Despite Well Known Risks, Survey Finds Most People Use Smartphones While Driving (cbslocal.com)

From a report: Everyone knows it's dangerous, but a lot of people are still doing it -- driving while distracted. In a survey of 3-million motorists, almost 9 out of 10 admitted to using their smartphone behind the wheel. According to a report by Zendrive, which studied device use among 3.1 million drivers over 5.6 billion miles of driving, in 88 percent of trips, drivers made at least some use of their phones. On average, they spent more than three-minute on the phone.

Comments

I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[redmid17]

People also know the risks of fucking with the radio, looking at maps, yelling at kids, driving while sleepy, or drinking and driving. Guess what?

All of those still happen in spades are for the most part of impossible to eradicate. With a combination of education, training (eg no passengers in the car for 3 months) and penalties, we can reduce them like the world has done for drunken driving, but people will continue to use their phones while they drive just like they've let other things distract them as long as cars have existed. The only real differentiator is that the phone lets us combine nearly everything into a handheld distraction as opposed to having 10 different proximate causes.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[courteaudotbiz]

What surprises me is that they need a study to tell this. Just look around, everyone who owns a damn cell phone is using it at some point while driving. At every red light, you can see at least 1/2 driver looking at their phone. Best way to catch them: cops in buses to spot them. And best way to deter them: higher ticket price.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[Anonymous Coward]

Even better when you spot the cops looking at their texts while driving as well.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[DaHat]

What surprises me is that they need a study to tell this.

How else are researchers going to get money to fund pet research projects?

At every red light, you can see at least 1/2 driver looking at their phone.

Which seems a good bit safer there then when in motion and they would be less obvious, same reason I'll dig for a dropped toy and hand it back to my son when at a light, rather than when in motion.

Best way to catch them: cops in buses to spot them

And if you are too stupid not to be aware of your surroundings when breaking that particular law, you probably deserve the ticket.

And best way to deter them: higher ticket price.

Who says the fines are intended to deter?

Here in Washington state, you texing or holding your phone to your ear will get you a small fine, but the infraction does not get reported to your insurance company, nor does it count against the points on your license as say... speeding or failing to stop completely at a stop sign will (let alone DUI or running a red light).

It's as if, it's more of an aesthetically driven revenue generator, rather than one intended to decrease talking/texting and increase road safety.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[Nkwe]

People also know the risks of fucking with the radio, looking at maps, yelling at kids, driving while sleepy, or drinking and driving. Guess what? The only real differentiator is that the phone lets us combine nearly everything into a handheld distraction as opposed to having 10 different proximate causes.

Well the phone is different because it was not designed to be used while driving. Compare the phone to the climate control or radio controls in a car. The radio controls are in a fixed place on the dash and possibly also on the steering wheel. The radio controls typically have some sort of tactile feedback that you can use without looking at them. With a smart phone, it is not in a predictable location (your hand, the seat, a holder in the dash, your pocket, maybe the floor). With a smart phone, you can not operate it without looking at it (phone may be locked, the app you need may not be on the screen, no real buttons with tactile feedback, etc.) Smart phone screens are typically much smaller (in size and font) than are the radio and native car controls.

Smart phone interfaces are not specifically designed for driving, where the native car controls are. Sure, some newer cars are going to screen based interfaces, and this is a bad trend, but at least these screens are mounted to the dash and car companies have some responsibility (and potential liability) around making these interfaces non-distracting, whereas smart phone manufactures do not.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[Solandri]

This is the problem I have with most arguments against autonomous cars. People always want to compare them against a completely attentive and alert human driver who completely understands every hypothetical situation. Not against the statistical average human driver who has 0.5 seconds to grok the situation and react before an accident occurs.

In a way I can understand it. If you can do better than humans in the human's best case, then you can do better than humans in all cases. But it just perpetuates the flawed reasoning most people use of making decisions based only on the best or worst case (e.g. winning the lottery, plane crashes, nuclear accidents). The real fix is to educate people to do these broad-band comparisons based on statistical average, not based on outliers.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[Anonymous Coward]

We could solve this with technology, if we were really serious about solving it due to the risk/magnitude of the problem. Could we solve it tomorrow with technology? Probably not, not without being too onerous. But we could easily drive automotive and mobile technology towards a solution where a mobile device cannot be used by the driver in a decade or less.

But we're not serious, so we'll just keep talking about it, and racking up the body count

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[Anonymous Coward]

This is one of those cases where we're fighting against reality, instead of dealing with it. What this study shows is that people really, really want to make calls (and probably texts and messages etc) while driving their cars. So what we need to do, instead of trying to stop them from doing it, is provide technology that makes it easy for them to do these things safely. For a start, we ought to mandate that all cars have a certain minimum standard of hands-free phone kit, that can be controlled without taking the hands off the wheel or eyes far from the dash - it's not rocket science, the technology has been around for ages, we just need standards to be set, and insurance companies encouraged to increase premiums for cars lacking certified kit.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[Dorianny]

What surprises me is that they need a study to tell this. Just look around, everyone who owns a damn cell phone is using it at some point while driving. At every red light, you can see at least 1/2 driver looking at their phone. Best way to catch them: cops in buses to spot them. And best way to deter them: higher ticket price.

People tend to not follow laws that they think are irrational, and most people think that prohibiting checking the phone while the car is at a complete stop, is stupid. Want to make things safer, then require the gear be placed in [Parked]. I don't know about other states but in NY you can get be ticketed while parked at the curb if the engine is running. The Laws in this case should strike a balance that minimizes risk and provides the most benefit, rather then idealism that in practice is wildly ignored

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[cayenne8]

Actually, it also assumes that laws against using a phone in the car are universal, and in the US, they vary by state to state.

I believe in my state, it is against the law to text and drive, however, you are fully free to talk on the phone all you want while driving.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[Anonymous Coward]

People also know the risks of fucking with the radio, looking at maps, yelling at kids, driving while sleepy, or drinking and driving. Guess what? ...

Not a parent of successful independent children, are you?

But I'm sure your basement-dwelling 22-year-old who can't hold a "do you want fries with that" baby job and pops 3 different antidepressants a day is deep-down a wonderful boon to society, right?

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[redmid17]

Smart phones weren't designed for use while driving but neither were maps, kids, sleepiness, or being drunk.

So sure, fixate on the radio or climate controls (did forget that one), but ignore that they were placed in a larger category of distractions and still cause a lot of accidents even if they are designed for use while driving.

I'll finish up with " something something forest for trees."

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[fnj]

most people think that prohibiting checking the phone while the car is at a complete stop, is stupid

That's because it IS OBVIOUSLY STUPID and corrupt. Legislators who pass laws like this can eat shit.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[fnj]

the phone is different because it was not designed to be used while driving

Says you. If the phone is set to be unlocked by a simple swipe, there is absolutely no reason not to answer it if it rings.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[Wulf2k]

More importantly, why do we need to stop them from checking their phones at a red light?

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[Anonymous Coward]

But it just perpetuates the flawed reasoning most people use of making decisions based only on the best or worst case (e.g. winning the lottery, plane crashes, nuclear accidents).

For each of those example, there are at least two variables in play; the likelihood of the event happening, and the benefit/fallout from the event. Just because you ignore the latter and only focus on the former, does not mean that people who use both are using flawed logic. And if you actually want to convince anyone to change their ways, you're going to need to focus on getting them to lower their value for the second variable, not simply ignore it.

You might have an extremely slim chance of winning the lottery, but the potential benefits are tremendous, so people buy tickets. Though I will grant you that there comes a point of diminishing returns, that you probably shouldn't be buying 50 tickets, 1 will suffice.
You might have an extremely slim chance of dying in a plane crash, but there will be minutes of time in between plane failure and the actual crash. That raises the second variable higher for some people.
Nuclear power, again, accidents might be slim, but the potential fallout could be huge.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[omfglearntoplay]

First, I seriously doubt 90% of people are reading text messages while driving 50 miles an hour. More likely when they are at a red light or something. But for those that are trying to kill their fellow humans by being really distracted, screw that.

And looking down at a phone is much worse than many ordinary distractions other than sleepiness. Reading/typing anything has a magical way of distracting you from all your peripheral vision and turning off your ability to judge time so you tend to look longer at a phone than other distractions.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[omfglearntoplay]

Agreed. Cell phones are too prolific... hands free tech should be in all modern vehicles. I will say that dialing should be made better. In my car, I click a button the steering wheel then with another button on the wheel I scroll and pick one of my 6 main contacts. If they aren't on that list, I can't be bothered with it. Voice activation is nice in theory, but never works for phone calls in my car the way it should. Strangely enough voice navigation works well enough to use.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[Marxist Hacker 42]

One thing all cars in the near future need is semi-transparent HDMI compatible windshield heads up displays.

That alone would reduce accidents due to distracted driving by half- because you could see the semi you're about to rear end through your semi-transparent e-mail.

Add voice recognition and you've got a full computing solution to help you out when you put your Tesla on autopilot.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Better yet, Android and IOS screen savers that are on by default whenever GPS velocity exceeds 20MPH.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Heck, if you have a bluetooth, you can answer with a tap on your ear without ever taking your eyes off the road.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[Anonymous Coward]

traffic laws == revenue generation
everything other reasonable reason is just gravy

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[Anonymous Coward]

Tesla needs to be sued to change their interface. It's no different than playing on an iPad while driving.

captcha: culpable

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[sootman]

Sadly, native controls are getting dumber. I've got a couple controls on the steering wheel for the radio (station or track, and volume) but everything else is on a touchscreen.

Climate controls used to be an array of different physical buttons and levers; now it's a bunch of nearly identical buttons in a row. You actually CAN'T use the climate control in my current car WITHOUT looking at it -- but I could on cars I owned 30 years ago.

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/8-PH_EP...

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[XxtraLarGe]

Agreed. Cell phones are too prolific... hands free tech should be in all modern vehicles. I will say that dialing should be made better. In my car, I click a button the steering wheel then with another button on the wheel I scroll and pick one of my 6 main contacts. If they aren't on that list, I can't be bothered with it. Voice activation is nice in theory, but never works for phone calls in my car the way it should. Strangely enough voice navigation works well enough to use.

What kind of car do you have? Hands free voice calling works great in my 2015 Ford Explorer, even with the cruddy Sync system.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[orgelspieler]

In many jurisdictions the cops have laptops mounted to their consoles. I'm sure they're there for official business, but it seems like a distraction waiting to happen.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[pr0fessor]

You can talk if hands free, texting or talking without hands free is a $60 fine here...

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[david_thornley]

They don't need a study to find that people use their phones while driving. They need a study to find out how many do it and how much they use them. We know there's a problem; how big and pervasive is it?

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[david_thornley]

In which case you're preventing the passenger from doing anything. I've often coordinated with other cars by having passengers use phones to talk to passengers in other cars. A passenger with a GPS app can be very useful also.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[thegarbz]

What surprises me is that they need a study to tell this.

Studies aren't needed to see if something happens. Studies are needed to gauge and create a baseline reference for a problem for which future studies will be repeated over and over again to see if any of the measures various governments are taking work in reducing the behaviour.

Really for a visitor on a tech site you set your bar for surprise quite low.

And best way to deter them: higher ticket price.

Except no, not at all. There are plenty of studies (which will probably surprise you) that show the ticket cost has marginal impact on people actually committing a driving offence.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[Anonymous Coward]

ignore that they were placed in a larger category of distractions and still cause a lot of accidents even if they are designed for use while driving.

Exactly. I once had a parked car in front of my house hit by a driver because, as she was driving down the street, she dropped her cigarettes into the passenger-side floorboard and decided to bend down and reach over to get them turning the steering wheel to the right as she did so.

Should using cigarettes be banned while driving? No. The driver just made a bad choice.

I'm not against applying laws to help make driving safer, but the driver is the root problem and not the distraction. There will always be distractions for drivers (billboards, street signs, kids/passengers, eating, radio, etc.) and drivers need to learn/know how to remain focused on the most important task (driving) and deal with distractions in a safe manner.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[david_thornley]

As far as anecdotal evidence goes, my first collision happened when I heard something on the radio, glanced down to turn up the volume, and when I looked up I saw brake lights everywhere.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[Anonymous Coward]

But we're not serious, so we'll just keep talking about it, and racking up the body count

First, I don't disagree that using a smartphone while driving is bad, but TFA made the leap that the admission of drivers using a smartphone is statistically related to the drastic increase in traffic deaths. I wouldn't be surprised if that is true, but neither you nor the article has provided a citation that the increased deaths due to traffic accidents had a cause of the accident related to smartphone use.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[Cro Magnon]

My car does fine with incoming calls. Not so good with outgoing. I've found that if I want to make a call, I'm better off pulling over and doing it straight from the phone.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[Anonymous Coward]

So they don't make everyone else sit through a second red light when they suddenly realize the light is green turning to yellow, screech through the intersection, oblivious to the 3 minutes of time wasted for everyone else queued up behind them?

I haven't seen it quite that bad, but there is definitely an increase in people not paying attention to when the light turns green and delaying other motorists because of it.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[Cro Magnon]

Probably because the idiots don't just check their phones. They compose long texts and don't realize the light turned green 2 minutes ago.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[orgelspieler]

I wish consoles were still designed with driving in mind, but a lot of evidence points to the contrary. My old 2005 Honda had readily reachable knobs of different sizes and prominent buttons. My "new" 2009 has one tiny knob and a flat panel of buttons of roughly the same size. Sure there are voice commands, but that takes even more concentration than reaching for a button.

The ones I use the most are for climate control. The fan speed is two little buttons all the way over by the passenger side, and the mode button (not a dial aurgh) is right above them. The mode selection is a real PITA, because you used to just be able to reach over and crank a knob to the right orientation. Now you have to remember whether it's one button press or three, and even then you look down at the middle console to make sure it's correct.

And of course you mention flat screen interfaces. Possibly the worst idea to ever come across a car designers desk. Hopefully this will all be a moot point in 5 years because cars will drive themselves. Most commuters would love that.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[Cro Magnon]

On mine, I tap a button on the steering wheel. Just as easy and predictable as the radio.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[Orgasmatron]

Well the phone is different because it was not designed to be used while driving. Compare the phone to the climate control or radio controls in a car.

You must have a very cheap and/or very old car. In new cars, pretty much everything above the very bottom of the line is a usability nightmare. Think touchscreens and/or "dynamic" buttons (rows of featureless buttons next to a LCD that displays the current function). Oh, and then there is the shuttle control where you twist and depress a knob to navigate a maze of twisty menus, all alike.

Smart phones at least have the advantage that (when you aren't worried about people seeing you use your phone in the car) you can bring it to your field of driving vision, rather than having to turn your head and sometimes lean your body over to see what you are about to press.

Plus, and I'm going to be called nasty things for saying this, but traffic accidents do not appear to be "way up", like they would be if smart phones were causing a ton of new accidents. I've seen some conjecture that the people who are prone to distraction will find something to distract them, and the problem should be addressed by working with those specific drivers, and not by chasing after the distraction that happens to be most popular at the moment. It will probably take several more years of data to clarify that. (And our data isn't trustworthy, but that is a rant for another day.)

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[danomac]

The cumulative effects of this can really add up too - if everyone delayed by 20 seconds at each stop light, in heavy volume, you could take another 30 minutes to get where you are going. Of course, it is dependent on how far you drive to work/etc every day.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[T.E.D.]

Well the phone is different because it was not designed to be used while driving. Compare the phone to the climate control or radio controls in a car. The radio controls are in a fixed place on the dash

My stereo has Bluetooth access, and I use my phone (mounted on a secure spot on the dash) as its head unit. That way I've got the same music options (including my entire 200+ CD library) available wherever I am. In this configuration, futzing with it is exactly like someone futzing with their stereo controls.

Now you may argue that it isn't designed for this use. However, it is far better designed for this use than most modern electronic car stereos. Many of those are designed so badly, with unnecessary extra menus, clicks, and delays you have to watch for (with your eyes), that Consumer Reports has started removing recommendations for the cars they come with.

There are a couple of options here. We can be Luddites and just try to blanket ban new things because some ways they are used are dangerous, or we can acknowledge that people will be doing it anyway, and try to do what we can to make what they will be doing safer. Standards for "car-safe" apps when hooked to a BT source would be a really good start.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[OrangeTide]

Theoretically a professional driver would have the necessary training to operate a more complex vehicle system. I realize in reality they probably receive no special training in this regard, but maybe they should add that to the curriculum in police academy.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[dgatwood]

Of course, this problem is easily solved using commonly available technology. Just put an electronic air horn on every traffic light and honk it when the light turns green in any direction. This would be useful regardless of the reason for distraction, whether it's a cell phone, a radio, or the kids bouncing off the ceiling in the back seat.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[countach74]

We also need to consider what happens when those laws are passed. In my state, it's illegal to use your phone while driving. Calls are permitted with a headset only. So do people stop using their phones? Not at all. They just keep their phone out of sight to try to avoid a ticket, which is even worse. Now, rather than bringing the phone up where one can see the phone and the road at the same time, people are looking down in their laps, taking their eyes off the road.

