'd be amazed how many accidents are caused by people just not paying attention to the road. Fiddling about with phones doesn't help this.
Another possible factor is that the sound quality of cell phones is just on the border of what humans can decipher (by design), meaning much more brain power is used to understand the words when you speak in a phone than it would be if the other person was present. This should change with, I think, 3G networks, which have better sound quality.
Problem for the law is that it is impossible to differentiate the people who can handle talking on a phone while driving and those who can't, so there has to be a blanket ban. That is no different to setting a speed limit or a limit for alcohol consumption - I'm sure there are people who can handle more but how can we determine who they are?
Just wait until you stop before making a call. If it is really that important you can always pull over, and if it isn't then it's not worth the risk.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
[...] Just because there are a few morons who abuse the privilege and put other drivers in serious danger should not prevent the rest from doing what is otherwise not that dangerous. [...]
I would wholeheartedly agree with you, were it not for one tiny problem: The vast majority of people is unable to adequately judge whether they belong to the morons or to the rest. So I rather have the law err on the side of caution and treat everyone as a moron.
As my driving school instructor always told me: There are bad drivers, and there are those who have not yet had the chance to find out that they are bad drivers.
Rudolf Hess edited Mein Kampf. He was the very first grammar nazi.
And the sad part is ... the nanny state will use this an example of why we "need" extremely restrictive laws regulating how and when cell phones and other devices may be used while inside a car. A couple of morons with bad habits are going to ruin it for the vast majority who know better than to take their hands off the wheel.
The "nanny state" needs these "extremely restrictive laws" because people behave fucking stupidly and kill not just themselves, but other people. You have to have laws to punish people, because otherwise everyone thinks hey know best, they're perfectly safe, nothing will happen to them...
Anyway, a law requiring you not to use your mobile phone only affects those moronic to do so in the first place.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Just because there are a few morons who abuse the privilege and put other drivers in serious danger should not prevent the rest from doing what is otherwise not that dangerous.
Fuck off, using a (non hands free) mobile phone while driving is always potentially dangerous. It's the same reason you don't let people drink and drive.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
should be handled the same way the rest of the industrialized world handles DUI - mandatory felony for the first offense.
except in Queensland, Australia. We have drunk off duty police keeping their licence, no conviction recorded and their names suppressed from media publication. This is the opposite of the nanny state. Here "justice" is administered not by the police but by the criminals who believe they are fairly redistributing wealth, Robin Hood would roll in his grave.
That problem is not unique, police abusing their powers to protect themselves happens all over the world.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Exactly. Someone driving recklessly is endangering someone no matter what. Someone who isn't driving recklessly isn't. Stop the root problem: driving recklessly. No one died because of a "distracted driver" or a "drunk driver" but they died because of a reckless driver, the person would still be dead if they were driving the same with in a completely silent car with a sober driver still driving the same way.
People being distracted by children, talking on mobile phones or driving while drunk don't think they are driving recklessly. Even boy racers going three times the speed limit in town probably don't think they're being reckless.
Reckless driving is like intelligence, no one's ever going to admit they're stupid.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
There is no safe way to drive without being able to see the road. Nobody that I know of considers it a good idea to have people who cannot see allowed to drive;
But I thought that the rumble strips on the side of the road were there so blind people knew when they had go too close to the edge? Have my friends been lying to me?
If you read a speed reading book, does it take you less time to read the second half?
The same studies also show that it's about the same level as talking with a passenger, as I recall. It is certainly equally distractive to have a baby whine at you because it has lost its dummy, believe me.
When my baby cries while I'm driving, I pull over, calm her down and then continue. I completely agree that it's a huge distraction and that's why I don't continue to drive while it's happening.
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This should change with, I think, 3G networks, which have better sound quality.
Aren't the current networks 3G?
English is not my first language. Corrections and suggestions are welcome.
So a couple of morons who don't pay attention while driving are going to ruin it for the other morons who don't pay attention while driving?
When you are piloting a ton of metal at 70 mph a couple of feet from a bunch of other piloted missiles, you need to PAY ATTENTION to what you are doing. Not be looking at the latest text message you just received. And yes, studies have shown that it's different from talking to people in the same car.
No, the studies that I've seen cited say that cell phone usage is NOT the same as talking to other people in the car.
Really?
And also the loss of all high frequencies (typical landline 3.5kHz, cell phone probably much less, certainly wordse sound quality) means you have to concentrate more on the call to understand the other person when compared with someone in the passenger seat.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
I always started with "Is it a woman?" before I went to alcohol or technology. Did an experiment with my girlfriend one time on a hundred mile stretch of Thruway. Every time we saw an erratic driver ahead, I could tell her whether or not it was a woman or old person long before we were within visual range of the driver. She still hates me for my near-100% accuracy.
If you can't stab a passenger to death with one hand, it's time to go back to Serial Killer Kindergarten.
Following too closely isn't dangerous. Speeding isn't either. You don't care about crashes either. You just want laws enforced in a manner to force those around you to drive in a manner you find more comfortable.
Conversely, if you're doing any of those things and driving perfectly safely, then good for you.
Because if they can't do them safely, then they are impaired. So you really are interested in impairment. You just have an issue with my wording. You are right that I'm not interested in impairment. I'm personally interested in risk level. Society has made a conscious choice that absolute risk is irrelevant and that impairment is a more important metric, so I addressed that. I'm much rather society abandon the Prohibition attitude toward drinking and the focus on "impairment" and instead focus on absolute risk. 75% of those with licenses shouldn't have them. But that includes most people, so they are against that because they don't like being told they are incompetent drivers (even if they are). So anyone focusing on real risk will get voted out.
Based on your post, I'd say you fall into the 75%.
Does hands free really make a difference? The actual act of holding the phone up to your ear isn't distracting, it's the conversation.
Testing only two examples is hardly conclusive. Most studies I've seen suggest that while older people do have somewhat slower reactions on average, the variation within an age group is much larger than the variation between age groups.
Are you really trying to make the argument that having a conversation with someone while driving should be banned? How about listening to the radio?
There is a point at which "conversation" can become distracting, for example, if you are turning round in your seat to shout at kids in the back.. Similarly, if you have the radio so loud that it's vibrating the doors and drowning out the sound of a police siren behind you.
However desirable, it owuld be impractical to have a law banning all conversation or music in cars, but the point is that drivers should reducing these serious distractions themselves.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
There is no safe way to drive without being able to see the road. Nobody that I know of considers it a good idea to have people who cannot see allowed to drive;
But I thought that the rumble strips on the side of the road were there so blind people knew when they had go too close to the edge? Have my friends been lying to me?
Did they forget to tell you that stop signs with white borders are optional?
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
The easy solution is self driving cars.
In the same way that the easy solution to our energy needs is cheap cold fusion reactors?
