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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If you dig deep enough you can get some of the methodology. They include talking hands free and using the GPS as phone use.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
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.
Citation?
Really? Found this in 3 seconds: https://www.researchgate.net/p...
Fully licensed blockchain psychiatrist
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...
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.
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
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.
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.
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.
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.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
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.
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
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.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
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.
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 ?
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!
That was pretty funny..i almost spilled my beer and ran a stopsign.
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?