People will, for the most part, do what they want to do. Changing behavior is very difficult and laws are often quite ineffective at affecting the change desired. I'm not saying we should just accept that people will always use phones or that it's OK to do so, but a lot of times the "solutions" are worse than the problems they intend to solve. Also I'd love to see safety data regarding cell phones in regions that have strict laws vs. those that don't. Everything I've outlined has just been from personal observations and anecdotes.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[Nkwe]

Fair points. I didn't expand on everything or it would have been a TLDR; post. Sure kids are distractions, but you can yell at them without having to take your focus off the road. Driving drunk or sleepy is just stupid and you can't fix stupid. My point was that there is a significant difference in the design of controls on a smart phone (especially when you include non-phone stuff like texting, navigation, and who knows what other apps people use when driving) and the design of controls that are built into the car.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[dgatwood]

Studies aren't needed to see if something happens. Studies are needed to gauge and create a baseline reference for a problem for which future studies will be repeated over and over again to see if any of the measures various governments are taking work in reducing the behaviour.

And once they have that, they'll come to the inevitable conclusion that cell phone bans aren't useful—not because they're ineffectual, but rather because the lack of a thousand-fold increase in accidents over the past ten years means that cell phone distraction isn't really that much worse than any other distraction. After all, if 90% of drivers use their cell phones while driving, then you'd expect a fairly high percentage of crashes to involve a cell phone, so when the statistics match that expectation, rather than wildly exceeding it, it means the phones aren't really causing crashes.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[nnull]

And what about the cops that constantly drive using their mobile phones? I see it all the time.

This isn't going to be deterred with higher ticket prices. They've already tried that and it isn't stopping it. The problem is getting worse when you have employers who request that you be by your phone at all times, driving or not, they don't care. This is also a failure of technologies as a lot of hands-free devices have been complete and utter crap. And now you have a new generation of kids who are literally stuck to their devices that are going to be driving really soon.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[omfglearntoplay]

Older Infiniti. If the names on the quick list are easy to say, it might pick them up... but I have a lot of odd names that is has problems with. I considered renaming my contacts to single digit numbers or something equally simple, but... nah.

And at least before the most recent firmware upgrade (maybe still like this), it was bad about calling the wrong person without confirmation... so if it got it wrong, bam, you were in the middle of a call to somebody else. That stress was not worth it! I found myself watching the screen more in case it called the wrong person, which defeated the whole purpose of hands free.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[butchersong]

I would think that the one time it would be acceptable to use your phone quickly would be at a red light. Obviously you don't want to fail to notice the green light but what would you charge them with "distracted while stopped"?

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[Oswald McWeany]

Even better when you spot the cops looking at their texts while driving as well.

I've seen this more times than I can count. But like the article is saying, almost everyone is doing it. Cops included.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[Zumbs]

Not very fun if you live near a traffic light. Especially when you want to sleep.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[Oswald McWeany]

At every red light, you can see at least 1/2 driver looking at their phone.

If I hear my phone buzz I will check it at the next light. I keep an eye on the light so not to be one of those people who holds everyone up. Honestly, I don't think that's all that dangerous and don't really intend to stop.

I won't check my phone while driving, I also don't focus completely on the phone when stopped- I'm watching that light too.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[Zumbs]

Yep. The really interesting question is how much these activities increases the likelyhood of accidents and congestion. With a sample size of 3 million, one should think it would be possible to make some correlation.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[Anonymous Coward]

This right here. Fine check your texts, etc. You need to look up at that light every few seconds though, and IDC if your almost done writing your text I will lay on my horn until you move.

Got pulled over once for that, told the cop that the person in front of me was texting, I had it on my dash cam and showed the cop. No ticket for me, but he said he was going to look into giving the texter a ticket.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[Anonymous Coward]

You can buy a decent hands free device $25. No need to 'require' anything from the car companies.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[Anonymous Coward]

and most people think that prohibiting checking the phone while the car is at a complete stop, is stupid.

I don't think its stupid when I'm sitting behind some idiot on his phone well after the light has turned green.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[DaHat]

Calls are permitted with a headset only.

Is the law actually written that specific? Here in WA, the wording prohibits holding the phone to your ear... which means you putting it on speaker phone and holding it in front of your face is perfectly legal. Just be careful hiding it down on your lap, because if the cop sees you looking down there too much you are going to get pulled over for texting.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[lgw]

My car comes equipped with a "horn" to solve this problem. I find it works well, especially if used promptly.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[lgw]

I can use all the basic controls in my car without looking. Radio volume, source select, change channels/songs, climate (though they made that needlessly hard). Phone UIs suck, and doubly so in a bouncy car, unless you have voice recognition.

I don't care what someone does with their phone while driving, as long as they don't have to look at it. But that's not what happens - people read social media while driving, FFS.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[NoSalt]

The radio controls typically have some sort of tactile feedback that you can use without looking at them.

Apparently you haven't used many of the new infotainment systems, or environmental controls, lately. They give almost none of that "tactile feedback" that you speak of. I wish they did, because I miss the "old days" of knowing the feel of turning the volume up/down, changing stations, adjusting the AC, etc. I look over WAY more now than I ever did with my older vehicles.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[LS1 Brains]

Better than ruining the lives of anyone living within earshot of an intersection (except, perhaps, the deaf) how about an ignition interlock system? If your car detects the driver using their phone in conjunction with unsafe driving practices (e.g. drifting out of your lane, failure to stop in time, etc.), after the next ignition cycle the car becomes immobilized until the driver can remove their head from their ass.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[lgw]

In this configuration, futzing with it is exactly like someone futzing with their stereo controls.

Oh, you can do it all through steering wheel controls and/or physical knobs, without ever looking at it? Neat if so.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[jjbenz]

That's why it takes so much longer to get through an intersection. I wish I had a dollar for every green light I missed because one of the morons in front of me wanted to play around with their phone and took forever to notice the light changed.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[Anonymous Coward]

People who do that and make me miss a light can eat shit. It isn't the end of the world if you have to go a few more minutes without looking at your damn phone.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[CrimsonAvenger]

And yet, traffic fatality rates have been declining for the last couple-three decades. In 2015, they were barely 2/3 what they were in 1990.

So, as cellphones became more ubiquitous, there have been fewer traffic fatalities...hardly seems to be all that serious an issue....

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[tsqr]

People tend to not follow laws that they think are irrational

People tend to not follow laws that they think are inconvenient

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[Anonymous Coward]

Statistics are complicated though. For example, if I'm a professionally trained driver and spend a lot of time practicing unusual situations and the like, then maybe I actually AM better than average. That skews my personal statistics... often dramatically.

With that said, most people overestimate their abilities so there is that. However, it is possible for many people to approach the subject objectively.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[countach74]

Yes. I just double checked: https://www.oregonlaws.org/ors...

Re: I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[Anonymous Coward]

"Study" is how you get the dinero for prostit^Wtools to do your research.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[Anonymous Coward]

That depends on your definition of "decent". How does your $25 device integrate with the steering wheel controls and the car audio system?

Re: I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a catastrophie waiting to happen. Before anyone says "well pull over and then fiddle with the controls", remember, there is things people should do and then there is the real world.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[Cochonou]

You must never take public transportation.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[tsqr]

And what about the cops that constantly drive using their mobile phones? I see it all the time.

I can't speak for other jurisdictions, but in California, perAssembly Bill No. 1785, which took effect on Jan 1 of this year, emergency services personnel operating emergency services vehicles are exempt from laws concerning mobile device use in vehicles.

Here's the full text of the new law:

23123.5. (a) A person shall not drive a motor vehicle while holding and operating a handheld wireless telephone or an electronic wireless communications device unless the wireless telephone or electronic wireless communications device is specifically designed and configured to allow voice-operated and hands-free operation, and it is used in that manner while driving.
(b) This section shall not apply to manufacturer-installed systems that are embedded in the vehicle.
(c) A handheld wireless telephone or electronic wireless communications device may be operated in a manner requiring the use of the driver’s hand while the driver is operating the vehicle only if both of the following conditions are satisfied:
(1) The handheld wireless telephone or electronic wireless communications device is mounted on a vehicle’s windshield in the same manner a portable Global Positioning System (GPS) is mounted pursuant to paragraph (12) of subdivision (b) of Section 26708 or is mounted on or affixed to a vehicle’s dashboard or center console in a manner that does not hinder the driver’s view of the road.
(2) The driver’s hand is used to activate or deactivate a feature or function of the handheld wireless telephone or wireless communications device with the motion of a single swipe or tap of the driver’s finger.
(d) A violation of this section is an infraction punishable by a base fine of twenty dollars ($20) for a first offense and fifty dollars ($50) for each subsequent offense.
(e) This section does not apply to an emergency services professional using an electronic wireless communications device while operating an authorized emergency vehicle, as defined in Section 165, in the course and scope of his or her duties.
(f) For the purposes of this section, “electronic wireless communications device” includes, but is not limited to, a broadband personal communication device, a specialized mobile radio device, a handheld device or laptop computer with mobile data access, a pager, or a two-way messaging device.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[Anonymous Coward]

Hands-free tech is no panacea. I've been a passenger in two cars that have hands-free tech. In one car when the driver made phone calls she spent a good part of the conversation looking and yelling at the screen in the center console as a sort of stand-in for the face of the person she was talking to. The other driver yelled at her visor (I guess that's where the callee's voice seemed to be coming from) and gestured wildly with her hands. Neither driver paid much attention to the road.

OTOH I've almost been hit head-on four times (that I can recall) by people using hands-on devices. Once I had to drive off the road to avoid a head-on collision with a nitwit who had a large tablet propped up on his steering wheel.

I can't wait for a solution that doesn't involve me getting killed first.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[tsqr]

First, I seriously doubt 90% of people are reading text messages while driving 50 miles an hour.

I hope you're right. I can attest that in So Cal many people are reading and typing text messages on the 405 through the Sepulveda Pass, where the average speed is around 6 mph. On the bright side, it does make it easier to find gaps to change lanes into when it's time to move to the right as you slowly approach your exit.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[Anonymous Coward]

CGP Grey covers this in the short video: "The Simple Solution to Traffic"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

I very much agree with the final statement, though I disagree about how to solve slowdowns. (Slowdowns are a bunch up caused by density rising past a critical threshold.) My solution is that the escaping edge must escape /faster/ to pull the slack forward and drain the pressure from the system.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[Ogive17]

I'm not a fan of the Honda touch screen in new vehicles however once you get everything set up, the steering wheel controls and do almost everything you want and they are EXTREMELY easy to use. Everything can be managed using one of your thumbs while leaving your hands at 10 and 2 on the wheel. Once you're on the road, shouldn't really be a reason you need to mess with the clunky items, as you mentioned.

I'm not going to pretend to be a saint and say I never use my phone while driving.. however that happens maybe 1 out of every 60 trips. I fail to see how most communication is so important it cannot wait a little bit before I'm safely stopped.

But I also started driving in '95 so cell phones weren't an issue. Guess I didn't grow up with the need to be in constant communication with someone.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[Anonymous Coward]

Smart phones weren't designed for use while driving but neither were maps, kids, sleepiness, or being drunk.

No, but drunk driving *has* been around since 1897 at least.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not the use of hands with a phone that's problematic. It's the use of a brain with one. Study after study shows that even hands free phone calls inhibit one's ability to drive as much as drinking and driving. Sure, you can hang up as needed, whereas you can't sober up as needed. But if you're distracted by your call, your ability to determine when hanging up is needed, so that's not terribly helpful.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[MBGMorden]

State laws vary though. In my state it's illegal to "text" while driving (with text meaning use the phone for anything but driving), but that law explicitly exempts people who are stopped at a traffic light.

It's also hard to tell sometimes. My car's in dash display links up with the phone so that I can do a lot of stuff from the dash while driving and never even have to touch the phone. Certain features like looking through playlists are disabled while the car is in motion (which it seems to deduce from the GPS).

Indeed with Bluetooth if you're looking to completely eliminate phone usage (even talking) you'd need to just pull over anyone who you saw speaking while driving.

In the end - to a large degree I think it comes down to the fact that not a) not are problems are solveable, and b) sometimes the solution isn't worth it. Sometimes you just identify a problem and say "Hey, that sucks, but that's life.".

Re: I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd really like Zoe Saldana to give me a sloppy bj, but at least I'm smart enough to realize that's not going to happen. What people want and what they need and or get are not always the same. What people need is a fucking way to detect if they're talking/texting while driving and a 40,000 volt shock to the asscheeks.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[MBGMorden]

That depends on your definition of "decent". How does your $25 device integrate with the steering wheel controls and the car audio system?

My $15 device in my 2006 Tiburon integrates with the car audio system just fine - I just plug it into the aux port. I can easily answer a phone call but pressing the button on the device which is glued beside the radio.

It doesn't integrate with "steering wheel controls" but not all cars even use those - even newer ones. I've also got a brand new 2017 Colorado that has integrated bluetooth but the controls for answering and hanging up are still on the entertainment system's touch screen. There's nothing on the steering wheel except cruise control.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[deesine]

The serious part is NannyStaters focusing on the issue resulting in absurdly high fines.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[DaHat]

Ahh, then no, not that specific, you are still allowed the use of a "Hands-free accessory" which they define as "an attachment or built-in feature for or an addition to a mobile communication device, whether or not permanently installed in a motor vehicle, that when used allows a person to maintain both hands on the steering wheel."... which at least allows for say... a bluetooth connection to your car, which at first I thought you are prevented from, it not being a 'head set'.

Granted, you still aren't trusted to pump your own gas, so there are stranger things.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[PrimaryConsult]

For me that's exactly how it is. It takes a few seconds while initially parked to set up (if Amazon Music or whatever wasn't already running/paused) and from then on, steering wheel controls. And I have an "older" car system, newer ones can probably communicate more than next/previous song and cycle playlists/albums.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[AthanasiusKircher]

Smart phones weren't designed for use while driving but neither were maps, kids, sleepiness, or being drunk.

Let's take those in turn, shall we?

Maps -- traditionally, most people only used these occasionally, relying on street signs, visual cues, and other general direction sense. For long trips, a lot of people would have a travel companion to use the map. And in any case, map use was usually NECESSARY to actually find your destination (which was your entire point of being in the car).

Kids -- can be horrible distractions. But again, like maps, you can't really avoid dealing with them.

Oh and most people don't really WANT to be distracted by kids and maps -- they're just forced to deal with them while driving. People WANT to look at their phones and thus seem drawn to them.

Sleepiness and being drunk -- the hallmark of bad drivers. The latter is explicitly illegal. The former is generally avoidable too, and if a cop catches you weaving and pulls you over to find you literally asleep at the wheel, you might end up with problems too.

Contrast this with phones -- which the present study says a lot of drivers use FREQUENTLY and which don't have the necessity element in most scenarios. Unlike maps (which actually get your where you're going) or kids (which can't be ignored), most of the non-mapping features of your phone use CAN be delayed. People just choose not to.

I'll finish up with " something something forest for trees."

Smartphone screens as distractions are a serious new threat. Like drunk driving and fatigue, they are not a necessary element to the driving experience and are easily avoidable... and yet people seem unable to stop using them even when doing what's pretty much the most dangerous activity most people do on a regular basis.

It's an addiction, more serious than drunk driving, because at least most people seem to recognize the dangers of drunkenness -- whereas lots of people seem to want to downplay the seriousness of the new smartphone distraction threat or, like you, just pretend "it's always been this way!" No, it hasn't. This is a new one which -- at a minimum -- ADDS to the previous potential distractions and compounds the danger.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[PrimaryConsult]

I'll add, when stopping the car it automatically pauses, so when you get back in later, it resumes. So if I don't close the player at some point during the day, I never even take the thing out of my pocket - meaning if I *don't* get my music playing the moment I start the car, I know I left it at my desk / at home.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[Anonymous Coward]

In my state, the only prohibition on cell phone use while driving is for texting and only for those under 18.

Also, passengers can drink alcohol in a moving vehicle.

Also, you can shoot a burglar in the back while he's fleeing your property and get away with it under the "castle" doctrine.

And this isn't Texas. (It's Missouri, which is like Texas, but quietly insane.)

Fun facts, though: we don't have higher rates of cell phone distraction incidents, drunk driving incidents, or burglars being shot than anywhere else.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[PrimaryConsult]

Yes! The texters on my morning commute create an opening on the long entrance ramp line to the highway once the traffic light changes. If I see one of these gaps I scoot in. If no gap I take local roads (so I'm not one of those assholes who jumps the line and forces my way in when there's no openings).

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[Anonymous Coward]

You should be able to dial with your steering wheel, like old-time rotary phone.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm going to be called nasty things for saying this...

You reasonable bastard! How dare you defy The Foaming-at-the-mouth Nanny Club!

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[countach74]

Oh yeah, I misunderstood. You can definitely use your bluetooth system.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[Anonymous Coward]

Might as well make the windshield Peril-Sensitive and go completely dark while the phone is in use. People seem to pay about as much attention as if it already was.

There's no way to make driving and using a phone safe at the same time. Studies showed that talking to a passenger is different as the passenger knows when to shut up when something interesting is going on. I know lots of people who talk on the phone while they drive and they're all fucking horrible drivers, however the set of fucking horrible drivers also includes most people who aren't talking on the phone as well.