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
a conversation with someone there actually impairs you far less than a conversation on the phone
Kinda depends how you do it. Several people I know appear to require eye contact with the person they are talking to, face-to-face. So while they may be hopelessly impaired while talking on the phone and driving, at least their eyes are on the road. When they are talking to someone in the passenger seat they are (most times) looking AT THAT PERSON and not at the road at all. I once had a particularly scary ride with one of these individuals who was carrying on a conversation with the person in the back seat .....
People like that should simply be banned from driving untilo they pass a special test. It would probably require them being dobbed into the police by a close friend or relative, but what the hell, they're a fucking menace.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
They have to, since there are loads of idiots who think personal freedom is the same as having the right to endanger others.
This is blinging
Then how do you convict them. It will always come down to the cop's word against the acused, with the way things are done now. "I saw him cross the line 4 times, drift off the road and onto the shoulder, and could see he wasn't looking at the road because he was looking down." Defendant: "No I didn't." So do you convict or acquit if you were on the jury?
Once you've got a system where people don't believe the word of police officers, your country's gone down the toilet one way or another.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Do you really care about impairment? No, you really don't. It's being used as a proxy. Impairment causes bad driving, which causes the consequences, like collisions, you actually care about. So you watch for the dangerous behavior like following too closely, speeding, swerving, etc. If you do those things, you're in violation, and it doesn't matter if it was because you were sleepy, talking to someone in your car, talking on the phone, getting serviced, or eating a cheeseburger. Conversely, if you're doing any of those things and driving perfectly safely, then good for you.
Well in that case you'd have to say the same about drink driving. The whole point is prevention, rather than mopping up the blood and brains of children from your windscreen afterwards.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
1) The other person is not in the car and has no awareness of the situation.
That argument is not true in general. If the person you are conversing with is a child, blind, or maybe just not a vehicle driver, the person may not have any significant awareness of the situation.
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.
It's a bit of both. I see a lot of cars turn/change lane without signalling when the driver's holding a phone to their head.
And I've had two near misses - literally inches away from t-boning the assholes - where drivers pulled out (when I had priority) and in both cases they were doing the same. Depending on how you hold the phone, you're probably blocking your peripheral vision to an extent - and I suspect you don't turn your head either.
But I think studies show that the majority of the effect is the mental load, rather than the physical encumbrance. 80:20, IIRC. Somewhat counterintuitive, I know.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
You are right, but there is a rule that applies even IF you are using a handsfree in the UK.
Our current law banning the use of a handheld device whilst "in control of a car" is relatively recent (since about 2004 I think). It makes it an offence to drive whilst holding or operating a handheld device, irregardless of how well you are driving.
But the law of Driving without due care and attention still applies if one is driving like an idiot. Having a hands free is not going to help you, and in fact can work against you if it is prooven that you were on a call whilst you were driving without due care and attention.
Have a nice day!
Changing the radio station can usually wait until the traffic's doing something simple and predictable (unless Eminem comes on, in which case I completely understand changing immediately). A phone conversation will happen and keep happening even if the road suddenly gets difficult.
The difference is that Cold Fusion is still tecnology very much in development. However, self driving cars ARE possible with exisiting technology. The hardest part is modifying the infrustructure to assist.
Have a nice day!
> 2) Your brain actually works harder in the weird situation where it's got to talk to someone who's not there â" humans haven't really evolved to do it well.
Does not really make sense, does it? I don't look at passengers while talking to them so they are not "there", either. Same for people in the back seat unless I see them in the rear view mirror.
Unless the concept of cell phones is still new and exciting, I don't believe it's inherently weird due to our path of evolution. If anything, we should all be stunned into silence every time we switch on the light.. And we are pretty used to artificial lighting, by now.
I guess we're all supposed to disable our radios and never drive with our kid in the car.. people think a cell phone is a distraction? Try driving with your kid screaming his brains out in the back seat. The whole anti-cell phone crusade is just a generational complaint from adults towards the younger folk who are on their cell phones 24/7. I'm not saying people should be doing this, but people have been eating big macs while driving for decades and there was never such a huge public outcry about that, or any number of other equally large or greater distractions than a cell phone. This anti-cell phone thing is just a bandwagon, I don't condone distracted driving but I also don't condone repeating the opinion of the year. Studies have shown driving tired impairs judgement just as much as drunk, and studies show driving talking with a passenger has equal impairment as being on a cell phone. We want to get up in arms about driving faux pa's, how about the fact that people complain about red light cameras. Honestly, what are people complaining about? The fact that they can't run a red light without getting caught? Cell-phones in the whole scheme of driving are just the trend to complain about right now. I guess people got tired of complaining about the noise from rice burners ten years ago.
An honest question: you said, "...where drivers pulled out (when I had priority) ...". By choice of words I deduce that you're not in the US. We also have a similar concept, called right-of-way, but the strange thing (at least in my state see page 26), is that the laws are written so that no one ever HAS the right-of-way, but that they must give up or yield right-of-way in certain situations. This makes it nearly impossible to argue that the other driver did something stupid that you couldn't foresee. The argument is that you must do everything in your power to prevent the accident, regardless of who was supposed to yield the right-of-way. It's very frustrating.
Are your rules the same, or do you have clear possession of right-of-way?
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
To be (mildly) fair to some of these drivers, it's illegal to pull over in a lot of places unless you've broken down or there's an emergency. If you have a really important phone call that you need to take and you pull onto the shoulder, you're liable to get fined.
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because a lot of idiots don't think it causes impairement of their driving.
It's easier to make an extra law that explicitely forbids it, just like alcohol and driving, so the 80% of people who did this will not do it anymore, leaving us with only the idiots who probally drive even after several alcoholic drinks and other dumb shit
Make a man a fire and he will be warm for a day, set a man on fire and he will be warm for the rest of his life
Yes, actually. The prevalence of mobile phones and the ignorance of their affect on driving ability, as demonstrated by the GG[...]GP means that if not explicitly legislated against as a dangerous thing to do people will just go ahead and do it until they crash. At which point they'll claim that the phone usage totally wasn't affecting their driving and the other guy just came out of nowhere. Of course that wouldn't stand up in any (sensible) court but by then somebody may already be dead, which kinda defeats the point of having safety laws.
Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.
However, pilots have something that your average driver does not, an absolute minimum of 40 hours of one-on-one instruction from a pilot who is VASTLY more experienced than the student, with 60 hours being the average, before they are ever allowed to carry passengers by themselves. If they complete their Instrument Rating, which focuses on communications even more, the number of hours jumps to 120 on average. And the testing involves a 60 question random generated written exam, a 3-4 hour oral exam, followed by 1-2 hours of flight exam. Whereas your average student driver has about 5 hours of instruction in a car with multiple other students, some tutelage from the parents, and a test so simple with a passing threshold so low that an ape could pass by randomly mashing the keyboard, before being allowed on the road alone. And we wonder why people can't drive. They've never been properly trained how!
