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U.S. Goverment Shames Texting Drivers on Twitter (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader writes: "The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is the federal body tasked with automotive safety," reports the Verge, adding "If you look at NHTSA's Twitter feed right now, you'll find that it's just a non-stop stream of burns aimed at people who admit -- sometimes gleefully -- that they text and drive."
For example, seeing a tweet that read, "I have no problem texting while driving, but I won't text while going down stairs, the NHTSA replied "You might not have a problem with the texting & driving...but we do. Stay off your phone and #justdrive - it's not worth it." And seeing a tweet that read "I text and drive way too much," they responded, "Um, agreed... Please realize you're putting yourself and others in danger, and a silly text isn't worth it. #justdrive".
The Verge argues "For what it's worth, NHTSA is right: countless studies have linked texting in the driver's seat with higher accident rates... Getting shamed online by a government agency is far harsher than getting shamed by a friend -- but it's still a lot better than getting killed over an email." To which the NHTSA responded on Twitter, "Thanks for the shoutout, .@verge! #justdrive"
For example, seeing a tweet that read, "I have no problem texting while driving, but I won't text while going down stairs, the NHTSA replied "You might not have a problem with the texting & driving...but we do. Stay off your phone and #justdrive - it's not worth it." And seeing a tweet that read "I text and drive way too much," they responded, "Um, agreed... Please realize you're putting yourself and others in danger, and a silly text isn't worth it. #justdrive".
The Verge argues "For what it's worth, NHTSA is right: countless studies have linked texting in the driver's seat with higher accident rates... Getting shamed online by a government agency is far harsher than getting shamed by a friend -- but it's still a lot better than getting killed over an email." To which the NHTSA responded on Twitter, "Thanks for the shoutout, .@verge! #justdrive"
My ex-girlfriends shame me all the time on Twitter. Just not about texting and driving.
My dad was killed by a texting driver while he rode his bike. The whole thing was caught on his camera, and in the video from his rear-facing camera, you can even see, in crystal clear high definition, that the driver's head is looking down towards her lap the whole time.
She got a ticket for failure to yield right of way. That's it. No manslaughter despite her obvious negligence.
Make it at least as bad as DUI, or better yet... First time felony.
Both should be automatic felonies, with extended loss of license. We treat both as minor offenses in the US which is itself criminal.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I see it all too often. The car driving under the speed limit slowly drifting out of its lane is driven by someone chatting on their phone. The one below the speed limit weaving all over the place is a texter. Or very drunk. The person on their phone driving safely and consistently, well, they don't exist.
A friend moved from the US to the UK and joined the company I worked at (he wasnt a friend before that point) and he was astounded by how different the drink-drive culture is in the UK - over here, its universally accepted that its a very very very bad thing to do, to the point where very few people pressure you to "have a quick one" if you are driving, and drinking soft drinks on a night out is completely acceptable.
He was very approving of it, and said that it was unheard of from where he came from (California).
It's costs a lot of money to buy cars and destroy them.
Oh, I see, you didn't think that they let the car companies provide them test samples directly, did you? How silly. That's just an invitation to commit fraud by providing samples that don't match what is manufactured. That's why they buy cars from random dealers.
The person driving below the speed limit and slowly drifting out of their lane is chatting on their phone. The one driving below the speed limit and weaving all over the place is texting. Or very drunk.
It's not physically possible to drive safely while texting. Too much time with your eyes off the road, too much attention on the phone. The instant you start manipulating your phone, you change direction. It's physiological - you start to turn in the direction of your focus. It can't be avoided or safely corrected for.
I suspect tweeting and texting while driving will continue unless someone sues and wins a large judgement against cell phone manufacturers and/or automobile manufacturers for not implementing a "kill feature" while driving.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
You should work on your understanding of this issue. Texting while driving is dangerous like drinking while driving. If you can't drive responsibly, you shouldn't be allowed to put other peoples' lives at risk. This is not too difficult to understand. Do you perchance happen to text while driving, and are getting all defensive?
As a cyclist, not looking where you are going in a 2 tonne metal box is the same as shooting a gun randomly. You may not have hit anyone yet, but on a long enough timeline you or someone else will.
You are making a leap.
1. Saying you do something on Twitter as a confession
2. Assuming that that doing something equates to a potential loss of life
3. Punishing it as though it did cause loss of life.
But you don't know its a confession and not a troll.