The sooner the rest of the idiots move over to self driving cars the more of my sanity I'll be able to keep.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[Obfuscant]

I can use all the basic controls in my car without looking.

Not everyone can, because not everyone memorizes where they are or which function is at which detent. And advanced controls are worse. But then, there are people who can operate their phone without looking at it, too, so if the controls of your vehicle are exempt from consideration as distractions, so to should cell phones be exempted.

Note that the "controls" of your vehicle would include the display from your Sirius radio, and if you don't think that looking at the display to see the name of the artist playing that song you're listening to is a distraction, then you don't own a Sirius radio.

The problem is, the issue is not what highly capable people can and are doing, it is what normal people do. Normal people are distracted by tuning the radio and other people in the car.

I don't care what someone does with their phone while driving, as long as they don't have to look at it.

Perhaps you missed the point that I was making, in that the argument about distracted driving that most people make regarding phones applies just as much to a lot of other things, like tuning the radio, and sometimes even just listening to it.

But that's not what happens - people read social media while driving, FFS.

Sadly, while that is the way the argument against using cell phones while driving is typically presented, eliminating that is not the result that anti-phone zealots seek. They wish the elimination of the "use" of phones, not just the obviously serious distractions they can present.

Oregon House Bill 2597 says, in part:

(c) "Using a mobile electronic device" includes but is not limited to using a mobile electronic device for text messaging, voice communication, entertainment, navigation, accessing the Internet or producing electronic mail.
(2) A person commits the offense of operating a motor vehicle while using a mobile electronic device if the person, while operating a motor vehicle on a highway:
(a) Holds a mobile electronic device in the person's hand; or
(b) Uses a mobile [communication] electronic device for any purpose.

The emphasis is mine. The law is specific in saying that you cannot use them for entertainment (playing audio) or for navigation. That means it would be illegal to start up a five hour audio book on your cell phone to listen to during your one hour commute, even though you don't have to touch the phone in any way from the time you press play while parked in your garage until you press "stop" after parking at work. "Any purpose" would be illegal. As is just holding it in your hand.

But holding a cup of coffee in your hand is not illegal.

The existing Oregon law has exemptions for ham and other licensed radio operators, and people participating in emergency service or public safety activities, but those exemptions would be removed.

So, while you cry about "people read[ing] social media", stopping just that is not the goal. If eliminating distracted driving were the true goal, then there would be a law that children under the age of 14 would need to be stored in the trunk.

I would argue that there be sanity in any regulation on "distracting" devices. Either accept that there are a lot of them and go after them all, permanently installed or not, or accept that there are times when it is NOT a problem for someone to use a cell phone in a car.

For example, while at a complete stop at a red light. OMG, someone stepped out in front of your car and you didn't see them! BFD. You aren't moving, and the only way they will come in contact with your car is if they walk into it themselves. They can do that whether or not I'm changing the playlist on my audio player.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[Anonymous Coward]

If you don't understand why it's not stupid then you're too stupid to be allowed to drive.
It's too bad there isn't a witless fuckstick test you have to pass before getting a license.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[rnturn]

Yep... It's why a commute that I used to have to make was taking over an hour -- about 45m on the local expressways plus about 15m-20m on the surface streets -- could easily have been under an hour. It should have taken only about 5-10 minutes of total travel on the surface streets but that time was at least doubled because the idjits whose attention was on their effing phone instead of on the road and, as a result, only about four cars were making it through each green light. (Wanna bet that when they all were late to work they blamed it on the traffic lights?)

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[Obfuscant]

In this configuration, futzing with it is exactly like someone futzing with their stereo controls.

The proposed Oregon legislation that I linked to earlier would make this use of your mobile device illegal.

Standards for "car-safe" apps when hooked to a BT source would be a really good start.

My HTC phone has a "car" mode with limited apps. I never use it since I never find myself needing the artificial nanny to keep me from texting. It is interesting that some of the apps in the limited set include navigation, music, phone, and texting (at least receiving them -- "car" wants permission to access SMS.)

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[epyT-R]

People like you are the excuses used by wannabe tyrants to trample liberty on the road. This self-driving dystopia they want to build (complete with ready-made abuses of remote kill and tracking) is a result of idiocy like yours. Put the fucking thing away while you drive. If you need to mess with it, pull over and stop. Then play with it all you want. Set your route and then go.

Driving distractedly IS driving dangerously. If you are moving, you ARE traffic. While I agree that cops can and do abuse their power, your shitty behavior is what's giving theirs popular support.

Re: I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[Anonymous Coward]

Your comments intrigue me and I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[thegarbz]

but rather because the lack of a thousand-fold increase in accidents over the past ten years means

Means nothing. As cell phone use has increased, accident rates and safety features have improved. Just looking at the raw numbers tells you nothing without some very deep analysis including comparing rates of releases of new vehicles in various countries to adoption of mobile technology.

When did Slashdot switch to 1-dimensional mode?

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[AthanasiusKircher]

Plus, and I'm going to be called nasty things for saying this, but traffic accidents do not appear to be "way up", like they would be if smart phones were causing a ton of new accidents.

I'm not going to call you "nasty things," because you're basically right that stats don't appear to be "way up." BUT it also depends on what stats you use. You're right that "distracted driving" stats are always hard to estimate.

What we do know: overall number of crashes (including fatalities, non-fatal injuries, and property-damage-only crashes) basically had been in steady decline since the mid-1990s, when we had nearly 7 million crashes/year in the U.S. This trend lasted until ~2010, when it got down to ~5.5 million/year.

For some reason total crashes have been steadily rising again, from a low of 5.3 million in 2011 up to 6.3 million in 2015.

Granted, total number of injuries and fatalities have thankfully not been rising at the same rate (though they are rising again too), but for some reason total CRASHES have been going up quickly. (That is, particularly crashes with no significant injuries.)

The official reports say that cell phone distractions have been steadily rising, though they only claim to account for around 2% of distraction-caused accidents in 2005 rising up to 8% of distraction-caused accidents in 2015. That is obviously a significant rise in that category, but I don't know how those numbers are estimated -- and still only accounts for (according to the report) 69,000 crashes in 2015, which is only about 1% of total crashes.

But I think we need to ask -- if total crashes have risen by ~20% in the past 5 years, after >15 years of steady declines (despite increased total miles driven), why? Drunk driving numbers have generally been continuing to decline. Are drivers really just that much more reckless in general than they were a few years ago? Are the reports estimating things that poorly? Are people suddenly reporting more accidents for some reason? Or could there be some more specific reasons why we're now seeing ~1 million more crashes per year than 5 years ago?

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[T.E.D.]

The proposed Oregon legislation that I linked to earlier would make this use of your mobile device illegal.

As does the already passed legislation here in Oklahoma. One interesting facet of this is that using my mobile phone (which I already own) with Google Maps or Waze as a GPS navigation device is illegal, while using a $100+ Garman device mounted to the exact same spot for the exact same purpose is legal. Garman has some offices here in Oklahoma...

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[Obfuscant]

while using a $100+ Garman device mounted to the exact same spot for the exact same purpose is legal.

The Oregon law as introduced makes no such distinction. It would be a "mobile electronic device" being used for navigation. And Garmin has a pretty large facility in Salem, OR...

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[shadowknot]

Those people are what horns were made for :-)

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[Aristos Mazer]

> Well the phone is different because it was not designed to be used while driving.

Kids weren't designed to be used while driving either. Just saying.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[mjwx]

People also know the risks of fucking with the radio, looking at maps, yelling at kids, driving while sleepy, or drinking and driving. Guess what?

If you're comparing the risk of using a map or changing the radio station with using a phone, drink driving or driving whilst fatigued... you don't have a clue what the risks actually are.

there are degrees of risk, we acept certain levels of risk because it bad results are small and infrequent enough or the risk can be mitigated to that point. Using a map or changing the radio stations (note, steering wheel controls are considered a safety feature) are risks that are negligible because you dont spend 20 minutes fucking with a radio and looking at a paper map practically ensures you're paying attention to what you're doing.

DUI and using a phone are risks that are not negligible, they are risks that cannot be mitigated beyond simply not doing them and they are risks that produce very severe results. I think phones are worse than drink driving now because we've managed to get it into peoples heads that they're impaired when drunk but people still think that they're not impaired when using their phones whilst driving. The're stupid to think this, I'm not sorry for saying it and I wont sugar coat it, phone and drive then you're a bloody idiot.

I had a rather nice Honda Integra, last of the proper K20's. It was written off by some stupid tart who was on the phone in her Hyundai Getz because she didn't see that every other car had stopped because of traffic. Went into the back of me at 40 KPH.

Using a phone whilst driving doesn't just delay your reactions like fatigue or drunkenness, it removes them completely as your attention is solely on the phone (Humans don't multi-task, we task switch like hyperthreading and we're not very good at it). Like the silly tart who went into the back of my Honda, you will simply not notice the hazards when you're staring right at them. Your brain wont even register my brake lights, it wont tell your slovenly hoof to move to the stop pedal, the first you'll know about it is when you're eating your phone thanks to your airbag. If it was just you, I wouldn't mind if you lunched on Takata's finest products all day, however your stupidity affects me because my car is now a wreck because you don't have the discipline to pay attention to the most dangerous activity you will probably ever undertake in your life... driving.

Beyond this, I'm probably going to punch someone sitting at a green light because they're too busy staring at their phone (we can tell you're doing it, your crotch really isn't that interesting. Its easy for a decent driver to tell if someone is driving on their phone. You depart your lane, dont notice when traffic has sped up (or slowed down, as detailed above). It is slightly different the way a drink driver acts, a drink driver will attempt to correct their actions (I.E. swerving in and out of their lane) a Moron On the Phone (MOP) will keep departing their lane until they either hit something or get the horn from a driver who is paying attention.

We need a zero tolerance attitude for phone users. Take their licenses and take their cars if they keep doing it. Driving is a privilege, not a right. Abuse it and you should have it taken away.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[mjwx]

Plus, and I'm going to be called nasty things for saying this, but traffic accidents do not appear to be "way up", like they would be if smart phones were causing a ton of new accidents.

I'll do it.

You're a fucking idiot who is using an incredibly stupid strawman that is so obviously wrong that it physically hurts me if I try to think like the kind of brain that could create it.

Collisions due to mobile phone usage have increased. Collisions and more importantly deaths, have decreased due to other factors. The fact Drink Driving is decreasing is the biggest factor. Also the fact that cars are made safer and able to protect occupants and pedestrians better.

If you bothered to look up collisions by cause, you'll find that mobile phone use is quickly supplanting DUI as the main cause of collisions. However we all know you wont because you dont want to have to change your ways. Well tough titties princess, stop being a moron and pay attention to the road.

Your argument reminds me of my tiger repelling rock. Of course you can see there are no tigers or signs of tigers in the vicinity.... but is that due to my rock... or the fact that there are no fucking wild tigers in Colombia?

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[redmid17]

Swing and a miss.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not surprising but it is depressing as hell. If you're driving then you should just drive. That means not screw around with the radio past hitting the off button or maybe spinning the volume/tuning knobs.* If you need to read a map then pull the hell over. If you want to use your phone's map then pull over, get it set up to give you voice directions, *then* proceed. By all means yell at the kids, but do *not* take your eyes off the road, and under absolutely no circumstances turn around to yell or attempt to reach into the back seat. And for the love of fsm do *not* drive when drunk, overtired, drug affected or impaired in a similar manner.

It's not that freaking hard people!

*assuming you can do that in a simple reach-over using actual knobs and not taking your eyes of the road, or using voice activation. Otherwise just leave it the hell alone.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[Anonymous Coward]

That is known as anecdotal. It suggests a possible result but is notoriously unreliable being prone to confirmation bias and similar problems. Before you act on the anecdotal or "common sense" you first need to check that what you "see" is actually a reflection of reality and not just a product of your personal biases. Only after doing so can you proceed to tackle the problem (again using evidence rather than anecdote to find a solution).

I'm a little disappointed that I need to point this out of a website that claims to be "news for nerds".

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[nnull]

I'm sure they'll claim "They're trained to do so" nonsense. Almost as bad as the cop that claimed he was trained to judge what speed I was going without a radar gun in court (Didn't really fly).

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[Anonymous Coward]

Most new cars now support CarPlay and Android Auto, wherein the driver's smartphone basically highjacks the stereo and the driver uses the (generally better) human-machine interface that their phone casts onto the car's screen. These systems also use the phone for voice recognition. Here in the US, with backup cameras becoming mandatory starting in the 2018 model year, car makers are putting these into even their cheapest models, to accommodate the camera display.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[nnull]

They can be exempt and claim all the training they want, they seem to lose in court constantly for it that it resorts to having to spend more tax payers money to payoff the victim and now paying millions to "research" new devices for emergency personnel that doesn't help squat.

Simple google search seems to reveal this is more common than we realize:

http://www.dailynews.com/gener...

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[nnull]

The problems with hands free devices is that they don't support many of the applications that people want to use. Many of the application developers just ignore the problem. Then you have the shoddy voice comms that just plain suck. Then you have connectivity issues and what not that most people resort to having a wired headphone to their ear instead. When the police spending millions can't even develop devices to prevent their own officers from killing people because they were to busy texting, what hope do we have?

Re: I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[Anonymous Coward]

The fix to this is to have the enforcement done by local police, but the ticket revenue go to the state. The separation keeps local cities from seeing their police as a revenue stream, while still maintaining the law enforcement part of it. A cop will still pull you over if you're doing something blatantly against the law, but because that's part of the job rather than a quota they have to make.

Re: I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[thundercattt]

I'm shocked at how low the fines are above. Here in Canada, it starts at about$400 and 3-4 pts. They managed to lop it into the category of dangerous driving offense.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[djinn6]

It isn't the end of the world if you miss the light either.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[tehcyder]

People will, for the most part, do what they want to do. Changing behavior is very difficult and laws are often quite ineffective at affecting the change desired.

Here in the UK, if you get caught drink driving, you lose your licence for a year, get up to a GBP5000 fine and receive a criminal conviction as standard. It is also not unlikely you'll get a short prison sentence.

There is massively less drink driving here than thirty or forty years ago. It really isn't worth the risk.

Whether you agree with it or not, the law most certainly has changed people's behaviour.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[tehcyder]

This is one of those cases where we're fighting against reality, instead of dealing with it. What this study shows is that people really, really want to make calls (and probably texts and messages etc) while driving their cars. So what we need to do, instead of trying to stop them from doing it, is provide technology that makes it easy for them to do these things safely. For a start, we ought to mandate that all cars have a certain minimum standard of hands-free phone kit, that can be controlled without taking the hands off the wheel or eyes far from the dash - it's not rocket science, the technology has been around for ages, we just need standards to be set, and insurance companies encouraged to increase premiums for cars lacking certified kit.

The point is that it is trivial to set up a hands free system nowadays, but people still often can't be bothered even when the facility is built right into the car.

Re: I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you sure passengers can drink? Life long resident and pretty sure any open container is not allowed, whether for the passenger or not.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[pnutjam]

Hands on the steering wheel is a minor part of this, the eyes on the road are the problem. Forcing people to hide their phone while texting is not helping.

Re: I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[Anonymous Coward]

DUI in US is also $5-10k and possible jail time / revocation of license ( at least the states I'm familiar with)

Re: I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[Anonymous Coward]

You guys don't have earplugs where you live ? Also, who moves in next to a traffic light and expects absolute quiet ?

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[dpidcoe]

Not very fun if you live near a traffic light. Especially when you want to sleep.

What we put this "air horn" inside all of the vehicles instead? That way the drivers could decide if it needs to be blown or not based on if the person in front of them is moving once the light turns green. It would keep loud noise to a minimum while still doing its intended purpose.

Re: I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[nitehawk214]

A small boro near me shut down it's police department due to this. They found it only existed to give tickets on a 100 meter stretch of highway to fund themselves.

They now use the neighboring township for real police work when necessary.

I still go slow on that stretch of road, though.

Re: I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[nitehawk214]

Probably only in a "party bus", or some such thing.

Re: I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[nitehawk214]

Continuous noise pollution. Yeah, great idea.

Re: I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[nitehawk214]

President Grant got pulled over for speeding.

Oh his horse.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[countach74]

Sure, but that doesn't necessarily conflict with what I said, which was that laws are often quite ineffective. Clearly they are effective sometimes. But really my greater point was that sometimes laws change behavior for the worse. I know where I live, the likelihood of getting pulled over and ticketed for mobile device usage is very slim and when perception is "that won't happen to me" people don't take it seriously. Instead they change their behavior (for the worse) but trying to conceal what they're doing, to help ensure it won't happen to them. One might argue that the penalty isn't severe enough: that perhaps it should be in line with drunk driving, and that would solve the "not taking it seriously" bit. And that may reduce the instances of mobile device usage, but we still need to ask yourselves if the punishment is fitting of the crime and of that, I have my doubts.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[Marxist Hacker 42]

The radio doesn't know when to shut up, how is that different?

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Correct. But that's why I said "by default". Should be settable in settings.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[Marxist Hacker 42]

I said "by default", not "permanently on". Presumably the passenger could turn this feature off temporarily.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[OrangeTide]

We trust them with a firearm but not with a laptop, yours seems like a ridiculous position.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[michael_wojcik]

In new cars, pretty much everything above the very bottom of the line is a usability nightmare.