The solution is unfortunately still not as simple as that. Germany has significantly lower accident rates than the US (regardless of whether you look at it per capita or distance travelled), but it's still FAR higher than it should be.
To get a drivers licence in Germany is significantly harder than in the US. Must be 17 years old to start the process (often 18), 14 theory classes, minimum of 12 practical lessons although often much more (all with an accredited driving school - not just with your parents or so), theoretical test of 30 or so random questions, and finally a practical test that can last up to a couple of hours. Not QUITE as hard as the pilots licence that you describe, but getting close.
The thing is that accidents still happen. This is primarily because people just get accustomed to driving to the point that they think they can do it without paying too much attention. 99.9% of the time, they're right... they CAN do it without paying much attention (and that's what makes them even more accustomed to it). It's the 0.1% of the time that something unexpected happens that causes the accidents. Trying to get people to be vigilant the rest of the time in order to get them to avoid these rare cases is something I don't think anyone has quite figured out yet.
It's anecdotal only, but I've found that people from places where driving is a bit more "chaotic" are often significantly better to reacting to the surprises - they're required to pay more attention more of the time and so don't get quite so comfortable as people in places where driving is more structured.
Not that I'd suggest we all start driving chaotically to try to improve things - of course it wouldn't. I can't say I know a solution, but in my point of view, it does appear to be a significant part of the problem.
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The ban on using mobile phones while driving isn't down to people taking their hands off the wheel, it's because studies have shown that it causes drivers to take their attention away from the road, thereby causing accidents.
I have a car which pairs with a Bluetooth phone and which I use for in-car telephone conversations. Put that in your holier-than-thou pipe and smoke it.
== Jez ==
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The argument is that you must do everything in your power to prevent the accident, regardless of who was supposed to yield the right-of-way. It's very frustrating.
Don't you typically do everything in your power to prevent an accident anyway? When I see someone coming towards an intersection perpendicular to me at a high rate of speed that doesn't look like they're slowing down, I could care less what color the light is, I'm not going to cross his path until I'm sure he's stopping. When someone ignores a stop sign, even if I was waiting at the intersection first, I'm gonna let them continue, not just head out into the intersection, too, and say "I had the right of way!!!!!"
I can certainly understand being frustrated by the shitty drivers that do that crap, and I am, too, believe me...but I'd rather let them go on their way and be shitty drivers elsewhere then to push the issue and play the "right of way" game. When I was 16 years old and I thought I was invincible and didn't give a damn about insurance since I wasn't paying for it, maybe yeah, I would have played chicken with the other guy because "fuck him"....but I'm a grown up now. The 16 year old's waiting behind me at a light may get pissed that the person in front of them didn't floor it the second the light turned green, but after watching people get T-boned at lights over 20 years of driving, I give it a second to make sure the interesection is clear (and going to remain that way). Better safe than sorry.
The calculator says I would need 29 beers in 2 hours to get up to 0.45
Sounds like the kinda parties I used to go to when I was in school....
The only solution I can think of that measures actual impairment is something in the car that monitors eye movement and such to see how often mirrors and such are checked.
But surely such a large dataset would be needed for this, and have regional variations? At night you are most at risk from sleep but consequently check mirrors far less as any car will be visible through headlights. I remember doing the UK driving test and consciously moving your head every five seconds to check mirrors - hugely distracting and yet going for much longer than that without obviously glancing at a mirror gets a minor fault. As soon as the test is passed this behaviour is put to the side as it's not practical in everyday use.
This is one area where manufacturers are a bit ahead of the curve. If safety guidelines include lane departure warnings on all new cars and other similar technologies then eventually these driving errors will start to decrease (hopefully). Car structures are so safe now that the safety focus should be on the driver rather than adding more heavy bodywork.
I think driver retesting every 5-10 years is possibly the best way to go to try and keep driving standards high.
So, a driver gets heavily distracted trying to infer things that would, in a normal conversation, be inferred from facial cues, but looking at his passenger's face to get those clues doesn't distract him very much?
Likewise, the passenger looking at the driver's face to get those social cues will notice problems and alert the driver to them by shutting up suddenly?
Somehow, that seems counterintuitive....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
There's a very important distinction that people miss when drawing this false equivalency: Failing to prioritize phone use while driving is a result of poor judgment, while alcohol impairment is a cause of poor judgment. The former CAN be addressed through education rather than criminalization - but we're too lazy to do that. Instead, we take the same approach as abstinence-only sex education employs, namely, "This is universally dangerous. There's no safe way to do it. Bad things will happen to you if you try." This is counterproductive. If you assert the dogma that something is absolutely bad, you don't leave yourself any room to teach people who are going to do it anyway, how to make it less bad. So it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy of our own making - phone use while driving remains as dangerous as it is NOT because it has to, but because we willfully refuse to make it safer.
The Nanny State tries to protect you from your own stupidity.
This is showing the need for the state to protect OTHERS from your stupidity. That is not nannyism. It's a perfectly legitimate role of the government.
And yet...
Statistics show a decline in fatal traffic accidents. This decline has continued in spite of people talking on their cell phones while driving. The rate of the decline didn't even change significantly....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
high rate of speed
I beg you never to use that phrase again. It's some idiocy that a newshead must have come up with, and everyone is repeating it, having no clue what it means. Rate of speed [change] is acceleration. That's not what you meant. </rant>
When you mean speed, just say speed. Want to sound more scientificky? Say velocity. Sigh.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Did this study take into account idiots who spend more time looking at the passenger they're conversing with than the road in front of them?
No one cares what your captcha was
Houston TX, USA
I saw a woman drive while eating a bowl of cereal milk and all. When she was finished, she poured the excess milk out at a traffic light. I had to laugh......
My wife would pass for a "soccer mom", but she drives a sedan, not an SUV. And for the car to cope with her driving style, I needed to upgrade her sway bars, add a front chassis brace, and get her much better front tires. The end links last about a year, then they all start clunking and need replacement :) Admittedly, the car drives much better after this work.
If she were distracted, she'd probably cause a minor pileup somewhere. Her driving style is very incompatible with distractions. The rule in the car is: the 8 year old has to keep her mouth shut, and the 1 year old is ignored (what else can you do, he won't die). The cellphone is in the trunk.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Having fast reaction times doesn't affect your ability to look ahead and prepare for dangers, that comes with experience. Most accidents are caused by people driving too fast at the wrong time or in the wrong place and/or misjudging hazards. Fast reactions aren't going to help you if you enter a bend much too fast , or decide to overtake just on the brow of a hill, or you don't notice the red light you've just sailed through.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
You mean like every driver in every movie ever made? I swear I want to reach into the screen and strangle them...