You don't know whether it was done in a place that could cause potential loss of life, or is even illegal. It's perfectly legal to text and drive on your private road.
Likewise you're punitively punishing it based on your hyped view of the crime.
> [...] "kill feature" while driving.
Now killing the driver (while effective) might be argued to be a bit... exagerated?
But hey, we might try and see.
I wish they would pull over texting drivers and then punch them in the face.
there is NO REASON.... to text while driving. NONE... and if you do it you deserve a punch in the face for risking others with your selfish behavior.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
It's simple, really. UK learned through public education from sane groups of people that don't hate alcohol, they'd just rather you consume it without driving a car.
The US (and to a lesser extent, Canada) attempted to teach it through harsh sentencing, surveillance nets, and public education from temperance groups (and later, groups that don't advertise themselves as pro-temperance, but act so much like it the president quit for that reason alone).
Extremely harsh sentencing doesn't work for the death penalty, and it won't work for drunk driving. Surveillance doesn't seem to work either, though I think it's a byproduct of the next thing: Temperance groups telling you to drink less are laughed at.
The UK has reasonable drunk driving laws. There's attempts by the temperance groups to bring our laws down to "Not even one", or 0.03%. When you teach from such an outlandish position, your attempt at education has the baby thrown out with the bathwater.
We need to make driving entirely voluntary (it isn't in most of the US) before we can legitimately remove someone's license.
I know that's an unpopular view, but you're literally destroying someone's ability to support themselves by banning them from driving in most of the US. That needs to change, the right way is to end bad zoning and to re-introduce public transport where possible, but until that's done (and we're nowhere near that) revoking driver's licenses is reprehensible and evil.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
No, you don't. You just don't realize how bad you're driving. Same goes with weed. I live in CO, and have met many people who claim they drive better while baked. Having witnessed them driving while baked, they really don't. Driving 20 MPH in a 50 MPH zone is actually quite dangerous contrary to what they seem to think.
D.A.M.M. - Drunks Against Mad Mothers
It helps that driving is entirely optional in the UK, which has an excellent transit system. As a result, driving is considered a luxury, and it's legitimate to crack down hard on people who drive badly.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
In addition to this, the US' culture is very much "It's only illegal if you get caught and the cops will do something about it". About -everything-.
If you tell someone they really shouldn't do something because it's dangerous/irresponsible, they'll blankly stare at you and go: "But...how will they ever catch me? I don't understand". No matter their age or what you're talking about. There's no critical thinking. It's just about scoring by sticking it to the man.
I mean, everywhere has a little of that, it's just human nature, but when I moved to the US, I was really amazed by how far they push it.
Public transport in most of the UK is terrible. Some cities, like inner London and Birmingham, are an exception, but for the most part a car is essential.
Drinking and driving became socially unacceptable here, much like smoking indoors has. It was down partly to some pretty shocking advertising on TV, and the potential repercussions of being caught (fine, points on licence, massively increase mandatory insurance costs).
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
In Japan anywhere that serves alcohol must ask if there is designated driver and not serve them anything alcoholic. They usually ask that person to wear a pendant or something so it's really clear to all the staff. Serving the designated driver is an automatic loss of licence.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Why doing half the job? Ban drivers and implement self-driving autonomous vehicles.
Achille Talon
Hop!
The headline:
"U.S. Goverment Shames Texting Drivers on Twitter "
Is what should be shamed. Stare at it for a while, boys.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
And as a cyclist AND a motorcyclist, you are deluding yourself to think you have total 100% control over all situations. If someone flies around a corner from behind and hits you from behind, there are times where there is absolutely nothing you can do to influence the outcome. In my case, had a broken rib and collapsed lung. I did everything I was supposed to in order to protect myself and still nearly got killed.
I'm tired of this it's all our own personal responsibility fault bullshit. Personal responsibility and attention is a necessary, but not sufficient condition for me not getting killed on the road when I'm on two wheels. At the end of the day our safety is dependent upon others acting responsibly as well. We need everyone's cooperation and not text/drive, else it will just be chaos out there.
Not to mention I don't see how texting and driving is more of a distraction than having some screaming toddler in the back.
You don't have to see. The facts are completely independent of your willingness to educate yourself.
"Old man yells at systemd"
I wish more people would at least stop and think first.