This is one of the reasons my most recent car is a 2015 Volvo. The infotainment system has a screen, but it's not a touchscreen, and most of the functions are manipulated using separate physical controls. I pretty much never have to look at it while driving. I don't know if Volvo has caved into the touchscreen mania - in another decade or so I may be stuck with classic cars.

The people responsible for putting touchscreen controls in cars should be deeply ashamed. Ditto idiotic all-eggs-in-one-basket physical controls like the much-hated BMW iDrive.

Re TFA, I'm surprised that 90% of drivers own a smartphone. In the US, in 2015, there were around 218M drivers and 189M smartphone owners, so presumably some of the drivers shared a smartphone and passed it on to whoever was behind the wheel.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[dgatwood]

Cars still don't drive themselves, and very few cars percentage-wise even have collision avoidance, which is the only sort of safety feature that can possibly significantly reduce the rate of collisions among people who truly aren't paying attention to the road in a dangerous way.

The reason cell phone use doesn't cause the huge number of crashes that were predicted is much more obvious: 99% of the time, a driver doesn't actually need to do anything, even without self-driving cars, because most of the time, the road is straight, and there isn't something in front of you. And unlike drunk driving, people don't typically use a phone continuously, so the probability of overlap is small. That makes the risk of cell phone use inherently very low even if it is technically a risky behavior. And if we assume that most people choose when to use the cell phone based on the conditions around them—at traffic lights, on long straight stretches with no visible cars at upcoming intersections, etc.—then the risk logically should drop to remarkably close to zero among otherwise good drivers. Any statistics that appear to show otherwise are highly suspect.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[dgatwood]

Better than ruining the lives of anyone living within earshot of an intersection (except, perhaps, the deaf) how about an ignition interlock system? If your car detects the driver using their phone in conjunction with unsafe driving practices...

Remaining stopped at a traffic light, assuming other drivers are not driving dangerously, is not unsafe. Therefore your proposal wouldn't help at all unless those drivers are also using their phones while driving badly.

Besides, it doesn't take an insanely loud air horn to get people's attention. It just has to be loud enough to be heard inside a car with the radio playing—no louder than a car horn. And if you embed it in the pavement underneath the car and use constructive interference correctly, you should be able to create a directed burst of sound that would be loud to the person in the driver's seat of the frontmost car, but quiet everywhere else. After all, the vehicle that fails to move is almost invariably the frontmost vehicle. The drivers of other vehicles typically notice motion in their peripheral vision even if they are looking down at their phones.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[dgatwood]

It would be nice to have a traffic light alarm feature, but that only helps if all the cell phone users buy new cars. That feature would have to have been made broadly available in new cars at least 15 years ago to be broadly effective today. By contrast, an air horn on particularly problematic traffic lights can be deployed today and is immediately effective at solving the problem.

Re: I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[dgatwood]

Like the traffic isn't already loud? Besides, they could be a little smarter about it and use RADAR to determine if traffic is moving, and honk the horn if nobody moves after two seconds. That would make it less frequent, but still nearly as effective. And drivers would quickly learn to pay attention to avoid the honk, so this would also have the effect of making itself moot.

Re: I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[Anonymous Coward]

I personally use mine but its in a bracket hooked into my sound system and is used primarily with Google Voice commands⦠but if this report includes usage such as mine it would include people that use their phone as gps which does anyone that doesn't have a gps built in to their car use a dedicated gps unit these days? I Don't know anyone that does personallyâ¦

Re: I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[Anonymous Coward]

nine of ten ! . and the one didn't admit to use it was lying >;)

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[Anonymous Coward]

The bluetooth integration in my car ('12 Civic) is so bad that it might as well not be there.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[Anonymous Coward]

I haven't seen anyone with their phone actually superglued to them.

Perhaps you meant "figuratively"?

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[thegarbz]

and very few cars percentage-wise even have collision avoidance, which is the only sort of safety feature that can possibly significantly reduce the rate of collisions

Yeah sorry I stopped reading there. Maybe look into what changed in the technology of cars in the past 20 years that make them safer, not just in crash survivability but also crash avoidance. Tip: Only about 5-10 of the changes have anything to do with electronics.

Re: I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[Anonymous Coward]

Anti lock breaks, better handling, less massive vehicles have done more to prevent crashes than anything else.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[Anonymous Coward]

Using your phone while driving should have the same penalties as a DUI.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[david_thornley]

In which case the driver spends some extra attention turning the feature off, since people who are going to misuse their phones while driving still will. I don't think this is a problem with a good technical solution.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[david_thornley]

Whether it's all that serious an issue is part of what studies are about. There's fewer traffic fatalities, true, but that could be due partly to old problems getting solved while new ones appear. It would be good to have even fewer traffic fatalities. (FWIW, some modern cars have features that will make it easier to avoid crashes. My new car has lane departure warnings and optional steering to avoid departure and collision detection, although I haven't actually tested these features much. This could lower fatalities more.)

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[Marxist Hacker 42]

The majority won't bother. Or be able to. When was the last time a relative or a friend asked you to set something on their phone or computer that they could have easily done through settings?
Happens to me weekly.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[dpidcoe]

Alright, either I'm missing something or the joke flew over your head. All cars today are equipped with horns. You're more than welcome to use it if the car in front of you doesn't start moving as soon as the light turns green.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[dgatwood]

Ah. Yes, I missed the joke entirely.

But taking that suggestion seriously, the problem is that by the time most people blow their horns, 10+ seconds have elapsed, and the damage is basically done.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[Anonymous Coward]

You should never drive, the bus is more your speed. Or just stay in your Mom's basement.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[dpidcoe]

But you have a horn. Feel free to honk it before 10 seconds have elapsed if traffic isn't moving.

Though as a side note, I remember seeing people not move at traffic lights even back in the early 90s before cell phones were a thing. And the few times I've been honked at for not seeing a light change were due to getting lost in thought (it was a long light) rather than anything phone related.

Re:I find this thoroughly unsurprising

[david_thornley]

None of this will make it easy for passengers to use their devices while hindering the drivers from using their devices. If a control is easy enough for a passenger to bypass, drivers will do it. If it's difficult for drivers to disable, it will be difficult for passengers to disable..

Bring on the tickets!

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe a $200 ticket will change people's minds. If not, then maybe a $400 ticket.

How do you tell if a driver is a moron? - They're on a cellphone while driving.

Re: Bring on the tickets!

[Anonymous Coward]

I read a huge academic article one time from the 80s which, through dozens of experiments and tests, conclusively proved that the way to alter behavior is to improve the chances of being caught as opposed to increasing fines.

For example in many countries you can get life in prison or even the death pentalty for using drugs but people still do it, not because the fines aren't high enough, but because the odds of getting caught are too low.

Same thing here. With all the people I see texting or calling while driving, I'd say the odds of getting caught are less than 2-5%, plus, you have the ability to talk out of it a lot because it's harder to prove someone was talking on a phone vs. talking to themself or whatever they might say.

Nothing surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

Use the format: "Despite Well Known Risks, Survey Finds Most People _____While ____ "

People do illogical things due to many motivations. This isn't exactly a surprise unless you want it to be.

Re: Nothing surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

99% of the people don't do stupid things. I mean everybody knows shit is nasty so as expected very few people eat it.

They could have done better with the data

[damn_registrars]

Once a phone call is initiated it poses little or no risk as it continues. If I start a phone call while I'm at a stop light and continue with it I'm really not posing any additional danger to anyone. By comparison taking your eyes off the road to read and write a text message is inherently dangerous any time you are attempting to drive while doing so.

Re:They could have done better with the data

[Anonymous Coward]

If I start a phone call while I'm at a stop light and continue with it I'm really not posing any additional danger to anyone.

Agreed. In fact I'm entering this message right now while driving. I do it all the time and nothing has ev

Re:They could have done better with the data

[Carewolf]

Once a phone call is initiated it poses little or no risk as it continues. If I start a phone call while I'm at a stop light and continue with it I'm really not posing any additional danger to anyone. By comparison taking your eyes off the road to read and write a text message is inherently dangerous any time you are attempting to drive while doing so.

Nope. All evidence shows that it is the conversation on the phone that is dangerous. It doesn't matter if you are doing it handfree or holding the phone in your hand. Having a conversation with a remote person takes 80% of your concentrations and increases your chance of having an accident 100 times.

Re:They could have done better with the data

[DaHat]

Nope. All evidence shows that it is the conversation on the phone that is dangerous.

Citation?

It doesn't matter if you are doing it handfree or holding the phone in your hand.

Because...?

Having a conversation with a remote person takes 80% of your concentrations and increases your chance of having an accident 100 times.

And what % of your concentration does a local person have?

At least with a remote person, whether you are holding your phone to your ear or both hands on the wheel and speaker phone, you are not as tempted to look at the person, be they next to you or behind you.

"But the local person can see the situation around you and stop taking your attention when the situation warrants" I've often heard... most of those people I suspect don't have children, or chatty friends, or the ability to stop listening to what is coming in their ear when their full attention is needed on the road.

Re:They could have done better with the data

[lactose99]

Nope. All evidence shows that it is the conversation on the phone that is dangerous.

Citation?

Really? Found this in 3 seconds: https://www.researchgate.net/p...

Re:They could have done better with the data

[Etcetera]

Once a phone call is initiated it poses little or no risk as it continues. If I start a phone call while I'm at a stop light and continue with it I'm really not posing any additional danger to anyone. By comparison taking your eyes off the road to read and write a text message is inherently dangerous any time you are attempting to drive while doing so.

Ironically, the initial justification for cell phone bans (before the era of smartphones) was the exact opposite. Cell phones with physical buttons were easy to dial with, could be done by touch many times, and scrolling a linear list of contacts was easy. The "concern" was that an emotional call (or any call at all) would be distracting in a way that listening to the radio wasn't. This is why other "fiddling with things" tech, even available then, wasn't included in the ban here in CA. (I'm talking about things like dedicated GPS receivers, and classic iPods.)

Text messaging alone didn't seem to really take off until the early-mid 2000s in the US outside of certain circles.

Nowadays, of course, it's almost completely the opposite. Phone calls are rarer, and your mobile device is multifunction and used for all sorts of things by the broad populace on a regular basis.

I have to generally agree with the grandparent/first post though. If EVERYONE is doing it regardless, the draconian law should be changed so something more meaningful and fairer to enforce. I'd say more people are breaking the cell phone law than are breaking speed limits -- and that's something. In CA you're not allowed to have your cell in hand even stopped at a traffic light which (as annoying as it is to have to honk at someone that the light's changed) not as much harm as that ticket would seem to imply.

My suggestion: "special circumstances" for injury accidents and reckless driving / moving violation crimes with hands off the wheel and a renewed emphasis on "Don't do distracted driving" vs "Don't look at your cell phone". Let's be realistic, and we'll have much more compliance.

Re:They could have done better with the data

[fnj]

You can take that bullshit and STUFF IT.

Re:They could have done better with the data

[nightfire-unique]

We found that driving performance of both younger and older adults was influenced by cell phone conversations. Compared with single-task (i.e., driving-only) conditions, when drivers used cell phones their reactions were 18% slower, their following distance was 12% greater, and they took 17% longer to recover the speed that was lost following braking. There was also a twofold increase in the number of rear-end collisions when drivers were conversing on a cell phone.

Hardly an increase of 10,000% as the OP suggests.

Driving while talking on a speakerphone/headset is worse than driving without talking to someone. Also, driving while tired is worse than driving while not tired, and oblivious drivers are worse than non-oblivious drivers. As usual, the devil is in the details.

Re:They could have done better with the data

[thebullshitpatrol]

Not true. Mythbusters (inb4 REALITY TV SCIENCE???) found driving intoxicated to be equally as impairing as having a demanding conversation on the phone.

They tested this on a fairly basic orange-cone track, but I guess you could argue that a demanding conversation and demanding driving conditions are worst-case-scenario. Still is valid.

Re:They could have done better with the data

[omfglearntoplay]

I'm slightly skeptical. The study was only of 20 younger and 20 older people, so probably not enough to be conclusive. From 2004, so I wonder if the results would continue 13 years later when more people were used to using cell phones.

Still very interesting, and I feel it has to be mostly correct if less exaggerated. Personally, I absolutely find myself halting/pausing conversations on the cell phone while driving when I'm at a major intersection that requires full concentration or I'd get T-boned. I even tell the other person "hold on a minute, I have to turn here". I'd do the same for people I am talking to. I also find myself losing concentration when the kids are being noisy in the backseats. So yeah, there has to be something about those distractions.

But then again, the way my brain works I have to concentrate very hard to have a verbal conversation with most people. Maybe some gab machines are so good at talking that it requires less concentration on their part. Hmm, I wonder.

Re:They could have done better with the data

[Anonymous Coward]

Good thing I don't converse. I just catch Pokemon.

Re:They could have done better with the data

[orgelspieler]

My old flip phone took no concentration at all to call my wife. Just flip and mash the big button twice. Now I have Bluetooth connection to my car, but I switched to a smartphone before that. I just gave up calling while driving, because I had to unlock the stupid phone (thanks work email), and then mash the right parts of the screen to call the right contact, or hope the voice recognition worked.

Re:They could have done better with the data

[fredrated]

Actually, you are wrong, it is putting your attention into the conversation instead of keeping it fixed on the road that creates the danger.

Re:They could have done better with the data

[dfm3]

See, that just goes to show you how risky it is to use a phone while driving... AC managed to accidentally tap both the Preview AND submit buttons before they finished typing!

Re:They could have done better with the data

[Oswald McWeany]

Also the old number pad that you press "3" 3 times for the letter "F" and "8" 2 times for the letter "U" when texting.

Those you could do without looking at. Most people had it down-pat pretty well. The modern flat screen keyboard requires visual confirmation to see where you are typing.

Re:They could have done better with the data

[DaHat]

Take cell phones out of it for a minute.

On the whole, who tends to be a better driver on average? A 20 year old, or a 40 year old?

Like anything, the more time you spend do something, the better you tend to be at it.

Re:They could have done better with the data

[lgw]

See, that just goes to show you how risky it is to use a phone while driving... AC managed to accidentally tap both the Preview AND submit buttons before they finished typing!

Slashdot has a preview button?

Re:They could have done better with the data

[ripvlan]

Unfortunately the scientific data does not agree with your opinion.

The issue isn't whether this is dangerous - science says it is. People want to take this risk. Heavy drinking will kill your liver - yet people still binge drink (and you might be surprised to find out how low # of drinks that defines binge). Don't eat sugar - most have a Mountain Dew in their hand right now. It doesn't matter that a Church van gets whacked by a texting driver and kills many -- not in my backyard.

No matter the number of studies telling of the risks - people will continue to believe that they are above average and that they can operate a cell phone while driving. Years ago I wondered how talking on the phone stacks up against "fiddling with radio, talking to passenger, eating snack" - and turns out talking on the phone is more dangerous for several reasons. One - your participant is not in the car with you. When talking to a passenger - they too can see a sticky situation coming up and will curb the conversation along with the driver. Also people tend to devote more focus on phone conversations than they would say...eating a snack.

IBM once put forward a system that could monitor the road, traffic density, and other attributes and plug that into the cell phone. Diverting calls to voice-mail if you had the brakes on, or heavy traffic etc. The more dangerous the situation and it would lock out external distractions.

Companies like Ford have tested this in their driving simulators. They know. My father has a GM with a navigation system that can't be operated while the car is in motion..... and I'll tell you what.. it is the most frustrating feature ever. I just pull out my phone or Garmin and think....why th' f* pay $1500 for a lousy nav system that you can't use.

Re:They could have done better with the data

[ripvlan]

Sure - show me the work - fair enough. There are lots of citations available - sorry this isn't wikipedia.

For example - Alan Alda covered this on Scientific American Frontiers when he visited the Ford driving simulator. Part of the show had him carrying out tasks while driving so that the viewer could get an idea of what distractions looks like.

It is known that the brain devotes more effort to listening to a phone call than listening to kids in the backseat. Probably because there's pressure to pay attention to the phone call where as you can ignore the children - or scream "shut up !!" at them...but not your boss on the phone.

An article from 2014 shows the same: https://www.scientificamerican...

This is an area of research. IBM even prototyped a driving assistant that could monitor the outside world and disable your phone to "turn down" the distraction level. Hey - talking on a quiet long straight country road vs rush-hour traffic in LA has a different impact-of-risk. Make a mistake in the country and...well probably nothing happens..maybe kill a bunny.

But that isn't the point of all of this -- it is distracted driving and people don't believe it or are willing to accept the risk.

Re:They could have done better with the data

[tsqr]

See, that just goes to show you how risky it is to use a phone while driving... AC managed to accidentally tap both the Preview AND submit buttons before they finished typing!

Slashdot has a preview button?

Try using the desktop view. There's a link at the bottom of the front page.

Re:They could have done better with the data

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly - and the study in TFA seems to back that up. It shows no correlation between states with hands-free bans and incidence of related accidents.

Re:They could have done better with the data

[overlook77]

That was pretty funny..i almost spilled my beer and ran a stopsign.