It's so bad that when I was biking, I decided to have two gopro HD cameras -- one on the helmet, another under the seat looking backwards. I tried biking to work, but the footage from the rear facing camera would show one very close call every other day or so, and many so-so close calls every day. The benefit of HD cameras with solid state memory is that it's expected to survive crashes, and you can clearly make out license plates, and often driver's faces, too. I decided it was too much of a risk, I don't bike anymore.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
What about changing the radio station while driving?
If you're so cackhanded you can't reach out with one hand and press a button, you shouldn't be driving a car in the first place. If you're so fucking stupid that you bend your head down under the dashboard to look at the little tuning bar, or something, again, you shouldn't be driving a car in the first place.
How do these people manage to change gear?
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
the bigger problem outside of steering with your knees is divided attention. You need to have your full attention on the road or bad shit happens and you piss everyone off.
When you are on a cell phone while driving you do dumb shit, I don't care who you are. I've seen people slow down to 45mph in the passing lane, change lanes right into another car (true story), and just stop the car in traffic at rush hour wildly gesticulating and yelling at whoever is on the other end of the call. The worst are the people that do 5mph on a one lane street and retard traffic because they are being a celltard. I saw a woman on a cell phone in the fast lane yank her wheel and recklessly change lanes across 4 lanes of 65mph traffic without even looking because she was about to miss her exit. She caused a tractor trailer to jack-knife.
Pull the fuck over and make your stupid call. Get out of my way; get off the fucking road. I'll take the guy driving with no hands any day, doing the speed limit or faster, over a moron on a phone slowing me down or changing lanes into my car. That drives me batshit crazy when I'm trying to get to work. If someone road rages, pulls out a piece and kills such an asshole I didn't see anything. That's a justifiable homicide in my opinion, a perfect example of natural selection at work. I'd cheer.
Don't kid yourself. It's the size of the regexp AND how you use it that counts.
It's a bit of both. I see a lot of cars turn/change lane without signalling when the driver's holding a phone to their head.
Not using your turn signal is the standard around here. Can't really blame that one on cell phones.
He can't if he's not in the car, can he?
In any case, it's an argument for why talking with someone in the car is less bad; the extra eyes partly offsets any distraction.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I really think that's the truth. The issue is not one of talking on the phone while driving, it's having to drive at all when one would rather be on the phone or sleeping or whatever else. I really look forward to the day when I can get in the car, say "Car, go to work. Alarm on arrival." and take a nap, read a book, or talk on the cell phone the whole time. Some day in the near future, your car will be a better driver than you are. On that day I will gleefully stop driving.
Too many people are really bad drivers, and it's not always the ones you see, or the ones engaging in socially unacceptable behavior like talking on the phone. I think that every time I see a beer can or bottle lying where it was obviously tossed from a vehicle, but it's just as true of the elderly driver plodding along at 15 MPH under the speed limit.
you've never had an issue, but other people have from the issues you caused. you didn't notice because you were being selfish and were in your own little world. I hope you get a very expensive ticket before you kill someone.
Don't kid yourself. It's the size of the regexp AND how you use it that counts.
So, if I, like, say like every, umm, like every few words, does that make it, like, acceptable, and best to be, like, ignored? It's not a common figure of speech. It's something that people choose to use, whether consciously or not, to sound more educated, it seems. I accept no excuses at all, and yes, I will not try to ignore it. I won't lose sleep over it either, but ignoring other's mistakes is counterproductive. Hopefully you'll reform and stop using that "figure of speech". I put it in quotes, because real figures of speech might get offended otherwise.
The formatting comes naturally. I'm always logged in. Everyfuckingwhere. So there :)
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
So your reaction will be a fraction of a second slower than if you'd not had to say it at all. And you'll be distracted, at least slightly, when they go "Whaaaaat?!?". A car travels quite a distance in a fraction of a second.
But we'll ignore the scientific studies that have been done if they don't support you're biases. I bet you're a better than average driver too - just like everyone else?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Don't punish people for the act of driving while using a cell phone. Many many people are perfectly capable of doing so safely. Punish them if they hit someone. There's no need for these laws. Use the laws already on the books for things such as manslaughter. Wait til someone actually harms someone else to punish them.
Unfortunately, people driving while drunk, using their phones or excessively speeding, just the same as people tailgating, weaving in and out of traffic or driving twenty miles per hour under the limit, all cause accidents, even when they are not affected themselves.
If it was just a case of morons wiping themselves out through their own stupidity, no one would really care, but your freedom to do what you want does not extend to killing or injuring other people. And it's too late once they've slaughtered that ever-popular minibus full of happy school kids.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
There would certainly be less children killed in car accidents. I suspect the number of children dying in household accidents would see an increase.
My car is 2 tons of metal you insensitive clod.
For a skilled driver, driving is not much different from walking
Apart from the fact that you are in control of a ton of metal travelling at twenty times walking pace, no, practically no difference at all.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
How about we make driving the privilege? And the more dangerous your vehicle is to others, the higher the standards for you to get a license. Rather than putting up a sign at every bridge in the state informing that "ice may form on bridge" (as Texas has done, which means drivers promptly learn to ignore the signs and are even more surprised when bridges ice over), why don't we just put that on the test to get a license in the first place?
The giant SUVs seem to actually require you to become a bad driver if you get one. Those drivers in particular should be held to higher standards, i.e. longer test to get a license, harsher penalties for bad driving behavior, more restrictions on eating/smoking/makeup/2phones-and-a-laptop while driving. Then again, it sadly too common to see people with a flat screen installed in the car who seem to believe watching porn makes them better drivers. Or something. We don't even enforce basic equipment laws in most states, leading to customized trucks with bumpers 4 feet off the ground, and headlights shining everywhere except where they should be, in every color of the rainbow.
Sit in a car with a good driver (think advanced training like IAM or police Roadcraft) and have a conversation. You'll find they regularly zone out of the conversation, much like a pilot when they're dealing with flying the plane and talking to ATC. A good driver knows when their attention is becoming comprimised and zones out of the conversation or slows down/stops to compensate. A driver who is talking on a mobile is clearly not able to do this. Hands-free kits are a middle ground - a good driver will be able to use one in the same way a good driver can hold a conversation with a passenger. A bad driver uses one to avoid conviction, and is just as dangerous as a bad driver holding a conversation with a passenger, which is not illegal but is bad practice.
Please consider this account deleted, I just can't be bothered with the spam anymore.
In TX they do, I have served twice on juries for traffic court. 6 instead of 12 jurors. Both were hilarious. Speeding in both cases. I think the defendant is just hoping the officer doesn't show up, but in both cases I served on, they did. In both cases, as soon as the defendant opened their mouth, you could tell they were not holding a full deck and had no defence whatsoever. Deliberation took about a minute.
people have gotten distracted, walked into glass and died. By your logic we should all be in self-contained bubbles with proximity alarms whenever we move.
No, there is a big difference between killing yourself through your own stupidity and killing someone else with two tons of speeding metal.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
So, if I, like, say like every, umm, like every few words, does that make it, like, acceptable, and best to be, like, ignored?