In more and more cities, I'm seeing situations where a person is given a citation for "texting while driving" even though their vehicle is stopped at a red traffic light. These are often the folks who were trying to COMPLY with the law by not touching their phone until they knew they reached a red light, where it was finally safe to take a quick look at what was sent to them.
For example, in the DC metro area, we recently had a cop dressed up like a homeless person on the side of the road begging (except the sign he was holding explained that he was a law enforcement officer). He was handing out "texting while driving" tickets to people at the intersection, at the red light!
When I pointed this out to a girl I know who was ranting about the "need to lock people up and throw away the key" for texting while driving, she just shot back, "Good! The people using their phone while sitting in the car ANYPLACE should be punished! Anything to make us safer!" That's the mentality in America that always scares me.
Doesn't every phone have voice control these days?
Between Google Now, Siri, and Cortana everyone should easily be able to send off a text completely eyes-free via voice. I use Siri to do it and haven't had a problem dictating or hearing her read the incoming. It's built right into the vehicle's own CarPlay system.
In most of the UK, a car isn't merely unessential, it's a liability, with no space on the roads and great difficulty parking it. On the odd occasion a city's bus system is subadequate, a bicycle is almost always a superior way to get around compared to a car.
British people bitch and moan about transit, sure. That's partially because it's transit, and like the weather, the post office, and TV, it's something everyone bitches and moans about regardless of quality; but it's also partially because that's what British people do, about everything.
I've only been in one place, a part of rural Wales, where a car was probably something you'd want, but even so I didn't need one, I used bicycles and rail and the occasional bus to get where I wanted to go.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
If you were a "field technician" you didn't receive any important messages. You are a TECHNICIAN. You are so full of yourself. Narscisstic asshole.
Car driver here, but I completely agree. A few years ago, I was driving my wife, mother-in-law, and then-toddler son in our mini-van to a local computer store. As we passed through an intersection (which was green for us), I spotted a car turning from the other direction that was going to hit us. It was one of those "time slowing down" moments - I could see that the impact was going to happen, but had no options for preventing it. The guy hit us, our mini-van went careening across four lanes of (thankfully light) traffic on two wheels. We wound up facing the other way on the other side of the road. Somehow, we didn't hit into anyone else, flip over, or suffer any major injuries.
Nothing I could have done would have prevented this accident. The guy was turning illegally (he was in the wrong lane and had a red light for turning at the time) and simply didn't pay attention to where he was or who was coming in the other lane. I couldn't have avoided him and his careless actions could have resulted in me or my family suffering serious injuries or worse. When someone texts and drives, they are distracted from the road. Some people think "oh, it's only a second", but all it takes is one or two seconds of not looking at the road to cause a major accident. If a text is that important, find somewhere to stop and answer it. If it's not important enough to stop over, then it can wait until later.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
This also doesn't help the case of "My wife is driving and I'm texting from the passenger seat to let X know we're running late." This use of texting isn't distracting to the driver (any more than normal conversation is and you can't ban talking to passengers while driving) but my phone would register "hit driving speed, shut down SMS."
Perhaps have a warning message pop up "Phone has detected that you are moving at X mph. This means you are likely in a motor vehicle. If you are the driver, please do not text and drive as this can cause a fatal accident. Press this button to verify that you are a passenger and not the driver." Then, have a button they can press to confirm. Make the phone record this action and, if an accident occurs because the driver confirmed it falsely, this would immediately be cause for license suspension (in addition to any other charges).
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
A lot of this texting and chatting would stop if the other person would cut off the conversation. I have this conversation all the time:
"Are you driving?". "Yes". "Call me back when you can talk"
I've had bosses carry on meetings while their subordinate was driving. I see that as criminally irresponsible behaviour. It should be prosecutable.
I do not block ads. I do block third party scripts.
People lose perspective, these are not even things which are themselves criminal, they merely increase the probability that one will do something criminal. In the old days before any of this DUI crackdown or the more recent decade or two of DUI insanity there were drunk people driving most of the time. While there were certainly accidents most people who drove drunk had none. Some of these people were alcoholics who drove around drunk effectively every time they drove for 40 years or more and never once had an accident.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not defending drunk driving or texting while driving. I think both are incredibly foolish. But these are things that increase the chance something bad will happen, not things which are criminal in their own right.