Re:They could have done better with the data

[PrimaryConsult]

That's only if you are engaging in the demanding conversation, which is what the testers were doing. The rare occasion I talk while driving (using the built in bt connection), if the conversation goes anywhere above inane chatter, I hang up suddenly. I might call back while stopped and say "oh sorry, bad reception out here in the sticks", or just not bother.

Re:They could have done better with the data

[Anonymous Coward]

I've seen those studies. I don't believe them completely though. I've seen the Myth Busters episode too - but there they did things that really taxed your concentration - having you remember and recite words from lists, doing math problems, etc. And yes, it did reduce the driver's ability to pay attention to the drive. That's a lot different than a hands free, "hey honey, I am on the way home. Did you need me to pick up anything on the way?" short call that takes next to no concentration. In fact that latter call takes probably less than talking to a passenger in the car.

Re:They could have done better with the data

[markdavis]

Sorry, I don't believe it. t is the dialing of the phone, the texting, the reading facebook, etc... THOSE are what have caused the accidents and it is mostly from taking eyes off the road and/or hands off the contols. Dumb phones didn't increase accidents much at all, especially not hands-free. Can you remember those days? I do.

For many people, if not most, TALKING on the phone is not much different than talking to a passenger.

Re:They could have done better with the data

[Anonymous Coward]

FAIL: Mythbusters use sample sizes that are statistically too small to "bust" anything, ironically. They CAN, and I think HAVE proven something COULD be true, such as with elephants being frightened of mice, (I think they called that one "plausible," which again, too small a sample to call it confirmed, even if they did, since they could have found the only elephant (or did they use two?) that is actually easily startled...

But no, I wouldn't put any stock in their, (much as I love the show myself,) findings of things being impossible. When they call something "busted," all it means is THEY weren't able to do it. Radiolab (www.radiolab.org,) a free podcast out of WNYC/NPR had an episode that is perfectly emblematic of this phenomenon, called "Double Blasted," in which the story is told of arguably the world's least fortunate man; an engineer who forgot his hanko, which he used to make his inkan, (a seal, essentially,) at his job in HIROSHIMA Japan, circa August, 1945, went home to get it, got stopped (and was too polite) to share tea with some people, and then on his way to work, BAM, the city gets nuked, but was far enough away that it didn't kill him, and so he eventually made his way to another facility (I forget which company he worked for,) in... NAGASAKI!!! When he gets there, he explains what he saw to a superior, and basically gets yelled at, for being an ENGINEER, and not understanding that the release of enough energy from ONE bomb carried by ONE plane could not POSSIBLY have occurred, so surely he was mistaken about what he thought occurred.

That supervisor would have deemed the first nuclear bomb dropped on Japan in 1945 as "BUSTED." Then the second one dropped on Nagasaki, proving that Japanese "Mythbuster" wrong. Incredibly, this same guy who survived the first blast also survived the second, and went on to live a somewhat normal, healthy life, apparently. It's certainly a well-told story.

So don't put too much faith when the boys (and/or girl(s)) "bust" something, nor when they allegedly deem it plausible or confirmed. I don't, and I wrote all this right off the top of my head. Just saying.

(For the full awesomeness of Radiolab, may I heartily recommend starting by watching their freely available live show, "Apocalyptical," at www.radiolab.org/live, for which an audio-only version is also available, if you don't have two hours to park and watch an awesome show. They open with a comedian, who isn't really part of the show, so at least watch through the part where they fire a gun underwater, it's pretty cool, they talk about endings, such as the end of the dinosaurs. I am in no way connected with NPR, apart from supporting them with small donations, nor have I met Jad or Robert, nor did I have the privilege of seeing this show in person :'( but it was very cool and entertaining, like so much Radiolab. Oh, also, Reggie Watts. Did I mention? He's part of it too, in a sort of intermission. You're welcome.)

Re:They could have done better with the data

[thebullshitpatrol]

I personally have a very hard time having even basic conversation while driving. It's incredibly distracting to me.

Re:They could have done better with the data

[PrimaryConsult]

Do you do mostly city driving? I could understand that. Highway though, an inane conversation is safer for me. It keeps me from "highway hypnosis" while staring at endless trees, dotted white lines, and the occasional other car. On road trips I require conversation from whoever gets shotgun - I want both of us awake, alert and looking at the road, and talking about random bullshit insures this. As a passenger I once saved us from hitting a wild turkey flying across the road (simply interjecting "turkey!" mid-sentence did the trick); I expect no less of my navigator!

Re:They could have done better with the data

[Immerman]

Actually, not true. Even just talking on a phone is still distracting, considerably more so than talking to a person in the car with you, who will tend to pace their conversation to the complexity of surrounding traffic and may even spot impending problems before you do. As I recall, the average person talking on a hands-free phone while driving is roughly as dangerous as if they had a couple drinks under their belt.

It's all about where your attention is focused. Attention is a severely limited resource and you're much less dangerous when it's focused on the car and surrounding area. The more you focus on someone who's not physically there, the less you have to pay attention to your surroundings. You don't suddenly grow more attention just because you need it.

Re:They could have done better with the data

[damn_registrars]

You have some good points and there is room for argument on the danger of a voice-only phone call in the car. To be clear I'm not calling it an inherently safe thing to do but rather I am arguing that there are ways to make it more safe.

However what I was really after with this is that a phone call is one of the least dangerous things you can do with a phone while driving. A phone call does not require the user to look away from the road once it is initiated as there is nothing important to see. If the phone is set up hands-free it also does not require the user to take their hands off the steering wheel. However dealing with SMS or social media on the phone while driving does require this.

So would it be safer for people to just not use the phone at all while driving? Sure. Can we expect them to do that? No. If we could even just get them to stop doing the most inherently dangerous activities - that no reasonable person should ever expect to be able to safely do while driving - that would be a huge improvement.

Re:They could have done better with the data

[thebullshitpatrol]

Yeah. Longer trips the talking helps, but in city driving I just can't do it period.

"Use" can mean anything.

[Anonymous Coward]

I "use" my smart phone for driving directions. It is on. I look at it from time to time.

I "use" my smart phone for music when on the road. Have a huge playlist and generally just skip tracks forward, not much else.

I do not take or make calls with it when driving.

I do not text when driving.

I do not change applications, except between the music player and mapping app when driving.

If it takes more than 1 button to do, I wait until a non-busy, straight, part of the road where grandma would feel safe driving.

Public education goddamnit!

[Anonymous Coward]

Phones -can- be used safely in a car. You just have to know that you need to prioritize tasks. In aviation we say "aviate, navigate, communicate, in that order" This means fly the plane first, worry about where youre going second, and talking to people is a distant third. ATC knows this, & theyre fine with it if it takes you a minute or two to respond, do what you gotta, just be safe.

Its the same in the car "hold on a second while i navigate this intersection" and PUT THE PHONE DOWN until youre back on a straight stretch.

Or just put the thing down & when you pick it back up, "hey mom, sorry i had to put the phone down to change lanes". She will understand, trust me.

"Hey this is not a good time to discuss (very complex or emotional topic), let me get to my destination and I'll call you back."

The problem we're having is that our reaction to it so far has been to just outlaw it & write tickets. This isnt going to work any better than "just say no" or "abstinence-only" education. People ARE going to do this, they just are, youre not going to stop them. Since that is the case, the best thing we can do is educate them on how to do it responsibly, and to also put some effort into updating our unwritten phone etiquette rules to fit.

Re:Public education goddamnit!

[LS1 Brains]

Spot on, this. If this advice were followed on the road, the whole cell phone while driving thing (or any other distraction) would be a non-issue. I honestly believe this is why investing in self-driving sheep movers will be highly profitable in the coming years. People don't want to have to think or do for themselves anymore. They want to be carted around like the mindless sheep they are.

Re:Public education goddamnit!

[mjr167]

But ZERO TOLERANCE!

Re:Public education goddamnit!

[Anonymous Coward]

People ARE going to do this, they just are, youre not going to stop them.

As United should have known, everyone has a price. $100 fine? $500? $1000? $10000? 10 days in jail? Cutting off your right hand? There absolutely is a penalty that will get a person to put down their damned phone, and I don't want to have to die because they won't.

Re:Public education goddamnit!

[drinkypoo]

We can't even get people to wash their hands, you think you're going to convince them to use their phone responsibly? There's always people who think they won't get caught, and/or that they're smarter than everyone else.

Re:Public education goddamnit!

[Anonymous Coward]

Phones -can- be used safely in a car. You just have to know that you need to prioritize tasks. In aviation

Nope. Stop stop stop.

You cannot make reasonable comparisons between what happens in aviation and driving. I know you're trying to bring up reasonable rules that apply to aviation, but the comparison is just a non-starter.

Consider the orders of magnitude of training and required flight hours that pilots require in order to obtain and keep their license. Consider that, broadly speaking, there is a world-wide authority in charge of the flow of air traffic that pilots communicate with at least a handful of times during a flight. Your average pilot is much, much more disciplined than the average driver, and infractions from pilots are much more likely to result in a piloting license being pulled (Harrison Ford notwithstanding).

So, no, don't say "phones can be safely used in a car". That's deliberately misleading. A 10 year old can safely use a chainsaw, too. So what? That's stupid, and you're stupid for saying what you did. Just say "Phones will most likely be misused in a car".

The problem we're having is that our reaction to it so far has been to just outlaw it & write tickets.

People drink and drive too. It's not a problem that can be legislated away 100% but we can really turn the screws on the persons irresponsible enough to drive drunk. (Yes, yes, I know MADD is considered a prohibition organization and people argue that the BAC limit is too low in some places. Don't fucking drive drunk, k?)

So, no, it's not a problem that our reaction is to outlaw it and write tickets. It SHOULD be outlawed, tickets SHOULD be written, and we should continue to turn the screws on people who do fiddle with their phones while driving because it is not okay to use a mobile device while driving.

Turn off the phone when you drive. You'll live.

Re:Public education goddamnit!

[Anonymous Coward]

Phones -can- be used safely in a car. You just have to know that you need to prioritize tasks. In aviation we say "aviate, navigate, communicate, in that order" This means fly the plane first, worry about where youre going second, and talking to people is a distant third. ATC knows this, & theyre fine with it if it takes you a minute or two to respond, do what you gotta, just be safe.

Its the same in the car "hold on a second while i navigate this intersection" and PUT THE PHONE DOWN until youre back on a straight stretch.

Or just put the thing down & when you pick it back up, "hey mom, sorry i had to put the phone down to change lanes". She will understand, trust me.

"Hey this is not a good time to discuss (very complex or emotional topic), let me get to my destination and I'll call you back."

The problem we're having is that our reaction to it so far has been to just outlaw it & write tickets. This isnt going to work any better than "just say no" or "abstinence-only" education. People ARE going to do this, they just are, youre not going to stop them. Since that is the case, the best thing we can do is educate them on how to do it responsibly, and to also put some effort into updating our unwritten phone etiquette rules to fit.

No, no no. DON'T put the phone down. It's when you go to pick it off the floor after dropping it that you run into trux.

Re:Public education goddamnit!

[Anonymous Coward]

There's less things to run into in the sky though...

Re:Public education goddamnit!

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope. Stop stop stop.

You cannot make reasonable comparisons between what happens in aviation and driving. I know you're trying to bring up reasonable rules that apply to aviation, but the comparison is just a non-starter.

I think his comparisons are valid with regard to the point he is trying to make: the primarily responsibility of the person in the driver's or pilot's seat is to operate the vehicle. There will always be things that try to take your attention from operating it, and the operator should have the correct set of priorities.

Consider the orders of magnitude of training and required flight hours that pilots require in order to obtain and keep their license.

Consider the number of hours the average driver has. Granted the training is less, and maybe that is part of the problem (which I think is what the GP is inferring).

Your average pilot is much, much more disciplined than the average driver, and infractions from pilots are much more likely to result in a piloting license being pulled (Harrison Ford notwithstanding).

Agreed. Maybe certain infractions - or rather negative results due to said infractions - should have harsher penalties, but not centered around the device. At fault accident? automatic 3-month suspension of license. Repeat offender? Sorry, you're taking a cab.

So, no, don't say "phones can be safely used in a car". That's deliberately misleading. A 10 year old can safely use a chainsaw, too. So what? That's stupid, and you're stupid for saying what you did. Just say "Phones will most likely be misused in a car".

I'm sure somewhere there is a 10-year-old that can safely use a chainsaw, and they should be allowed to do it. And there are people who can safely use a phone in a car. His statement wasn't that -most- people can safely use a phone, is was that a phone -can- be safely used. The problem is the person using the phone, not the phone itself.

The problem we're having is that our reaction to it so far has been to just outlaw it & write tickets.

People drink and drive too. It's not a problem that can be legislated away 100% but we can really turn the screws on the persons irresponsible enough to drive drunk. (Yes, yes, I know MADD is considered a prohibition organization and people argue that the BAC limit is too low in some places. Don't fucking drive drunk, k?)

So, no, it's not a problem that our reaction is to outlaw it and write tickets.It SHOULD be outlawed, tickets SHOULD be written, and we should continue to turn the screws on people who do fiddle with their phones while driving because it is not okay to use a mobile device while driving.

Turn off the phone when you drive. You'll live.

We should turn the screws on people who do all sorts of things while driving. The challenge is that accident prevention is a hard thing to legislate fairly. If you're going to take such an extreme position, it should be to remove anything internal to the vehicle from providing a distraction to the driver... Radio? Sorry listening to tunes takes away from your concentration. Eating? Too bad, you won't starve. Changing climate control system? Sorry, just sweat it out til you stop. All of these things detract from the driver's concentration. And obviously since some drivers can't be trusted to have their concentration impacted because they are sucky drivers, we should punish all drivers and ban those activities for all drivers.

Define "Phone Use"

[Anonymous Coward]

Dig past the article and you get a link to the published study. I had to dig but I found this:
"Phone use while driving is detected when the driver handles the phone for a certain period of time for various purposes such as talking, texting or navigating."
So talking hands free and using the GPS apparently count towards this total.

Re:Define "Phone Use"

[thegarbz]

This makes the study worthless. There's a word of difference between handling a device with a touch screen, and pushing a button on the car radio to answer a call via bluetooth and talk hands free.

Count me towards the 80%. Hell if that's the bar they set I will say that I never drive without using my phone.

Re:Define "Phone Use"

[Cro Magnon]

This makes the study worthless. There's a word of difference between handling a device with a touch screen, and pushing a button on the car radio to answer a call via bluetooth and talk hands free.

Count me towards the 80%. Hell if that's the bar they set I will say that I never drive without using my phone.

Totally agree! Before I had a bluetooth, I answered a phone call from my GF. The phone was easy to reach and unlock, but I could tell my focus was too much on the phone. I've often answered calls on my bluetooth, and my primary focus then is on the road.

Re:Define "Phone Use"

[Anonymous Coward]

So talking hands free and using the GPS apparently count towards this total.

Which is substantially safer than using a paper map, like we used to do.

Re:Define "Phone Use"

[Anonymous Coward]

Dig past the article and you get a link to the published study. I had to dig but I found this:
"Phone use while driving is detected when the driver handles the phone for a certain period of time for various purposes such as talking, texting or navigating."
So talking hands free and using the GPS apparently count towards this total.

That's because phone calls, even if using a hands free device, are still distracting and increase the risk of accidents.

Re:Define "Phone Use"

[Aristos Mazer]

It doesn't make the research useless. You can find plenty of recent research that any conversation with someone not in the vehicle -- i.e., someone who doesn't know when to shut up when road conditions get interesting -- raises accident risk considerably, whether the phone is hands-free or not. I've seen stats indicating that having kids in a car where the only adult is the driver shows the same tendency, although not the same degree.

You can Google around for the research. Someone earlier on this slashdot thread found this paper, for example. The exact level of risk varies between studies, but all of them are considerable. That's why studies of cell phone use have begun including hands-free use.

Re:Define "Phone Use"

[Anonymous Coward]

No it doesn't. You're not handling a phone if you're using voice activation or car buttons. You handle a phone when it's in your hand. If you have to hold a phone to do GPS stuff then yes, it should be counted. That doesn't mean people who mounted the phone and entered directions before the trip started were counted. Why was the parent modded up? He quotes a line then makes a claim completely opposite of what the quote says, or is that why it's an interesting post?

Re:Define "Phone Use"

[thegarbz]

They are two different types of distractions with two different risk factors. That's what makes the study worthless in general. Having a conversation is distracting whether someone is next to you or on the other end of your car's bluetooth connection to your phone. However neither is even within the order of magnitude as distracting as being on the other end of a text message.

Study conversations.
Study hands-on use of mobile phones.

Both are different things worth studying, but need to be studied separately in order to focus efforts on reducing risk.

Re: Define "Phone Use"

[Aristos Mazer]

That's a reasonable point.

Well

[Anonymous Coward]

That just means most people are stupid.

Tainted survey

[Anonymous Coward]

A survey by someone who sells handsfree tech. Yeah, no POSSIBLE conflict of interest there.

Fuck you slashdot. Slashdot editors are truly useless.

Re:Tainted survey

[BradleyUffner]

That doesn't mean they are wrong.