Yeah, because otherwise you're that one insufferable ass in the group that irritates everyone because they're going out of their way to correct those around them. Even if they think they're helping, they're not, because it just irritates the piss out of everyone else. The end result isn't someone that modifies their speech to be more correct, it's someone that thinks you're an asshole, especially when it comes to nitpicky things like our current situation where there was no real confusion or ambiguity in the meaning of what was being said. In these cases, the error is brought up just to point it out and (this is purely conjectural on my part) so that person can feel better about themselves for having done so, or smarter, or superior perhaps. The fact that you knew what I meant despite my improper use of a scientific term illustrates my point clearly in my opinion.
Keep fighting the good fight and crusading against improper use of scientific terms by laypeople in non-scientific situations when it really doesn't matter, though. Just don't expect to get much respect doing it. Have a great day.
the problem is that we continue to give licenses to pilot multi-thousand pound vehicles at high-speeds to practically anyone who applies. Why this guy doesn't loose his license forever is beyond me. Driving is a privilege. How about we start treating it that way instead of something any idiot can do.
Do you think the cost of preventing drunk driving also exceeds the safety benefits? Because that is what study after study has been showing; that talking on a cell phone impairs a driver about the same as driving drunk.
When that means that we are pushing down limits (far below what has been shown to actually cause impairment) in order to cast a wider net that promotes state revenue and makes politicians pushing for 'Zero Tolerance' look good?
When we use techniques for catching drunk drivers that actually hurt our ability to catch the real problem drunk drivers, and instead catch the people, in that aforementioned wider net, that aren't really the ones that pose the real danger?
Then, I have to answer yes.
What if a small child were near the glass? The could easily be killed as the sheets come down.
It's a very slippery slope.
Well then you're going to have to ban pretty much everything then, seeing as how just about every activity involves the possibility of being killed.
That's a load of crap. Manufacturers aren't allowed to sell that explode and saw people's heads off head off at random intervals, but this still leaves using a chainsaw as a slightly dangerous activity.
I suppose you think soldiers in Afghanistan should just fight in shorts, tshirts and trainers rather than all that unnecessarily wussy body armour, and not bother with mine detectors or anything, as they're almost as likely to get blown up anyway?
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
I don't believe in banning something if a few people abuse it, either. Even if the person abusing that something dies from it. To me that sort of thing is a reasonable context to bring up the term 'nanny state' as well as ideas like we are tampering with natural selection to the detriment of the species.
However if innocent bystanders are dying because of the abuse then I'd say it is time to start looking at the wisdom of making the abuse illegal. The concept of negligent homicide is pretty well established and I don't think it should go away.
No, because other passengers will be aware when a situation occurs that will require extra attention by the driver and will instinctively not distract the driver during those times. An extra passenger also means an extra pair of eyes to look out for dangers.
So, a driver gets heavily distracted trying to infer things that would, in a normal conversation, be inferred from facial cues, but looking at his passenger's face to get those clues doesn't distract him very much?
Nothing that I said required the driver to look away from the traffic. Also, I explicitly said that the passenger will change the pacing of the conversation to ebb and flow as required by traffic conditions because they are looking out the window at the traffic too.
Somehow, that seems counterintuitive....
And completely counter to what I said.
I'd say it's a nanny state if they ban something just because a few people use it and get hurt/hurt other people.
There is a profound difference between getting hurt yourself and hurting other people.It's why suicide is generally allowed and murder punished.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
I guess we're all supposed to disable our radios and never drive with our kid in the car
I'm not aware of radios being a problem, but on the kid side yes, yes, a thousand times yes. As a cyclist I find most vehicles are actually decent and competent (and a quick-thinking truck driver probably saved my life when I made a particularly stupid mistake), but drivers with kids in the back are a threat to public safety.
I am trolling
Inspector Grim called :).
He wants to arrest the bastard who dinged his car.
It works better if you decrease the font as you repeat.
At what point to you say enough is enough?
At not using the hands free kit, and not texting or anything like that while driving?
Using a phone while driving is NOT significantly dangerous.
Unless you look at every study ever published on the topic.
The road is not and should not be a safe zone.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't work to make it as safe as possible. Or do you think we should repeal drunk driving laws too?
The same studies also show that it's about the same level as talking with a passenger
No, they haven't, actually. And there's one important distinction: A passenger in a car can also see what's going on, and can shut up and let the driver drive when needed. Someone over the phone has no such ability.
And the increase in vehicle safety mechanisms and designs had *nothing* to do with that, I'm sure.
What your statement fails to realize is that, in most cases, the driver wouldn't be driving that way if it wasn't for alcohol or phones.
Most states that have laws written like that also have penalties for failing to yield the right of way when required.
If you feel the person behind you is too close for your safety, slow down until he either gets the message and backs off, or decides to overtake you. Idiots are marginally safer in front of you, because you can keep an eye on them.
[FUCK BETA]
Holding the phone would be even worse, as now, not only are you distracted by talking on the phone, but you have to use one hand to hold it, meaning you can't steer as well if something should arise. Not to mention that holding a phone up would interfere with your peripheral vision.
And the difference with talking to a passenger is that they can see what's going on, and can shut the hell up when the need arises. Someone on the phone can't.
If it's the act of having a conversation, then we definitely need to ban communication between passengers in vehicles.
Because it's the exact same thing, right? There's no way that a passenger could be able to sense when the driver needs to concentrate, and shut up accordingly. And there's no way that the human brain actually needs to work harder to decipher a phone conversation than a live one. Nope, it's all the same shit.
It only seems that way if you're stupid enough to think that it requires the driver looking over at the person to realize this stuff.
No, you took that to a ridiculously stupid extreme. One in which you completely ignored any and all evidence to the contrary.
not with cops, you slow down they follow you longer, you slow down too much then they have reason to pull you over, your acting suspicious
Of course I do everything in my power to prevent accidents. It's trying to convince your (or their) insurance company that I did everything in my power to prevent an accident and that it's not somehow my fault that they ran a red light or pulled out from a driveway between parked cars.
The only accident I have been involved in was where a driver (in a rental car since she'd crashed her car the previous day, seriously) pulled out in front of me when I was 15 feet away from her and I was doing 35 or so. Even though I swerved into the incoming lane to avoid her (after checking for oncoming cars, of course) and hit the brakes ASAP (and left tiny skid marks - the cops didn't get the fact that I had anti-lock brakes and that there wouldn't be long skid marks) somehow her/my insurance company decided that it was 15% my fault, which just so happened to match my deductible. This was in NJ in the 80's, back in the days of the NJUA and mandatory insurance issuance. That may still be the case up there, I don't know. I didn't get a ticket, obviously, but she sure did, yet it was partly my fault? The only fault of mine was being in NJ at all.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
I actually routinely find myself calling friends while driving purely to keep me alive. They keep me awake, especially on long night drives, to avoid exactly what you've mentioned -- if I'm tired, or otherwise distracted. They keep me focussed.