I don't disagree that public transport is pretty bad in much of the UK (unless your baseline for calibration is the USA), but there are some important differences. Cities in the UK tend to interleave different property types. This means that most people live within easy walking distance of a pub (most villages collect around one and you'll find at least one in most residential areas of a city). In contrast, UC city designers like ensuring the places where people live and places where people want to be are as far apart as possible, so that it's basically impossible to get from home to a bar without driving.
As a knock-on effect from this, if you do need to get to the pub in a car and there aren't busses (and there often are in many cities, though they're not always convenient), a 10-15 minute ride in a taxi is pretty cheap. Most US cities sprawl so much that it's a 30-40 minute drive, which is a lot more expensive.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Getting to work on the bus would take my 1.5 hours, and there is no train. In the car it's 15 minutes. This is not unusual for the UK.
Cycling is okay when the weather is nice, but often during the colder months it would be unpleasant and dangerous. All year round, in many areas the roads are not safe for cyclists anyway.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Your freedom to make decisions on your own ends when those decisions endanger innocent people around you who didn't consent to be hit by your car.
You certainly can contrive situations where that happens. They are relatively few and far between though. Most people who've told me that they just cannot live without their car in the UK have made a combination of certain choices, living far away from their employer because they have a car, and exaggeration of the circumstances they're currently in.
I've lived all over Britain, Oxford, Reading, Aylesbury (urgh), Norwich, Leeds, and Milford Haven (double urgh) to name a few. Only the latter I'd argue came close to US styles of mandatory driving. And even there driving was not mandatory. I didn't drive, I used a bicycle and the public transport that existed.
Coming to the US was an utter shock as a result. In most parts of the US, even a bicycle isn't going to get you very far. There are no urban centers, buildings are deliberately spaced far apart (imagine walking 1,000 feet and passing 5 stores. That's typical. The space in between? "Free" parking.)
In the US, not owning a car outside of a small number of decent cities means you're no longer able to support yourself. By all means tell me that your current job and current home means a car is more optimal, but tell me seriously that if you didn't have a car, you wouldn't be able to have a job capable of supporting yourself. That's not true for anyone in Britain. That's true for 90% of Americans.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
> you'll find that it's just a non-stop stream of burns ... "You might not have a problem with the texting & driving...but we do."
Oh, snap! Harsh!
Regardless, I agree with the sentiment. Each time you're stopped the punishment so double. First time $200, second $400, etc. with no cap. Will it stop the problem? Not entirely. But it'll get awfully expensive for the asshats who insist of sharing whatever the hell it is they're texting.
Bark less. Wag more.
I'm sick of you nanny-state SJWs who want to make the roads all "safe". Laws against texting while driving are censorship against my free speech. You're saying it's OK to be feminist while driving but not for me to text while driving. It's 1984 all over again.
You are welcome on my lawn.
A friend moved from the US to the UK and joined the company I worked at (he wasnt a friend before that point) and he was astounded by how different the drink-drive culture is in the UK - over here, its universally accepted that its a very very very bad thing to do, to the point where very few people pressure you to "have a quick one" if you are driving, and drinking soft drinks on a night out is completely acceptable.
He was very approving of it, and said that it was unheard of from where he came from (California).
Just for people who've never been to the UK, that's because the DUI penalties are an instant loss of license. The penalty for DUI is 1-3 years of license suspension and up to 2500 pounds in fines for your first offence, second offences within 10 years can get up to 5 years suspension and 5000 pounds in fines. Jail is also a real possibility for repeat offenders.
They really do take a hard line on drink driving over here, in Australia or the US, if you're caught just under the permitted BAC (Blood Alcohol Content, for the uninitiated) then you're fine, here courts are likely to treat that as DUI. If you get pinged for drink driving, you've got no chance of keeping your license.
The UK has the harshest drink driving rules I've seen outside of countries where alcohol is illegal.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Well the way car makers keep piling on new safety features like adaptive cruise control and lane assist and whatnot it seems the dominant strategy is to make it safer for you to text-while-driving.
Make it at least as bad as DUI, or better yet... First time felony. That'll help.
People are charged with DUI because they are incapable of safely operating a motor vehicle on the public highways, but drive anyway.
Treating a person that used their mobile phone in some specific way the same is pre-crime. There is no difference between someone causing an accident because they're distracted fiddling with the radio or arguing with their kids, than because their detracted by their cell phones. NONE.
So you create punishments for people because they actually caused a problem, not by calling out one specific activity that could be a distraction that could cause an accident.