Re:Tainted survey

[Anonymous Coward]

But it doesn't mean the data is reliable. 9 in 10? That sounds VERY suspect. If you're not sceptical of such a claim, you should be.

32,000

[Anonymous Coward]

32,000 people died in traffic accidents last year. Yet the Luddite Republicans are doing everything they can to stop autonomous vehicles.

Re:32,000

[fluffernutter]

You realize that is only 0.015 percent of drivers in the US right? Many years more people die of the common flu.

Re:32,000

[fluffernutter]

Gun control is an apples to oranges comparison. No one *needs* a gun in the US unless you buy into the fiction that they protect more people than they kill. For the most part it is a hobby. If comic book collecting was killing people, I would advise people not to collect comic books just the same.

Re:32,000

[PrimaryConsult]

In rural areas it does protect more than they kill, even the people who don't have one. If 1/3 the property owners in a zip code are armed, none of them get robbed (the robbers go elsewhere for easier targets). Being followed by a road rager? Call a buddy to come out onto his porch with his rifle and pull into his driveway. When the cops are 20 minutes away, that's how it works. Think of it like the Nuclear Umbrella.

Re:32,000

[Anonymous Coward]

kids in Wyoming need to carry rifles to school to shoot grizzly bears.

Betsy DuVos, Dept of Education

Fuck you stupid people.

Re:32,000

[michael_wojcik]

kids in Wyoming need to carry rifles to school to shoot grizzly bears

I don't have any evidence for that, but sure, there are plenty of people in the US who need to defend themselves from critters of various sorts. There was a case a few years back, not so terribly far from my place in New Mexico, where a woman shot a bear that had broken into her house. And it's not just bears; if there's a rabid dog wandering about the property, it's best to address that from a little distance.

So, yeah, OP doesn't know what he's talking about. While the number of people in the US with a demonstrable need for firearms is small relative to the total population, it's not negligible. And that's regardless of whether you make any allowance for defense against other human beings (an application I am dubious about myself, except in the case of people in certain lines of work).

Betsy DuVos

DeVos. I know, it would have taken precious seconds to look that the fuck up.

And what about DeVos? She's a shill for the kickback-rich charter-school system. She doesn't know dick about education, and I doubt she knows anything significant about what kids in Wyoming need. That branch of the DeVos family is good at one thing: filling their own pockets.

Fuck you stupid people.

... writes AC who can't be bothered to formulate a coherent statement or look up the correct spelling of someone's name. This is why we can't have nice arguments.

Re:32,000

[fluffernutter]

People will need to 'shoot critters' in low-density places. This will not be a large portion of the population. I didn't say no one should have a gun, I said that I would advise against it. Sorry, didn't think I needed to spell that out.

Re:32,000

[michael_wojcik]

I didn't say no one should have a gun, I said that I would advise against it

From your original post:

No one *needs* a gun in the US

"I would advise against it" is rather a gloss for "[n]o one needs". For that matter, "not a large portion of the population" is a rather different thing from "no one".

The simple fact of the matter is that your original statement was wrong. It wasn't ambiguous or poorly phrased; it was factually incorrect.

I'm not a gun owner myself, despite having a home in a rural area where critters can indeed be a problem. Guns are tools, and like most tools they're dangerous, and I prefer to hold off on acquiring, much less using, dangerous tools until I decide they're justified by my circumstances. I haven't reached that point with guns yet. (Bears are rare on my side of the mountain, and I have neighbors close by.) But that doesn't prevent me from assessing the need for guns properly and avoiding insupportable generalizations.

Re:32,000

[fluffernutter]

Ok badly worded. I meant the 'relatively no one' not 'absolutely no one'. If you want to get technical law enforcement should have them as well, and military, properly trained security, and probably some other fields I can't think of righ tnow. The point of gun control is not to oppress people but to limit use in a way that can be managed.

Some use of the phone?

[BigBuckHunter]

When my phone rings and I'm driving, I'll look at the front of it, to see who is calling. If it's important, I'll park and call them back. If not, I'll wait till I get to my destination. On occasion (city driving), I'll take a moment to turn off the ringer so that I do not encounter subsequent distraction.

It's unfortunate that, even though I do not use a cell phone while driving, I'm still breaking the letter of the law.

Re:Some use of the phone?

[Anonymous Coward]

Congrats! You are one out of 100 that might do this including all the yahoos on /. that say they don't use their phone when nearly all of them text, call, look at email etc. Yes, I'm one of those double-standard assholes too. I hate seeing people driving while talking or checking an email or text, but I still do it on occasion. What really blows me away, I see people looking at Facebook and not only that, but watching fucking videos. Now that is way out of bounds.

I'd wager a bet that even your immediate family members will answer the call while driving or check a text message. You sir are the rarity, nearly everyone looks at their phone while driving. Just peel your eyes off of the road ahead of you for a little bit and look around. If you're in heavy traffic you will see at any point in time 2-10 heads looking down at their laps or head bobbing, reading/texting while trying to inch forward in traffic.

Re:Some use of the phone?

[thegarbz]

When my phone rings and I'm driving I hit the answer button on the car radio. Why would you take your eyes off the road when you don't need to?

Re:Some use of the phone?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, it's pretty scary. I have a complete "No Phone" policy while driving. It goes into "Do Not Disturb" mode when I get in the vehicle and only select (emergency) contacts will make it sound. If it does ring, I will pull into a parking space to check what's up.

A friend of mine turns her phone completely off before driving. Her employer actually got a bit belligerent until she pointed out (in writing to their HR department) that cell phone use while driving is illegal in her jurisdiction and her employer was essentially telling her to break the law. They shut up pretty quick.

Re:Some use of the phone?

[Cro Magnon]

Maybe he doesn't have a bluetooth capable car. My current car is my first with BT, and yes, I look at the number and answer with the car buttons.

Re:Some use of the phone?

[thegarbz]

Maybe he doesn't have a bluetooth capable car.

Neither did I. But adding the feature to my 12 year old french piece of merde cost less than 1/20th of the value of my smartphone.

Re:Some use of the phone?

[Anonymous Coward]

You ARE using a cell phone while driving. You're spending time you would have spent focusing on the road to instead focus on the phone. For those times you are a distracted driver. All distracted driving is potentially dangerous. If your state has a law against distracted driving then you should be breaking it, which you are.

Have the tiniest amount of foresight and turn the ringer off before you start driving. It's easy, you have to remember to put your keys in the car and close the car door. There should be room in your head to remember to check the phone too. Or get a better phone which turns off the ringer when you flip it over.

Re:Some use of the phone?

[swillden]

On occasion (city driving), I'll take a moment to turn off the ringer so that I do not encounter subsequent distraction.

Suggestion: If you're using an Android device with Google Now or the Google Assistant, "OK Google, silence ringer" will do that without requiring you to look or touch. I expect that Apple's Siri can do something similar.

Define phone use

[Anontroll]

If you dig deep enough you can get some of the methodology. They include talking hands free and using the GPS as phone use.

Re:Define phone use

[Anonymous Coward]

Seconded - there's a huge difference between something like typing a message and using something handsfree.

Re:Define phone use

[Calydor]

And even more from hands free (you're paying attention to the conversation even then) to using it as a GPS which you glance at every now and then to make sure you're on the right path.

Re:Define phone use

[nightfire-unique]

They include talking hands free and using the GPS as phone use.

I figured as much. So, essentially, the study is irrelevant and worthless. GPS use increases safety behind the wheel, where texting decreases safety. So what's the net?

I suspect this oversight wasn't made by accident.

Re:Define phone use

[immortalcrab]

Yes, driving means you have to be 100% focused on the road and the vehicle, no exceptions. You also should know your route beforehand is your responsibility; motorists have it easy in their ton of steel cages with belts and airbags, a small hit at 20 km/h is nothing but a bruise on the bumper, but what most of this egotistical assholes doesn't mind at all is that they share the road with pedestrians, cyclists and motorcyclists who will be (and are) seriously injured by the idiots that make traffic jams, stay in debt for their stupid ton of steel and waste fuel to move 20 times their fat asses weight around town.

Re:Define phone use

[Anonymous Coward]

Completely and utterly unreasonable.

Also, you're a dick.

Fuck off.

Re:Define phone use

[Anonymous Coward]

Talking hands free could still be a problem. Trying to keep a conversation going with someone outside the vehicle can still be distracting (trying to keep your mind in two different areas).

GPS on the other hand probably isn't they can usually be set up to provide warnings well ahead of turns/exits, so a person has plenty of time to take in a situation and react.

I didn't need a smartphone for a tech accident

[wwphx]

in '94, I had amateur radio. Someone cut-off the car in front of me, instant three car collision with the car that caused it skating away free. It's the last car on car accident that I've had. The people whom I was on the radio with said it was quite impressive to hear.

Yes, I use my phone while driving, exceedingly carefully, and only while in a straight line with no traffic and not while approaching a light. I don't live in a city, so I think it's not too dangerous to do this. When I use the phone part, I use the speakerphone and voice dialing, or I wait until I'm at a destination or I can pull over. I'll use voice to text to read texts to me (I'm job hunting, so it's mildly important), but I'll pull over to reply. Otherwise I'm just listening to music or podcasts and don't need to touch the thing.

Re:I didn't need a smartphone for a tech accident

[Wulf2k]

Like everything with government, it no longer has anything to do with safety.

The second it's a source of revenue it's milked for all it's worth in every possible edge case, with everybody who questions it on the pro-side of running over babies.

Parked by the curb, finishing your conversation before you put it in drive? The engine's running, you're on the phone, pay up.

Re:I didn't need a smartphone for a tech accident

[wwphx]

There have been bitterly-fought DUI cases in similar circumstances where the person knew they were too drunk to drive but it it was too cold to just wait in the car to sober up, so they started the car to run the heater to warm up. I don't know the outcome of such cases, but it does show that officer judgement should be a factor.

Re:I didn't need a smartphone for a tech accident

[JesseMcDonald]

... but it does show that officer judgement should be a factor.

No, what it shows is that it should not be possible to be convicted of a DUI unless you were actually driving, regardless of the judgement (or lack thereof) of any officers in the vicinity. The fact that the vehicle's transmission was in Park should be an absolute defense against any accusation that you were driving under the influence. If an officer sees someone impaired in a parked vehicle and worries that they might start driving under the influence they are welcome to stick around until the person actually does start driving and only then charge them with a DUI. No one is being endangered so long as the vehicle remains stationary.

Re:I didn't need a smartphone for a tech accident

[Anonymous Coward]

In New Jersey where I grew up, if the keys are in the car you're guilty of DUI even if you're sleeping in the parking lot.

Or walking in traffic with your cellphone....

[__aaclcg7560]

I was on the express bus in Palo Alto when we drove past an auto accident on 280 North yesterday morning. The front end of a Ferrari got smashed in, parked on the side of the freeway. A second vehicle was nowhere in sight. The driver was walking in the slow lane while talking on the cellphone, ignoring traffic and everything else. May have been drunk.

Re:Or walking in traffic with your cellphone....

[bano]

I'd be willing to lump that possibly in with shock and being unaware what they are doing, or just being an asshole.
I've seen enough people after accidents do some pretty irrational things attributed to shock.

Speaking as a firefighter

[Anonymous Coward]

Not every car accident I've worked, but certainly in the past 3-5 years, most of them have been caused by cell phones. I've also seen three fatals caused by cell phones. Are there other distractions in the world? Sure. But none as ubiquitous as cell phones. I think many people look to their cell phones so often during the day, they no longer actively register doing so. You yell at your kids, you goof with your radio - you do that infrequently enough that you're actually cognizant of the change in your focus from driving to the other thing. Meanwhile we watch TV while on our phones, hold conversations with loved ones on our phones, walk down the street staring at our phones - we come to believe, because we didn't fall into an open manhole cover, that we're aware of our surroundings, that the cell phone is not consuming most if not all of our focus. We're wrong. And the woman who was rear-ending at a stoplight by a guy who was texting, pushed into opposing traffic, ejected through the driver side window, and then run over by her own car (100% true accident), pays the price.

Re:Speaking as a firefighter

[thegarbz]

stoplight by a guy who was texting

The study counted hands free use as well making it quite a worthless metric for stopping accidents.

Re:Speaking as a firefighter

[orgelspieler]

It's the getting rear ended at a stop light that really pisses me off. I was hit once like that. This gal had already stopped behind me in the turn lane, got out her phone, and plowed into me. Really? I was lucky she stopped first, I guess, otherwise I might have ended up like the lady you're talking about. I heard one interview with a high school girl who said she "can't not" look at her phone. I got an idea. How about you leave it in your fucking trunk if you're that attention challenged.

Re:Speaking as a firefighter

[Chris Mattern]

The study counted hands free use as well making it quite a worthless metric for stopping accidents.

On the contrary, that makes it the correct metric. Studies have shown that "hand-free" is as as dangerous as other cell phone use. It's still completely distracting you from paying attention to the road, and thus it's still highly dangerous.

Re:Speaking as a firefighter

[Anonymous Coward]

There are nothing but assertions in your source with absolutely no verifiable statistics. It looks like something that would be printed and displayed in a drivers ed room.

If you are going to make the (imho) extraordinary claim that hands free driving is more risky then talking to a passenger, and just as risky as texting someone, then you are going to need to supply evidence, not propaganda.

Re:Speaking as a firefighter

[Anonymous Coward]

(Possibly) interesting addition: The guy who was texting was not charged because the last text message he sent was 60 seconds before the 911 call reporting the accident. By my reckoning, send a text message (a few seconds), look up and realize you're going to cause an accident (a few seconds), cause the accident (maybe 5 seconds - it did ultimately involve 5 cars), everything comes to a rest (maybe 10 seconds), spend some time with everyone wondering just what the hell happened, collecting their wits, finding their phones, dialing 911, having it answered, computer marks that time... my point is that somehow the courts have decided that the timeline between the two verifiable time data points (the last text, the 911 call) to consider the events linked seems kind of out of whack in my book. But a woman lies dead, and he's probably still texting behind the wheel (RIP Katie Hamilton http://www.cnn.com/2013/12/25/us/new-hampshire-holiday-tragedy/)

Re:Speaking as a firefighter

[moeinvt]

I don't know of any studies which concluded that "hands free" talking is as dangerous as "other cell phone use" like texting.

Studies have definitely shown that the danger of having a "hands free" phone conversation while driving is on par with the risk of driving while talking on the phone using one hand to hold it up to your ear. i.e. it's the distracted mind and not the distracted hand which creates the risk.

Re:Speaking as a firefighter

[thegarbz]

Studies have shown that "hand-free"

Define "hands free". THe level of hands free ness has changed over the past 5 years dramatically.

People using their phone "hands free" on speaker phone, by holding their phone in front of their face.
People using their phone "hands free" by holding a cord up to their mouth.
God forbid people using their phone "hands free" by fumbling trying to plug said cord in.
People using their phone "hands free" by having it mounted on the windshield still staring at it and pressing buttons.
People using their phone "hands free" with a headset which they obviously aren't wearing until they need to put it on when they receive a call.

Personally I use my phone hands free sans quotation marks. I don't even have it on me half the time, it often sits in the boot of the car with my work gear, and when it rings I simply push the button right underneath the AC on the dash to answer without ever taking my eyes off the road or doing anything more complicated than turning down the air in the car.

People use the term hands free but the vast majority of them don't actually embrace it.

Re:Speaking as a firefighter

[Anonymous Coward]

And this is why it's not safe to use your phone at a stop light either. As any motorcyclist will tell you, you should be checking around you and making sure another car is actually going to stop behind you instead of running you over. When you slow down to stop at a light (and when stopped), always double-check that the person behind you is also stopping. If not, honk and if possible move out of the way (sometimes you can, sometimes not).

Thanks, jackasses!

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks so much, jackasses; because of this and things like this, you're contributing to people eventually not being allowed to operate motor vehicles, instead having to be relegated to the level of lower animals, cattle, basically, being carted around in so-called 'self driving cars', and probably being KILLED by them when (not IF, but WHEN!) they fuck up. Never mind that there are plenty of us who learned how to drive properly and safely, who don't do stupid things like this, don't cause accidents, aren't selfish and thoughtless behind the wheel, oh no! You just HAVE to screw with your goddamned phone, because YOU are more important than everyone else! You, you, FUCK YOU, sideways with a rusty, Zika-and-AIDS-infested chainsaw, you fucking FUCKS.

You want to fix this problem? We don't need 'self driving cars'. The solution is simple: MINIMUM 6 month license suspension for distracted driving conviction, followed by mandatory completion of a 'Driver Re-Education Program', which basically starts you from scratch, and takes you all the way through a drive test, just like you're a new driver again. Second conviction for Distracted Driving after that? Your license is REVOKED. Enjoy spending thousands and thousands of dollars on a lawyer trying to convince a judge you're not going to go for the third strike.
Having implemented that legislation, you jam through thorough top-to-bottom reforms of driver education, driver training, and driver testing. Everyone has to take a drive test the next time their license comes up for renewal, regardless of their record. You fail? You go back to square one.
Congratulations! You've negated the need for so-called 'self driving cars' and raised the average IQ of the entire adult population by at least 10 points!

Re:Thanks, jackasses!