Why don't we have him be the human test subject in driverless car systems?
Am I correct in assuming that when you are using the Radio you aren't just chatting away with local ham operators and that the topic of conversation is usually related to your actual flight? But I think that's a important distinction.
Also I am guessing the distances used in aviation from possible obstructions are far greater than in a land vehicle.
All in all, not buying the plane/car analogy. Not disagreeing with your overall point however, we do need much better training, I finally realized why driving in Houston stresses me out so much. Apparently until recently they never had to pass a road test to prove they have a basic understanding of the rules of the road in a real scenario. This may account for the large amount of illogical driving I see on the road every day.
If a cop wants to screw with your day, he will. That isn't a good reason for you not to drive safely.
[FUCK BETA]
So you prefer the system where convictions come only because the word of the accused is assumed to be a lie because they wouldn't be on trial if they are innocent?
I've been in the situation where I was charged with speeding and the cop told me that nobody saw me speeding, no readings were taken, and he doesn't know how fast I was going, not even an estimate, but that he thinks I must have been speeding because I was on a motorcycle.
When your system asserts "presumed innocent" then, when the defendant speaks in court, assumes they are lying because they are guilty, then your country went down the toilet 50+ years ago.
Learn to love Alaska
I have few regrets in life. One is not having stolen the book from the Texas A&M University library that had a statistical proof (documented with 20+ cites) showing that following distances of 2 seconds are the worst, and longer is worse than shorter. The reasoning is that a competent driver that gets hit from behind at a 10 mph speed differential will not crash. Thus, if you are competent, do you want a fender-bender, or do you want a situation where if you stop for a deer or person in the road, the person behind you at a 4 second following distance will hit you at full-speed and kill you?
People always ask me for cites and such, and I can't provide them. I've even gone back to the library and looked for the book again (I know where the shelf was that I found it, and it was published by Texas A&M, by the affiliated TTI, one of the most respected traffic engineering organizations on the planet), but I don't have it. I have read it. I've never seen anything that contradicts it, and I've heard a number of people who hold contradictory opinions, but none have substantiated ther opinions any more than "my opinion makes sense to me, so I won't listen to what you have to say" just like you did.
Learn to love Alaska
Yeah, there is. But I still wouldn't support a ban on something just because a few people abuse it and hurt/kill others.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
its not me who drives unsafe, I am not 2 inches off someone else's bumper playing with a laptop, how did this get turned around?
I would then argue that you're part of the problem of why driving is the most dangerous activity mankind partakes in.
People assign risk based on fear, ignoring all evidence. That's why driving is unsafe. We are so afraid of spiders and snakes for that reason. People perceive a slow poisoned death to be a bad one, so they add extra risk to them, despite the fact that dead is dead. But cars are common and necessary so we don't fear them, even though they cause lots of deaths. We are driving, so we have the perception of power. We fear cars like a professional snake handler fears snakes. The danger is no less, but the fear of it is diminshed so we take more risks because we never know or care what the real risk level is.
When people are rational, the deaths on the road will drop to 500 per year (where it would be if people recognized risk and adjusted accordingly).
Learn to love Alaska
Yes, because anyone that holds an opinion different from yours must be because they are wrong. There's no chance that you opinion could be wrong, so you won't even entertain the thought that someone else could be right. Just because I'm more interested in safety than MADD's campaign against drinking (unrelated to driving, that's just the excuse for laws enforcing their Prohibitionary ideals).
Learn to love Alaska
It's ironic that you would talk about an 'idiot public' while you apparently didn't understand anything I've said. It is not a case of 'some who can't do things responsibly', it is a case of something being dangerous for anyone to do, but most people are either ignorant of the danger or too arrogant to believe it affects them. As for the expense aspect of the laws; they usually come with fines. And I'm quite certain the founding fathers didn't envision many of the laws that we use today, nor did they envision any of the things which made them necessary. They were not omnipotent, your country's blind dogma surrounding the founding fathers and their vague and sweeping statements about law and freedom is absurd.
Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.
Well in that case you'd have to say the same about drink driving.
I do. 0.05 is so low of an impairment level it's absurd. Someone wearing average sunglasses will be more impaired than that (given the peripheral vision blocked). But drinking is a more complex isssue because it doesn't directly impact the ability to drive at the levels banned. It affects secondary systems (judgement, and chemical depression). So your judgement is impaired to where yuo are more likely to take an unsafe action, but still be able to control the car as you always could. And chemical depression (as opposed to the mental disease) triggers sleepiness that's more likely to result in someone falling asleep at the wheel on the drive home from the bar. A "drunk" who is alert and not asleep with a person sitting next to them saying "don't do that, that's stupid" at appropriate times is essentially identical in risk as a sober driver. They have no direct impairment of their driving ability. That's why clinical tests show *any* impairment to be "worse than being drunk" because drunk at the legal minimum isn't impaired. So talking on a cell phone, and such compared against it are all impaired worse than drinking. But that doesn't mean that it's safe. Sleeping at the wheel is very dangerous. And it happens quite often. And having had anything to drink, even lower than the minimum, can impair your ability to tell how sleepy you are and increase the chance of you falling asleeep. That's why so many of the "signs" of drunk driving are exactly the same as somoeone falling asleeep. Because we are targeting the wrong problem because MADD would rather there be 100,000 dead people than one drunk one because they don't care about safety, just Prohibition.
Learn to love Alaska
Rather than regional variations, it should be learning and train itself to see how "active" the person is normally, then when the activity decreases below some percentile deviation, it signals an alert. The issue is everyone here would complain about that being used against you in the case of a crash or just general monitoring.
Drivers tests every year wouldn't help. The tests are too easy and test the wrong things. They test your ability to control the car for a few of the most basic tasks under ideal conditions. The entire philosophy of driving tests would need to be changed to make them worth giving.
Learn to love Alaska
No, they don't. http://www.psych.utah.edu/AppliedCognitionLab/HFES2004-000597-1.pdf The risks are increased, but no where near as much as using a cell phone.
Xavier Rabourdin for president 2012
I don't know. To me it's very much less distracting using the bluetooth in my radio to communicate rather then having to crasp the telephone with my shoulders and my back or to use the less effective hands free of the speaker and the mic of my iPhone.
On a plus side, if I navigate with it, I hear the driving instructions over my car speakers while listening to music streamed from my iPhone. Unless I have disabled bluetooth to spare battery life it mostly spares me a lot of hassle and makes it easier to talk and drive.
Sarching for the phone, unlocking it, starting it, searching for the "favorite" and dial *is* distrating. Searching for the phone, longing, answering the call is also distracting.