No victim == No crime.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
I take it you've never actually looked them up.
The UK has the harshest Drink Driving penalties in the western world.
Being caught with a breath test reading of 35 micrograms of alcohol per 100 micrograms of breath (about 0.08 BAC) carries:
1) Mandatory 12 month driving suspension (minimum, could be up to 36 months).
2) Up to a 2500 pound fine (calculated according to your income).
3) 3 to 11 demerit points.
Repeat offenders can expect up to 5 years suspension, 5000 pounds in fines and up to 6 months in prison. More over, you can be charged with drink driving even if you blow just under the limit.
These penalties are far harsher than any others I've seen, especially compared to Australia or the US.
In the UK these penalties work because they're enforced and we have decent public transport options (erm... not to mention there's a pub on every street corner, so you dont have to go far to get rat faced if you dont want to). It's just not worth the risk to drink and drive... nor do you really need to.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
All year round, in many areas the roads are not safe for cyclists anyway.
From what I've seen here in London, cyclists are not safe for the roads the year round. I dont know what it is about Lycra that makes people feel invincible around 2 ton hulking death machines.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Seems like a decent suggestion, though I'm already pretty sick of car GPSs making me push an acknowledge button (to the danger of being distracted) every time I start the car before I can see directions, regardless of whether I'm driving or not. Perhaps the phone could sense where in the car it's located with NFC or something involving a transmitter in/near the steering wheel.
You should work on your understanding of this issue. Texting while driving is dangerous like drinking while driving. If you can't drive responsibly, you shouldn't be allowed to put other peoples' lives at risk. This is not too difficult to understand. Do you perchance happen to text while driving, and are getting all defensive?
No, it's nothing like "drinking while driving" (intoxicated driving). If you are incapacitated by drugs or alcohol, you're simply incapable of operating a vehicle safely. No matter what. Getting behind the wheel at all is endangering yourself and others.
When we talk about texting while driving, we are simply referring to a specific kind of distraction. There are many others. Fighting kids, eating in the car, playing with the radio (or "in-car entertainment center"), hunting through the console, putting on makeup, eating, talking on the phone (yes, even hands free), being sleepy.
In fact, drowsy driving is just as dangerous and causes as many highway deaths as drunk driving. Far worse than the specific type of distraction called "texting".
If you're stopped waiting for a stop light, you can whip off a quick text "Driving right now - will respond later". Perfectly safe, and perfectly legal even in jurisdictions where non-verbal mobile phone use (texting) has been outlawed. Nothing like drunk driving - if if you manage to stop at the stop light, it's still not safe for you to be driving.
The whole issue is just another instance of wanting to punish everyone because some people are irresponsible with things. People that allow distractions to interfere with their driving will find another distraction. But people that can use their phones safely while never being in danger of a distracted accident are punished.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
We need to make driving entirely voluntary (it isn't in most of the US) before we can legitimately remove someone's license.
Texting - and drinking - are 100% voluntary. People who take their driving sufficiently seriously do not engage in either when they are driving.
I know that's an unpopular view, but you're literally destroying someone's ability to support themselves by banning them from driving in most of the US
They made a terrible choice. They need to face the consequences of that terrible choice. They could have chosen to not do this terrible thing. Nobody forced them to do this.
revoking driver's licenses is reprehensible and evil.
Not when the holder of said license is showing complete disregard for public safety. They do not deserve the privilege of driving when they do that. They chose to be irresponsible, with that choice comes consequences.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
God, you're a dumbshit. You're still trying to prove having a toddler in the backseat is more distracting than texting on a cell phone by citing an article that claims toddlers are more distracting than talking on a cell phone.
Here's the first paragraph from the article you cite:
You are welcome on my lawn.
We have really moved away from the "not your child" thing. For better or worse, that's how it is. Initially it was people who were legitimately abusing their child. Now? I see articles about people getting arrested for letting their kid play in a nearby playground (visible but maybe 500 feet away, if I had to guess based on the picture in the last article I saw) and having their kid taken away.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Unfortunately, disabling the phone while driving is a bad idea, because how is the phone supposed to know it's being used by a driver rather than a passenger? Same thing with in-car navigation systems: it's very annoying to not be able to operate it while the car is moving as a passenger. There's really no excuse there, since it could just detect if there's someone in the passenger seat using the existing sensor for the passenger seatbelt warning.