[Anonymous Coward]

Listen, dickhead: If you got a better, non-'self-driving car' solution to the problem, then let's hear it. Otherwise STFU and get on board with this.

Re:Thanks, jackasses!

[Anonymous Coward]

Go ask your mommy to drive you. Or are you too much of a coward to do that, even? If so I'll ask her for you when I see her tonight.

Finder's fee!

[GeekWithAKnife]

If police will pay 10% of the fine to other motorists that can provide clear recoded evidence then we'll have free policing in everyone's common interest.

You can submit recoded evidence of a serious crime already. Why not driving while using a mobile phone?

Re:Finder's fee!

[thegarbz]

Bonus points if you record a guy using his cell phone to record you using your cell phone to record him using his cellphone to record........

Re:Finder's fee!

[Anonymous Coward]

You'd need 110% of the fine to pay for your own fine for using your mobile phone to record another motorist using their mobile phone.

Re:Finder's fee!

[Anonymous Coward]

Awesome, pull out your phone and record someone driving while you are driving. Problem solved.

Re:Finder's fee!

[GeekWithAKnife]

How can you assume I referred to using your own smartphone to record someone else infringing with their phone??

Ever heard of dash cams? GoPros?

Confusing extrapolations and data

[Sumus Semper Una]

I wholeheartedly agree that using a cell phone while driving is distracting and dangerous. I've had too high a percentage of experiences being nearly hit by another driver only to later see at a stoplight that they've been using their cell phone to feel any other way about this. However, I do feel that the Zen Drive survey is making some strange extrapolations from their data. From the article:

Zendrive researchers also found that during an hour-long trip, drivers spent an average of 3.5-minutes using their phones. This finding is frightening, especially when you consider that a 2-second distraction is long enough to increase your likelihood of crashing by over 20-times. In other words, that’s equivalent to 105 opportunities an hour that you could nearly kill yourself and/or others.

Ok, that's just ridiculous extrapolation there. The assumption that you had 105 2-second distractions is in no way supported by the survey. There could have been 42 5-second distractions mostly involving stoplights. There could have been 420 0.5-second distractions from glancing at the phone and reading it without interacting with it. Or any distribution in between. They could have just included a section on whether the drivers were ever interacting with their phones for more than 2 seconds and used that to determine a link between that number and the "more than 3 minutes" number. At least then they would have data to back up the claim.

Also, what is "phone use" in this context? If I'm using a hands-free device connected to my smartphone to have a conversation without interacting with the phone does the duration of that entire conversation count as "phone use?"

tl;dr - Disingenuous and ill-thought-through extrapolations designed to reinforce your point hurt your argument, even if I would otherwise agree with you.

Re:Confusing extrapolations and data

[amiga3D]

I'll admit I've used mine while driving in the past. One near miss cured me. Now I either ignore the thing or pull over.

Re:Confusing extrapolations and data

[jeff4747]

Also, what is "phone use" in this context? If I'm using a hands-free device connected to my smartphone to have a conversation without interacting with the phone does the duration of that entire conversation count as "phone use?"

According to their methodology, yes.

So does using the GPS for navigation during your trip. Including if you only listen to the turn-by-turn directions.

The company that performed this survey sells hands-free devices for cell phones. I'm sure that fact and their methodology have nothing to do with each other.

Re:Confusing extrapolations and data

[thegarbz]

I'll admit I've used mine while driving in the past. One near miss cured me. Now I either ignore the thing or pull over.

I replaced my car radio with one which has bluetooth phone support. Answering a call is now as complicated as turning the AC on. No need to even look at who's calling or look away from the road.

Unfortunately this study includes such situations, and lumps them in with two handed txting idiots.

If most people are doing it..

[xtal]

Is it really that dangerous?

Re:If most people are doing it..

[immortalcrab]

Yes: specially for pedestrians, cyclists and motorcyclists, who can't afford a small bump against a car.

Re:headline disproves itself

[fluffernutter]

If driving was really as risky as automated car people want you to believe it is, no one would want to drive. The fact is people do choose to drive, therefore finding the risk acceptable.

Navigation

[nightfire-unique]

I personally use my phone to improve safety behind the wheel, by navigating with it. It allows me to focus exclusively on the act of driving, rather than looking around for street signs.

Were these figures included in the study?

Re:Navigation

[Anonymous Coward]

If you are focused exclusively on the act of driving, how are you also paying attention to your navaid?

The word "exclusively" means "to the exclusion of everything else," so... I'm just curious how you can be everywhere at once.

Not everyone is Infomercial level incompetent

[KalvinB]

There are some people who can't walk and chew bubble gum at the same time.

We don't outlaw walking and chewing bubble gum.

What we need to do is have harsher penalties for people who cause accidents so that if you can't walk and chew bubble gum at the same time, you are highly motivated to not try just because Bob over there is doing it just fine.

Re:Not everyone is Infomercial level incompetent

[R3d M3rcury]

Part of the issue is, frankly, I'd rather you not kill me. Yes, I can appreciate that you feel you can talk on the phone while driving or that you can drive while drunk. But if you're wrong...then what? I'm dead.

Would you be willing to spend the rest of your life in jail? Whoo...that's a toughie. I mean, hey, you killed someone. But it's not like you meant to do it. It was an accident. You looked away from the road for just a moment, honest, because your phone rang. It could've happened to anyone. And I'm sure you're sorry. I'm sure you're very very sorry. And you're a basically law-abiding citizen and I'm sure you'll never ever do that again.

But I'm still dead.

Do I have to die in order for you to learn that, hey, maybe you're not quite the superman that you think you are?

Smartphones are great driving aids. . .

[Idou]

you just have to use them correctly. Here are the steps I have taken:
1) Installed Waze
2) Bought a proper smart phone mount. I have had success with the rear view mirror mounted type.
3) Enter my destination into Waze every time I am about to go somewhere.

I have noticed the following with this approach:
- I have no motivation to do stupid things like text while driving if I am using my phone for navigation and the cars around me can easily see my phone screen.
- Even if I were to do something stupid on my smartphone, at least I would be looking up, instead of down, and would have a significantly better chance to avoid an accident (plus, other cars would more easily be able to see that I was doing something stupid on my rear view mirror mounted smartphone and could do a better job avoiding me)
- Waze is excellent for getting a heads up that traffic is about to slow down or there is an object on the road that I need to avoid. Unfortunately, they do not seem to have an option for reporting stupid drivers that are using their smartphones wrong while driving.

Anyway, cars are starting to notice me typing this post while driving, so I better end my post here. . . (I kid).

Re:Smartphones are great driving aids. . .

[jeff4747]

In some states, such a cell phone mount is not legal. There can be laws about how much of the windshield you can block, and which areas you can block.

Re:Smartphones are great driving aids. . .

[Idou]

Good point. Here is a comprehensive list of states with stupid laws.

Regarding Texas, I have the following points:
- The law specifically mentions "attached to windshield" but not "rear view mirror." It also mentions "Obstruction." Accordingly, the law would make for an interesting case for "rear view mirror" mounted devices. Would like to check case law when I have some time.
- The way the law is stated, if "rear view mirror" mounted smartphones are "obstruction" then so is every single rear window sticker, rear view mirror charm, and dashboard bob-head. . . I want to say that ~30% of the cars I see have something like this, so perhaps this is just another dumb Texas law that is almost never enforced.
- If they are actively enforcing this for people who are using apps like Waze, then they are killing people every year by their stupidity, and I feel morally obligated to resist this out-of-date and very stupid law. I hope I do get a ticket so that I can be the first to loudly fight it.

Re:Smartphones are great driving aids. . .

[techno-vampire]

I also use Waze, but I prefer a dashboard mount. You can use it to report accidents or stopped vehicles but most of the time that takes your attention off of your driving. My phone's been used for that once, and only because my passenger did the reporting while I kept my eyes on the road.

I see it everyday...

[wjcofkc]

Everyday during rush hour traffic, I see many vehicles over the course of the trip gently swerving out of their lane only to suddenly jerk back over and over again. When I see that - sometimes dodge that - and other indications that someone is on their phone while driving, I inevitably catch the act out of the corner of my eye. Just a couple weeks ago several people were killed when an SUV came barreling past a red light and into and intersection. This was just up the street for me. The cause? Talking on the phone while driving. I could have easily been the victim there.

There is no excuse for willingly driving distracted. Although, at one time I was in that crowd. Fortunately I saw enough consequences of this dumbfuckery to wise up. I don't even use hands free calling anymore. And if after programming my GPS then my GPS goes nuts and tries to steer me into infinite u-turns? I either ignore it and try to find the destination on my own, or I find a safe place to pull over and reset it.

This is why Washington is banning them

[WillAffleckUW]

Here in Washington State, in addition to our strong privacy laws, and Internet privacy laws just signed, we also have a ban on using cell phones while driving. Period. No exceptions. Even if you're stopped at a stop sign.

$145 ticket the first time. After that it gets serious and you are also guilty of distracted driving, which triples penalties for other distractions.

Got cell?

Not so fast.

Re:This is why Washington is banning them

[immortalcrab]

This should be implemented worldwide; I would just add a minor tweak: dead penalty at second offense.

As a programmer

[jediborg]

I think those who write mobile apps need to deal with the fact that, laws be damned, someone is going to use this app whilst driving. Therefore you DO HAVE some moral responsibility to make sure your app is as easy as possible to use in as few clicks as possible and that you NEVER EVER (especially for GPS enabled mapping programs) deliver an unexpected popup to the user that could potentially distract the user.

Some apps I can manipulate without looking at the screen, because i know in advance where the buttons will be and where i have to touch to get it to the point where the voice is telling me the info i need or the screen has the exact info i need in large print that can be safely read while reading. When such an app that i am used to suddenly changes their entire UI layout, or delivers unexpected popups that i have to read, locate the 'close' button and then click AND HOPE THE BUTTON IS LARGE ENOUGH THAT MY FINGERS ONLY HAVE TO PRESS ONCE that app is putting me in danger of crashing. I find popups that say 'please don't use this app while driving' to be paternalistic, and its like the developers are trying to 'wash their hands' when they clearly have some moral responsibility to make sure their UI is as user friendly as possible

Re:As a programmer

[immortalcrab]

No, a hundred times no. I won't stand for further dumbing down of user interface so an idiot can break the law and put other people in danger.

New meaning to "First Post!"

[pj2541]

Smashing you car into a sign while texting to Slashdot.

The key is redirecting the behavior

[NotARealUser]

We keep trying to force people to do things they will not do. I am annoyed as the next person when some teenager sits at the traffic light texting their friend rather than going forward on green, but I think we go about the solution the wrong way. Fines certainly have their place, but when you see a trend develop that is not easy to correct, you need to think outside your paradigms and come up with more creative solutions.

An example of such creative thinking is how residential neighborhoods solved speeding issues. Many newer neighborhoods created road patterns that made it difficult to speed. Their first attempts punished everybody - they created speed bumps all over the road. Later attempts were more friendly to the law abiding drivers because they found that by putting in curves, the roads became visually appealing and it reduced speed.

Instead of thinking that fines and enforcement campaigns will solve this issue, we need to find better ways to adapt the technology and make it safer and less distracting. I don't have the ultimate solution on this, but handsfree devices in cars have helped greatly with voice calls. There is still a very big issue with text messages. That solution is still in the future. It is clear that people will not just give up text-message-like communication while driving, and it is also clear that there is no way to evenly enforce punishments on such a large percentage of people. Therefore, the best hope of a long term solutions lies in innovation and new ideas.

The key here is redirection. If a behavior cannot be solved by education and/or punishment, we must find ways to redirect the behavior into something safer.

Re:The key is redirecting the behavior

[Aristos Mazer]

Faraday cages for car bodies? White noise broadcasting on all transmission channels on major streets? Or... self-driving cars! :-)

The biology of why we drive with cell phones

[maiden_taiwan]

People continue to use their cell phones while driving because of a limitation of our biology. Here's a quick demonstration.

Imagine right now that you're petting a dog. Can you see (in your mind's eye) the dog's face? Can you "feel" the fur against your fingers and the dog's breath against your face? Can you "hear" the dog panting in your head? Most people can, easily. Your brain is great at simulating these sensations through imagination.

Now, try to imagine agony. Imagine the physical feeling of crashing your car at high speed, because you were on your stupid cell phone. Can you actually experience the agony of your destroyed body in your mind? The answer (for almost everybody) is no. Your brain is very bad at imagining/simulating internal feeling. Our brains are wired that way. So we continue driving with cell phones, even though we know the risks.

These ideas were inspired by the book, "How Emotions are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain," by Lisa Feldman Barrett, chapter 4, "The Origin of Feeling." https://www.amazon.com/How-Emo...

Re:The biology of why we drive with cell phones

[thegarbz]

You're over thinking it. People in general are poor at risk assessment. They get even poorer when you combine risk with something they do automatically without thinking (like driving). And as nice as the emotional example is, people are even poorer at judging risk when they have any emotional attachment to the activity at all.

Nothing more nothing less. You don't need to feel agony of an accident to know you don't want to be in one. But hey what are the odds, I mean I'm driving for 40min, and sending this message will only take me a few seconds so I should be fine ....

Re:The biology of why we drive with cell phones

[maiden_taiwan]

>You're over thinking it. People in general are poor at risk assessment.

Sorry, I think you're under-thinking it. :-) "Risk" is a mental concept made up by people, not a basic part of biology, chemistry or physics. A better question is why people are bad at assessing risk. It's reasonable to argue that the reason, in part, is that we cannot mentally simulate the consequences of risky actions with any accuracy, because the human cortex is wired not to detect bodily signals finely.

>You don't need to feel agony of an accident to know you don't want to be in one.

True, but not really the point. If we could feel agony by imagining it, I suspect we'd be a lot more careful in the car.

Re:The biology of why we drive with cell phones

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you ever experienced having your body smashed? I have. I can imagine it without difficulty.

Correlating petting a dog, which most people have done and thus will remember - memory, with having your body smashed - imagination, is apples to oranges.

Are people more risk adverse if they've experienced something and it has gone wrong? Typically yes. You don't need ability to image something to explain the phenomenon.

How often do you imagine what you're going to do before you do it? I mean fully imagine, not just think I'm going to hammer the nails in this order, but actually full simulation where you experience hitting the nails in your mind? For myself and people I've talked to, rarely. (BTW you really need to imagine with this level of detail to use the false memories method of lying). Now do we imagine things to some degree? Of course. This is typically why we remember things like, oh I'm going to need to bring the light over so I can hammer.

People are simply terrible at assessing risk of low frequency high consequence risk. They get away with it too many times making them comfortable with the risk. The risks with going 70 mph are out of mind in a tin can with AC and tunes going.

Re:The biology of why we drive with cell phones

[thegarbz]

I disagree with that last point. People feel agony of losing $500 quite a lot. They know what that suddenly feels like and yet they do nothing to prevent it. The problem with agony is it's only one part of the risk equation.

The part that people generally get wrong about risk is not the consequence, but rather the likelihood. Yes I could die right now, or I could get pulled over and fined, but really what are the odds of a cop seeing me right now. *steps on the accelerator and undertakes like a lunatic*.

Re:The biology of why we drive with cell phones

[Anonymous Coward]

I disagree. I think that dumb people simply round a low probability to zero. That is, they see a 1/10,000 chance of accident, figure that's low enough for the benefit of the text, and take the risk. But they don't do the math that in 5 years that means they'll get their accident.

Re:The biology of why we drive with cell phones

[the_skywise]

Oh BS.

Most people have pet a dog.

Almost NOBODY has felt the agony of having their body destroyed in a crash.

And those that have - DO remember it - It's called PTSD.

Need DUI like penalties

[Anonymous Coward]

Start making it a crime to use your phone equal to a DUI. Then maybe the roads will get safer.

Uber trouble

[Anonymous Coward]

One of the things that bothers me about Uber & other rideshares is that the drivers are getting pings, directions, and other notices from phones frequently. The "pool" feature can kick in additional passengers at any time, en route. Everything's routed thru the app. Drivers are expected to manage a high level of phone distraction while trying to drive safely.

GPS Maps?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does this statistic include those who use the GPS navigation features of Google maps? Because by that metric, a lot of people will be "using" their phones for the duration of the drive, where "using" equals having the phone mounted on the dash, plugged into the 12V port (formerly known as the cigarette lighter in less enlightened days). Also, taking incoming calls hands-free through the car/phone bluetooth pickup would count as using the phone, with none of the risks association with the morons who TEXT or look down into their lap at their phone, browsing the web or facebook or whatever.

I would want to be certain of the definitions before reading too much into this dramatic, but probably misleading, "88%" number.

Re:People vote Democrat despite crappy results, to

[david_thornley]

They told me that if I voted for Hillary, the US would make provocative bomb strikes in the Middle East. They weer right!

Re:People vote Democrat despite crappy results, to

[Anonymous Coward]

It's modded down because it's offtopic, dipshit.

Look at the Results of Our Carelessness

[glennrrr]

Here are the deaths per million miles driven in the U.S. over the years https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re:Look at the Results of Our Carelessness

[Anonymous Coward]

Crappy graph. (Tens of Billions) made me confused. Was that created in mspaint by a kindergarten?
The label on the blue line is confusing, the numbers at the x-axis don't have a label.