And the sound is better. And I can clearly hear what the other is saying. And he is clearly hearing me, because the mic is adjusted towards my. And it is relatively cheap for a good radio that could easily play iPods or USB-devices beside the blutooth streaming of my iPhone. I could switch sources (USB/iPod, bluetooth, Radio, CD) and still receive a call over the hands free in my radio.
This is like 150 $. You pay more for a car. In Germany I certainly paid more for my licence. You pay more taxes than that. You pay ten times the price for decent audio equipment and stuff.
Could you please provide an explanation why it is so harshly unfair to buy such a device except "I hate rules, even the understandable ones"?
Listen, pal. I live in Germany and we have no speed limit. I could go as fast as I like provided the road is clear. I did my share of 160, 180 or even 220 km/h on a few occasions. But:
1) I always look for the weather. Even 80 km/h is too fast if it rains cats and dogs
2) I always take into account the idiot that pulls over to pass a truck without checking first
3) I always, always, always leave enough room to the guy in front of me. Rule of thumb: 3 seconds, I mostly give him 4 or 5 or more. 1 second: Reaction time. Rest: The time between adjusting how fast he is decelerating and the severity of the reason he is doing so. Assume a flat tire. Assume an animal. Assume a traffic jam just after the hill or the curve. Assume he is crashing into the last car at the traffic jam. Assume there is someone going in the wrong direction.
It always comes down to this: Reaction time.
Looking out for situations in the distance that might occur soon need space between you and the car in front of you.
That is why you give the other guy enough space. And yourself enough time. This is a life saver. No space between you and the guy in front of you is murder with contingent intent. Period.
You may have found ONE study that says otherwise. But you know what? In science, the guy that says something everybody else calls bullshit even after years of studies usually IS wrong. There is a climate change, you americans start to get a taste of extreme weather. There *is* a reaction time. There *is no* driver with magical foresight what might happen next when it was not predictable by logic and perception.
Moron.
There *is* a reaction time. There *is no* driver with magical foresight what might happen next when it was not predictable by logic and perception.
Take a deep breath. In. Out. Are you calmer now? What would happen to you if you if you were going 160 km/h and someone hit you from behind going 165 km/h? "Speed kills" is said all the time in the US. There are many people who think that a car is uncontrolable at over 100 mph. It would be impossible to even drive in a straight line at 160 km/h. I noticed you didn't address my comments that speed isn't unsafe. You know that you can go faster without dying. So you are more comfortable with it. You are no better than the others. You want what you find acceptable and comfortable to be legal, and everything else to be illegal. The reasons change, but human nature never does. In regular traffic, you are least safe when you are being followed at the recommended distance. Nobody here can prove that wrong. The sad thing is nobody even tries. The best I get is "I've driven fast, so I know more than you, and my opinion differs, thus you must be wrong." Yawn, You might as well be a 12 year old saying "I've never been wrong and I disagree so you must be wrong." You presented nothing that disagrees with me other than chanting "reaction time" which indicates that not only are you wrong, but that you didn't even understand me, and thus can't have a valid objection. I agree that following more closely will result in more crashes. The question was risk and safety, not "reaction time" and I explicitly stated that. You didn't understand and essentially argued "I don't understand you, thus, I conclude you must be wrong." It would be amusing, if it wasn't the argument of most people here.
Learn to love Alaska
Hitting someone is evidence of having followed too closely. Conversely, not having hit someone is evidence of not having followed too closely
It would seem then, that shooting someone is "safe" as long as the bullets miss.
Statistics on actual accidents involving rear-ending, and the distance between the cars in question, provide the evidence of what is following too closely.
Also, no need to explain the relation between speed and safe distance, I'd thought that was obvious to everyone.
People assign risk based on fear, ignoring all evidence.
And how do you assign risk? Obviously not using physics and statistics.
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
So many people on this forum seem to think that more laws will make driving safer. And they typically pick on the cell phone users because that it very obvious when they see someone driving badly and you can see them with their electronic device. The problem with that is that there are so many more distractions that you cannot see easily that are just - if not more -dangerous as driving while using cell phones. Some examples:
- reading newspaper while driving
- reading book while driving
- having conversation with passenger while driving
- eating/drinking while driving
- spilling/dropping something in your lap while driving
- adjusting the car radio (for those that still use them) while driving
- reading billboards while driving
- staring a pretty girl on roadside while driving
- not getting enough sleep before driving
- taking medication (even cough medicine) before driving
- putting on makeup while driving
I could go on and on with the number of things that my mother (a former police chief) has seen as the reasons that someone was distracted while driving and causing an accident. Most states have a law that covers all of these conditions. It is usually called something like "Reckless Driving". There are just too many variables to try making laws over specific issues. Then, you have to take into account the people trained to handle many things, at one time, that have to be excluded from the laws for things like cell phone usage. Take police officers. For years, they've had to deal with emergency driving situations while using communications gear.
Bottom line is to let the Reckless Driving laws handle people that are careless. Don't punish those that handle whatever they are doing behind the wheel successfully. Just because you can't talk on the phone (or any of the above situations) at the same time you drive, don't punish those that can walk and chew gum at the same time.
And how do you assign risk? Obviously not using physics and statistics.
Actually, that's exactly what I do. The problem is that your opinion formed from fear and ignorance doesn't match my opinion resulting from statistics and physics, so you assert the opposite.
Learn to love Alaska
There *is* a reaction time. There *is no* driver with magical foresight what might happen next when it was not predictable by logic and perception.
Take a deep breath. In. Out. Are you calmer now? What would happen to you if you if you were going 160 km/h and someone hit you from behind going 165 km/h? "Speed kills" is said all the time in the US. There are many people who think that a car is uncontrolable at over 100 mph. It would be impossible to even drive in a straight line at 160 km/h. I noticed you didn't address my comments that speed isn't unsafe. You know that you can go faster without dying. So you are more comfortable with it. You are no better than the others. You want what you find acceptable and comfortable to be legal, and everything else to be illegal. The reasons change, but human nature never does. In regular traffic, you are least safe when you are being followed at the recommended distance.
OMFG.
You don't get it.
If the car before me is crashing into someone, I would crash into him. There is no remote chance to survive a crash at this speed. If he is before me about 1 second and hits the brake very badly (or worse: Assisted by the tech) and I crash into him, the speed difference is likely to kill me. And him, if he would have made it to a halt in the last second otherwise.
Are you suggesting to connect all the cars on the motorway in order to synchronise the braking?
The Truck behind me would simply kill me, if he ist too close, because of inertia. The mass of my car would have come to a halt, but this truck will not. If the car behind me is big and bad, like, a mercedes, he would kill me, even though I would have survived w/o him following so close behind me.
Speed alone does not kill, as long as the weather makes the speed controllable as opposed to a bad weather day. To be more precise: On a mixed weather day, because people tend to continue their speed for too long a time after the rain or fog or snow hits them. With really bad weather, only stupid people drive fast - and die.
