Slashdot Mirror
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
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.
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.
Or he managed to be lucky for a while, which is far more likely.
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.
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.
The fact he was caught proves he is a terrible driver, but the fact everyone around him can actually drive and was paying attention to the road is what prevented this from becoming a pileup. Someone who willingly ignores not only road rules but basic common sense should not be driving, let alone teaching other people how to drive.
People like him rarely injure themselves. It's the people they hit that get killed.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
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?
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.
If they really cared about dangerous behavior on the road, they wouldn't give these assholes such light sentences. It's just like with driving drunk. Why should you ever *EVER* get your license back after you've been driving drunk? At the most lenient, you should get one chance. Drive drunk and you lose your license for five years. Drive while suspended during that time and lose it forever. Drive drunk a second time and lose it forever. Drive very dangerously (putting on makeup, getting dressed, having sex, talking on two cell phones while going 70mph, texting, using a computer, etc) and lose your license for a couple years. Second time, lose it forever.
Why we give lazy, careless, dangerous people continued access to dangerous hunks of speeding metal that can repeatedly put the rest of the public in significant danger is fucking beyond me.
But, of course, that's not what will be done in this case any more than it is in others. They'll use it to springboard some bullshit authoritarian narrow-minded pandering garbage.
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?
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.
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
Totally! And I've driven drunk a bunch of times (including right now) and never had any problems - drunk driving should also be legal!
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
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...
Banning children in cars would seriously make the road safer. You could then remove all the soccer moms, SUVs, etc from the road too.
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.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
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.
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.
Fun with Anagarams! LADS HOST, SHALT DOS. HAS DOLTS. AD SLOTHS, HATS SOLD. ASS HO, LTD.
Sometimes they even emerge unscathed as others trying to avoid hitting them wind up colliding with someone else trying to avoid the moron.
Mycroft
https://signup.leagueoflegends.com/?ref=4c3ed6600b6ea
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
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 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.
That's statistics for you.
Everyone makes mistakes when driving: forgetting to look over the shoulder, overlooking a dangerous corner, forgetting to indicate direction (if only because you decide a bit too late to make that turn). If you say you never make mistakes, I don't believe you. You're not a robot.
Luckily those mistakes usually do not cause accidents, as other drivers prevent them for you. You surely will remember some situations where you had to correct for someone else's driving.
The thing is when driving impaired (drunk, texting, whatever) makes you more prone to making mistakes (giving you more chances of causing an accident), and less likely to correct for other's mistakes (due to slower reaction by you). Now again the vast majority of drunk drivers will arrive home safely, as they do not encounter any unexpected situations. However the chance for such a driver to be involved in an accident is far higher than for sober drivers. Chances of accidents are also increased by texting, speeding, driving on worn tires, not switching on your headlights at night, etc. That's why there are all those rules preventing you from doing those things, and why you need to do driving tests before you're allowed to drive on your own.
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.
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
[...] 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
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.
My book about LSD and Self-Discovery
Also on facebook as: DroppingAcidDaleBewan