Re:Look at the Results of Our Carelessness

[OrangeTide]

Some people demand absolute safety. Those people are being unreasonable.

Also we still get in a lot of collisions, but fatalities are down thanks to seat belts, child car seats, collision testing, air bags, faster emergency response, frozen blood plasma, etc.

Re:Look at the Results of Our Carelessness

[Anonymous Coward]

Errr... OK.

Maybe try again when you graduate high school.

I guess you haven't learned how to read a graph yet.

Re:Look at the Results of Our Carelessness

[michael_wojcik]

Also we still get in a lot of collisions, but fatalities are down thanks to seat belts, child car seats, collision testing, air bags, faster emergency response, frozen blood plasma, etc.

This is an excellent point. Fatalities are an important metric, but they are certainly not the whole story. Even injury-free collisions can cause tremendous difficulty for someone.

It's good that fatalities are down. It's bad that so many drivers are behaving foolishly. Those two facts can both be true.

Also unsurprising, misleading statistics

[s.petry]

TFA claims that 9 out of 10 people are using a cell phone while driving, but how many of those are using the two we would consider safe?

1. Phone calls: Voice assist means you don't need to take your eyes off the road to dial, and you surely don't to talk. I don't believe the hand waiving stereotypes fit for conversations while driving. At least as a generalization.

2. Maps: As with phone calls, once you plug in the directions there is no need to take your eyes off the road. "Turn left in one mile", "Turn left in 1/2 mile", etc...

There are other aspects of a phone which are certainly distractions and require screen time, but using the two apps mentioned is no more of a distraction than having a conversation with a passenger in the car. People can be morons with those uses, but lumping all users into the same "evil" basket is foolish.

Fixed that for you

[Anonymous Coward]

Despite Well Known Risks, Survey Finds Most People Are Fucking Stupid.

Guilty as charged? It's my GPS.

[enjar]

Since Waze allows me to select routes based on real time traffic data and also share my ETA and current position with my wife/friends, I am a horrible person since I'm "using" my smartphone while driving.

Since Waze added the "share drive" feature way back when, I don't receive calls asking "when will you be here" if I'm delayed by a traffic jam. Not only does the app automatically send notifications of ETA changes, it also lets recipients click a link to see exactly where I am. I use the hell out of that feature, sending links to friends and family when I'm on my way to meet them, it saves having a conversation about ETA while driving.

I recall driving without a phone, having to use a paper map, etc. I wonder how many people ran into things while trying to use a paper map and looking for road/street signs. I live in the Boston area where they rarely have a street sign for the street you are on, and where the color scheme of the street signs can change based on the town you happen to be in at the moment.

Re:Guilty as charged? It's my GPS.

[mjwx]

Since Waze allows me to select routes based on real time traffic data and also share my ETA and current position with my wife/friends, I am a horrible person since I'm "using" my smartphone while driving.

Actually you're not. All studies have differentiated using a phone as a navigational device and using a phone as a phone.

When we say phone use in cars, we specifically mean using it for calling/messaging/facebook etc.

I'm ardently against using a phone whilst driving, I dont even like hands free but I also use my phone for navigation if I'm going somewhere I'm unfamiliar. I prefer Google Maps over Waze as Waze doesn't give you lane directions. I have a Kenu Airframe that sits on the vent above the stereo ando not on my windscreen, my phone sits there and just does nav, I rarely ever touch it until I'm at my destination.

Using a phone for navigation is different to using it for communication. When you use it for navigation, your brain is focusing on the act of driving and the phone is an ancillary part of that. When you're using it for communication your brain is focusing on communicating at the detriment of any other task you're doing at the time.

Re:People aren't dying because of phones

[orgelspieler]

One of the worst violations that goes almost completely unenforced is following distance. If people would just leave a little space in front of them on the highway we wouldn't have nearly as many fatalities.

Did we really need a survey ?

[nehumanuscrede]

For those who don't have their nose in their phone 24/7, a quick glance around you on the freeway will show you what we already know.

Many of the drivers buzzing along at 80+mph are only half paying attention to the road. The rest of their time is devoted to doing whatever on their smartphone.
This isn't limited to vehicular traffic, the same holds true for walkers, joggers and even folks on bicycles.

Personally, if someone drives off a cliff and removes themselves from the gene pool due to this sort of stupidity, I would have little issue with the matter.
However, the problem is these snowflakes are putting EVERYONE at risk with their behavior and it's painfully obvious that asking nicely and Public Service Announcements are doing little to curb it.

In the past, when I've tried to nicely point out to the driver who is weaving all over the roadway because they're playing with their phone instead of paying attention to the road, it's nearly started fights. They KNOW they're in the wrong, yet go full stupid when someone calls attention to it. Have actually had folks stop the car in the middle of the road and jump out wanting to fight. Or they go full road rage mode, hit the gas, jump in front of you and slam on the brakes.

All for trying to get them to simply put the phone down and drive the fucking car :|

Hell, we recently had an incident here where the driver of a large non-commercial truck was all over the place because they were playing on the damn phone. Others saw this, recorded it, called 911 to report it and nothing was done. The truck later veered into an oncoming lane and hit a bus head on. Killed quite a few folks if I recall.

The days of asking folks nicely are over.

Self-drive cars will be one option, but even at their current pace it will be a decade or more before they are ready for the average driver. Much longer before we see a majority of them on the roadways.

Near Field, RFID or a simple low power xmitter built into the car designed to set a bit in the phone when powered up could be used to disable all but emergency functions of a phone while in motion. This would greatly annoy passengers*, but since we're done asking nicely, it is what it is. Since the carrot isn't working, we have to resort to the stick instead.

*We managed it in the days before cell phones. You'll live. I promise.

We could severely increase the penalties if caught while driving distracted with one. Give it the same rules as a DUI / DWI since the outcome, more often than not, is the same. Crank the penalties up. $200 is laughable. $2000 per infraction stings a bit more. Confiscate the phone, the vehicle and revocation of the drivers license is much more eye-opening.

Sound harsh ?

Remember, this stupid behavior is putting everyone else at risk so I would rather see folks lose their possessions than someone else lose their life. If you're still willing to play with your phone while driving with these types of penalties in play, then you certainly don't deserve to have a license to drive to begin with.

So, this being Slashdot and all, I'm guaranteed to get flamed to death for even suggesting the above, but the fix for a problem doesn't begin until you can admit you have one to begin with. Everyone that is guilty of said behavior is in flat out denial that it's a problem at all.

That being said, ( again, since this is Slashdot ) what realistic technology options could be implemented today to solve the problem ?

Re:Did we really need a survey ?

[Anonymous Coward]

That being said, ( again, since this is Slashdot ) what realistic technology options could be implemented today to solve the problem ?

None. Never use technology to try to solve a cultural issue. As other posters put - enforce more frequent and stiffer penalties. Make it a risk vs. reward decision for drivers. That'll fix itself real quick once enough folks get a $200-$300 ticket per infraction.

Re:Did we really need a survey ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, self driving cars. People are becoming less and less competent at driving. I see so many bad habits and stupid/narcissistic moves on a daily basis that didn't happen nearly as much 20-30 years ago. Everything from tailgaiting and red light running to u turns in the middle of intersections. Neither do they have a clue as to subtler things like lane disciple or defensive driving..

Re:of course they do.

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not so bad, it still leaves me at over 100. A smartphone and a few beers and I can pretend to be a normal person for a while.

Re:headline disproves itself

[Stewie241]

Eh... I don't think automated car people want you to believe driving is risky. I think all that is desired is the recognition that some risk exists, and just because there is risk involved in automated cars does not mean it is riskier than human driving.

Something needs to be done

[tgibson]

It's hugely distracting having to drive while editing code on my phone using vim through my ssh client app.

Re:Something needs to be done

[michael_wojcik]

Agreed, which is why I now use a hands-free voice activated vim app. "f open-paren a i d x comma space colon n no wait damn it backspace backspace escape colon n enter..."

zero-minute spent editing?

[Anonymous Coward]

"On average, they spent more than three-minute on the phone."

Typed while driving, presumably.

What's the point of your post?

[Anonymous Coward]

That he was talking while driving? You don't know that.
That he was drunk? You don't know that either.

If anything you were probably rubbernecking and holding up traffic while you assuaged your sense of self-smugness that you weren't drunk or using your cellphone.

Re:What's the point of your post?

[__aaclcg7560]

If anything you were probably rubbernecking and holding up traffic while you assuaged your sense of self-smugness that you weren't drunk or using your cellphone.

I was riding on the express bus. The driver had to cross three lanes of traffic after driving past the accident to get on the off ramp. The driver of the wrecked car couldn't walk a straight line in the slow lane. Stick your "self-smugness" where the sun doesn't shine.

cellphones and driving

[Anonymous Coward]

they should be dragged out of their vehicles and pistol whipped. I've had numerous idiots come close to hitting me because they were texting on their damn phone.

Bad Research

[Notabadguy]

This research includes *all* smart phone utilization while driving. Not just texting or talking.

Amazon Music, iTunes, Pandora, youtube, all the other means people have of listening to music on smart phones that no longer require toting around a separate device or tuning into the radio to listen to ads -

All of those are included in this. I'm a chronic smart phone user when I drive too. I get in the car, open my phone, go to my Amazon Music app, and listen to whatever it is I want to listen to until I get to where I'm going.

Re:People aren't dying because of phones

[Anonymous Coward]

We have the technology today to enforce that, too. Vehicle radars can easily prevent following too closely, as well as failure to yield that space by merging too closely in front.

All it takes is a little bit of regulatory courage.

Jesus H., GDMF CHRIST.

[Anonymous Coward]

Listen, guys, seriously. When someone says, "I'm conducting a survey," you are NOT UNDER OATH, and you're NOT in a goddamned confessional!

When people answer surveys like this, it provides the impetus to DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT, like, for example, increasing penalties for doing the thing you just admitted doing! Fuck!

Let's practice. I'm conducting a survey; have you ever done ANY of the following: smoked tobacco, drunk alcohol, driven a car, had sexual intercourse, or any combination of two or more of these, either sequencially or simultaneously, while being underage, OR with an underage person? Have you ever made, or grown, transported, sold bought, given, received, ingested, or otherwise used any unlawful or recreational illicit drug or substance? Have you ever driven or operated any motorized vehicle while distracted, i.e., by a phone, pager, a book, applying, fixing, or examining makeup, your hair, a hat or wig, or some garment or decoration, or a blowjob, (giving OR receiving,) or while intoxicated, inebriated, tired, angry or otherwise emotionally disturbed, or while under the influence of a legally prescribed medication that nevertheless adversely impacted your ability to operate the vehicle in a safe and legal manner? Have you ever operated a motorized vehicle without a license or insurance, or permission of the owner, or at least a person authorized to so permit you to do so? Have you ever dumped used motor oil, or other hazardous waste, into a storm drain, or placed it in a trash can, dumpster, or other container deployed for the purpose of collecting NON-HAZARDOUS waste to be taken to a municipal landfill, a regional dumping site, or a trash burning/gasification facility? Have you ever used a substance subject to the jurisdiction of the United States Federal government, required to be labeled warning against use inconsistent with the manufacturer's intended purpose, in just such an inconsistent and unauthorized fashion, by for example, deliberately concentrating and inhaling the contents, or "huffing"? Have you ever stolen anything, or secreted something that did not properly and legally belong to you, trespass on another's property, commit arson, kidnapping, pandering or prostitution, (where illegal,) human trafficking, money laundering, burglary, larceny, possession of a weapon of mass destruction, a nuclear, biological, chemical, radiological, or energy weapon, or unlawful possessed a firearm either by its class, (such as a fully automatic machine gun or rocket launcher,) or made, bought, sold, produced, procured, etc., the same? Have you ever bought, transported, possessed, sold, or offered to do any one or more or all of these, state secrets or property, for personal profit? Have you ever betrayed your country? Have you ever misused your authority, or exceeded it? Have you ever run from the police or the scene of a crime?

Have you ever caused, compelled, induced, or otherwise caused another person or person, either with or without you, or compensated or otherwise rewarded after the fact that person or those people to commit any of the crimes above? Have you ever had knowledge of such a crime but failed to report it to the proper authorities? Have you ever comitted rape, incest, adultery, or perjury, witness intimidation or obstruction of justice? Have you ever interfered with an official police investigation? Have you ever committed piracy on the high seas, the low seas, highway robbery, intellectual property theft, copyright or patent infringement or a trademark violation, or wasted electricity or water, violated a burn-ban or failed to pick up after a pet? Have you ever abandoned a pet? Fucked a pet?

Have you ever spat gum on a sidewalk, cut the tags off your mattresses or pillows, (not actually illegal if you are the END CONSUMER,) while expecting to resell them to someone else, talked too loud in a library or texted or took pictures in a movie theater, failed to rewind a video tape before returning it, wrote in a school-issued textbook, whistled at a woman walking by a

Re:People aren't dying because of phones

[Anonymous Coward]

And what is the legal following distance in your area?

Re: Solution: Use apps, NOT LUDDITE CARS!

[Jesus H Rolle]

Travis? Travis Kalanick? Is that you?

Where are the deaths?

[Anonymous Coward]

Since the last decade, smart phones have become almost ubiquitous and likely many of them were used while driving. Were they a serious source of distraction while driving, traffic accidents should have shot up in proportion. However, traffic accidents have decreased in the same period, not increased. Therefore, this is nothing but fear mongering, likely eyeing to make yet another harmless activity to life and property a crime. As if having the largest incarcerated population in the world were not enough for the police-judicial-prison complex.

You are wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

Behaviors can be modified by social pressure and/or punishment. That is my point.

Do you wear a seatbelt?
Your parents didn't when they were learning to drive. What changed? For me, it was when my girlfriend got into a serious accident and nearly died. She happened to be wearing her seat belt at the time and it saved her life. From that point forward, I've always insisted that everyone in my vehicles always wear their seat belts before the car moves. BTW, this was before any seatbelt laws were passed.

Do you or your friends drink and drive multiple times a week? Probably not. It isn't socially acceptable anymore. It was when I was growing up - people would say "you can make it." In less than 4 hrs time, drunk driving became socially unacceptable. I know because I took the keys away from people at my college parties to prevent any drunk driving. There were altercations over this, but in the end, it was appreciated. 4 yrs earlier, we would have just sent them on their way.

In Europe, drunk driving is punished severely. It has been unacceptable there much longer.

2 yrs ago, a good friend of mine was driving home and got pulled over after having 2 drinks in 2 hrs. He got a DUI and $10,000+ in fines plus legal costs. They didn't take his license away. He'd been stopping at the same bar, 3 times a week on this way home from work for almost 10 yrs and ordered the same drinks before driving home. Now he still does the same thing, but just has a soda for the last hour as he sits there waiting for the alcohol to process.

I've worked for large telecom companies. It is against their corporate policies to text while driving, period. All managers in my organization had blackberries since the late 1990s and we constantly emails (blackberries in a corporate environment are tied to corporate BES/email servers). I probably emailed on my BB 150 times a day. Around 2001, they knew that texting was dangerous and came out with the no-texting/emailing/paging while driving policy. Most people would wait until a stoplight to reply. I never felt it was that important, so I'd wait until getting to my destination. It isn't like 45 minutes was that big of a deal for my role there.

Behaviors can be modified by social pressure and/or punishment. That is my point.

Texting/phone use is just another thing we, as a society, need to make unacceptable.

9 out of 10

[n329619]

9 out of 10 admitted to using their smartphone behind the wheel.

so 1 out of 10 admitted to using their smartphone in front of the wheel?

I guess I'm a good person then

[Rande]

I almost never (maybe once or twice a year) use my phone while waiting at stop lights or in stationary traffic. ...because I don't have many friends. (#insert forever alone#)

Mythbusters did an episode on this

[Fish (David Trout)]

The myth: that driving while talking on a cell phone is just as dangerous as driving drunk.

Result: myth CONFIRMED.

http://www.discovery.com/tv-shows/mythbusters/videos/cell-phone-vs-drunk-driving-minimyth/

It's pretty simple

[backwardsposter]

Using the phone while driving is a problem that can only be solved by people no longer driving. Any other solutions either have a work-around or reduce the freedom of the driver by too much.

All the more reason...

[atrex]

...that self driving car technology needs to be aggressively developed and rolled out as fast as safely possible. It is next to impossible to stop people from being stupid. So take the wheel out of their hands.

Waze

[nitehawk214]

Shit, Google encourages people to use their phone while driving with Waze.

Death by bluetooth

[guacamole]

Gosh, I swear if the smartphone kills me while driving, it's not because of texting and driving. It will be because of tinkering with the BT settings. Every second car with bluetooth unit I have tried using has _serious_ bugs. Sometimes the bluetooth connection is not made at all when you start the car, sometimes it is made, but audio continues playing through the phone, sometimes the audio controls on the car stereo don't function properly with the phone, and sometimes when everything works, the incoming phone call crashes the stereo unit, and then you need to answer the phone the old-fashioned way.

missing the point

[Anonymous Coward]

It isn't having a cell phone in your hand that's distracting, it's using a phone. Hands-free setups make using a phone lawful in many jurisdictions, but it doesn't make it safe.