But low distances also kill. Every time. On a German motorway. You don't have to take science for it. Try it out. Spend one year in Germany, drive often and watch for yourself. People here mostly don't decrase the distance because after a bit of experience, you learn that the distance saved your life. A dozen times. The rest will be brought to justice. A truck driver below the recommended distance should not be fined. He should go for jail. For. A. Very. Long. Time.
He is willing to kill me and others to meet his timeline. He or the guy at 220 km/h driving a mercedes can not avoid inertia and mass and human reaction time. Nobody could. It's simple physics.
Of course speed does not kill. Otherwise we would all die - the earth has quite a speed, you know.
It's the difference between two speeds that mostly kills on the streets. We call it energy. Above 50 km/h even airbags and seat belts will not save you from harm. But you could avoid following suit in one of our mass accidents if you simply get a few metres more between you and the guy before you. There is this thing called braking. I do that, bevore it comes to a crash. Because I usually have enough reaction time. If a kid hops on the street to the guy before me, he would try everything to stop. If I would have followed suit, I would get his car and the kid a few more metres because of my mass. He possibly didn't do anything wrong, it was not enough time. But I increased the severety of the accidents by hurting them both. Think about me driving a mercedes or a truck in the city. They have mass. You don't seem to understand the basic rules of physics. Not to worry. We have jails for people like you.
Kill someone because of low distance and face the consequences. Don't believe me. Don't believe science. Don't believe studys. Just do an accident and hurt people because of low distances and go to jail, but please try to kill someone old, sick of cancer, who was planning to kill himself in a few hours anyways. Don't try this on good and decent people or on kids. Thank you.
If the car before me is crashing into someone, I would crash into him. There is no remote chance to survive a crash at this speed
You are the one that doesn't get it. If a piano falls out of the sky and hits you, then it doesn't much matter what your speed is. You are just making up shit. And shit that doesn't happen. You are saying that if two cars going 100 mph (or 160 km/h if you prefer) were to collide, they'd be at a dead stop instantaniously, violating all laws of physics. If that's not your assertion, then you are a liar. The car before you crashes into someone, then you wouldn't crash into him. You'd slow down as you watched the crash unfold in front of you.
I'm only talking about real life events. You are fabricating your fears into impossible hypothetical situations to justify your previous opinion without any rational thought. That's why driving is dangerous. Idiots like you can't put down their false opinions on risk assessment for 10 seconds and listen to any other information.
Kill someone because of low distance and face the consequences. Don't believe me. Don't believe science. Don't believe studys. Just do an accident and hurt people because of low distances and go to jail, but please try to kill someone old, sick of cancer, who was planning to kill himself in a few hours anyways. Don't try this on good and decent people or on kids. Thank you.
I've seen studies, and you are 100% wrong. Low distances result in more crashes of inconsequential sevreity. A bump and no injuries. But a higher following distance and an inattentative driver slams into the back of someone at a 160 km/h difference, killing everyone involved. You go read the studies you are telling me to read. You are wrong. You don't understand the physics. You just understand your opinion and present it as fact. It isn't, and it is wrong.
Learn to love Alaska
In many ways, aviation communication is easier because:
all communication is flight related.
and all communication is in a standard format.
The problem with cell phones and other distractions is that they are unrelated to the task at hand. Flight communication is directly related to the task at hand.
--
JimFive
Please stop using the word theory when you mean hypothesis.
At absolutly NO point is using a phone at any time regarded as approriate. All good trainers and people that know how to drive [...] know that ANY distraction while driving is not on at all.
And this is a problem with driver training. Drivers will get distracted, either by their environment or by themselves. Driver training needs to teach how to deal with distractions and regain focus, not pretend that it is a character defect if your mind drifts away from what is usually a mundane task.
Yes, using a phone while driving is distracting; so are eating, talking to passengers, or sight-seeing. Driving is the most dangerous thing most of us do on a daily basis and that familiarity breeds contempt. Most of us rarely have accidents, and when we do they are often no more than an inconvenience. In the end, for most of us, results are what matter. If we get to our destination without an accident then it was a successful trip. After we've done that a few thousand times we tend to think that we have mastered this driving thing and forget how dangerous it can be.
By the way, I disagree about keeping the radio off. I find, especially on longer trips, that a "quiet" car leads to my mind wandering more than a car with music playing. Listening to talk radio is more distracting, however (especially if you disagree with the talk).
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JimFive
Please stop using the word theory when you mean hypothesis.
You know, pretty much all places already have rules against inattentive driving. Why make a lot of additional rules banning "this one thing that people sometimes distract themselves with to become inattentive while driving"? Just put in heavier penalties against inattentive driving, since that's what people are really worried about. All these creations of additional bans benefit no one but the lawyers.
This is the real signature
(Beats those shadows on the cave wall, don't it?)
Your are responsible for your own safety. If someone is tailgating you and you don't respond, you are being unsafe. Yes, someone else caused it, but you are still responsible for dealing with it.
[FUCK BETA]
Psst, I think there's an R tailgating you.
Yep. There's no idea so terrible that you won't find someone to defend it.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
Road House!
People always ask me for cites and such, and I can't provide them.
The rest of the comment is irrelevant since you are making extraordinary claims.
Maybe the publisher figured out it was a typo and had the books withdrawn. Maybe you read it wrong. Maybe there is a giant conspiracy to hide these facts so every copy was destroyed ala "1984". Or not. So now I can believe some random anonymous guy on the internet, or my own 30 years experience. You know the rest.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
It was the premse of the entire book, and the cites it gave existed. I read nothing wrong. Nobody since has been able to provide anything that contradicts what it said. I agree that those with extraordinary claims need extra proof. I was there. I saw the book. And apparently nobody on the planet can refute it with anything other than "I find that opinion incompatible with my current opinion, so I will choose to disagree, even though I have no empirical basis for my opinion." In the face of 20 years of that, without anyone coming up with anything other that fabricated scenarios at the end of which they announce "see a longer following distance would have fixed that!" as the only logic-based rebuttal I've heard in 20 years, I give up on there being an alternative. Give me a grant for $5 million, and I could then prove that I'm right. Short of that, argue the point. You can't. There's nothing you've ever seen that can prove it wrong. It's just that it doesn't agree with your existing opinion you can't remember coming up with, so you choose to believe the opposite of what I say and argue from the position that I'm wrong.
Oh, and a ll the people that disagreed would strongly assert that secondary collisions were common and more dangerous than the primary collision, but none would agree that if they were hit from behind at a 5 mph speed difference that they would crash. So they all argued from the position that their personal opinion was false.
Learn to love Alaska
I don't know whether or not to thank you for that. If the idiots are sneaking up behind me, I might be better off not knowing.
Excellent post, and an excellent idea.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Use a rearview mirror. A large one. 10+cm in diameter.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.