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Smartphones Are Killing Americans, But Nobody's Counting (bloomberg.com)
An anonymous reader shares a Bloomberg report: Over the past two years, after decades of declining deaths on the road, U.S. traffic fatalities surged by 14.4 percent. In 2016 alone, more than 100 people died every day in or near vehicles in America, the first time the country has passed that grim toll in a decade. Regulators, meanwhile, still have no good idea why crash-related deaths are spiking: People are driving longer distances but not tremendously so; total miles were up just 2.2 percent last year. Collectively, we seemed to be speeding and drinking a little more, but not much more than usual. Together, experts say these upticks don't explain the surge in road deaths. There are however three big clues, and they don't rest along the highway. One, as you may have guessed, is the substantial increase in smartphone use by U.S. drivers as they drive. From 2014 to 2016, the share of Americans who owned an iPhone, Android phone, or something comparable rose from 75 percent to 81 percent. The second is the changing way in which Americans use their phones while they drive. These days, we're pretty much done talking. Texting, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram are the order of the day -- all activities that require far more attention than simply holding a gadget to your ear or responding to a disembodied voice. By 2015, almost 70 percent of Americans were using their phones to share photos and follow news events via social media. In just two additional years, that figure has jumped to 80 percent.
We just made using a phone while driving illegal in Texas... Didn't passing a law fix this?
Wha? You mean people don't obey laws?
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
If every car had by default some good way to mount a cell phone there would not be nearly so much distraction, since you could see the road and not have eyes diverted to the side for notifications or what have you.
But I am pretty sure car makers do not want your eyes to have any competition from the crappy entertainment consoles they build in, so they provide no good way to view phones which 99% of people would prefer to use for directions and the like.
That's another factor the article seems to not consider at all - how much does relying on GPS directions which can be confusing and mean many more sudden movements from divers play into increased traffic incidents? Again a problem reduced quite a lot by having a phone holder in line with your view of the road.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
People deep in a conversation on a cell phone can also be quite distracted - and cause accidents.
I was once almost hit by a taxi cab at a zebra crossing because the cab driver was yapping away on his cell phone. I saw him using the phone because I was trying to get eye contact with him, expecting him to stop at the crossing as is the law when there are people out on the crossing. I had to jump.
"We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
There's no cure for stupidity. Can't fix this without crippling legitimate users, unless the equivalent of speed cams are introduced, that identify correctly cretins that hold phones while driving. Because I don't think eye-tracking will be in cars anytime soon to identify prolonged lack of attention on the road.
I own a flip phone while I ride the bus with the people who pick up your trash. We aren't all millionaires out here in Silicon Valley.
That's always the conundrum in such metrics. For example, it is actually well known that more powerful motorcycles are safer than underpowered ones. WHY? Because they ensure the ability to move quickly when needed in order to avoid accidents.
Could the increase in accidents be due to the auto industries efforts to achieve better MPG in EPA testing? I've noticed that many newer vehicles, particularly those I've rented, have a trait where hitting the gas does not always move the vehicle. Often, you have to press the pedal down fully, and sometimes hold to really kick a newer car into high gear. It is like this plateau. I wager that acceleration pattern helps to achieve better fuel mileage. But it also means a lot lot lot lot lot more of the sort of accidents that occur when pulling out of parking lots or making left turns, and suddenly being confronted by an oncoming car - where you punch the gas to launch forward, only to find your vehicle is not responsive.
What we need is more driver assistance tools: autopilot, collision detection, lane assist. There's money in it , it appeals to the laziness of the drivers, and allows to take control away from the drivers. What's not to like.
we can have the conversation about how road deaths have consistently not tracked cell phone use over many years and there is pretty much no solid statistical evidence that phones increase accidents. They certainly contribute to some accidents, but that's very different to them contributing to higher accident rates. It's entirely possible that map applications reduce accidents by causing people to drive less and to know where they are going to turn before they get there.
Why, when road deaths increase are people quick to blame cell phones? If road deaths go both up and down while cell phone use goes in one direction, that's evidence that they are not directly linked. What about other likely culprits like shorter yellow times at traffic lights? Increased use of speed and intersection cameras causing people to suddenly brake? An increase in politically infuriating radio shows?
People have simplistic minds and no clue about statistical inference.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Time for self-driving cars. People would rather surf the 'net, troll around, and watch cat videos while in the car than drive.
Table-ized A.I.
If every car had by default some good way to mount a cell phone there would not be nearly so much distraction, since you could see the road and not have eyes diverted to the side for notifications or what have you.
There have been numerous studies showing that mounting the phone or even having hands free operation still results in unacceptable levels of distracted driving. And having a mount doesn't force people to use it.
I've said it before and I'll say it again even though it's not popular. The ONLY way to eliminate the problem is for the smartphones to utilize their tracking abilities and to cease most functioning aside from a few items like 911 calls and GPS when it shows you to be in a car traveling down a road. Since it is impossible to determine who the driver is then it would have to apply to everyone. Yes this will limit passengers use too and that's simply going to have to be a trade off to be made for safety. Exceptions can be made for properly designated first responders. There is no other technology nor any law that I'm aware of that will otherwise adequately mitigate the problem. If you have a better idea I'm all ears but as draconian as it sounds I think it's the only way to force people to be safer.
There's a big problem with 'people' in general - they won't learn any lesson you want to teach them, as a population, no matter how simple, or stupid the thing you're trying to correct.
At a basic psychological level, we sometimes get the urge to correct them at large - a lot of road rage is effectively this, where you try and interfere with a rude driver to 'teach them a lesson'. It virtually never actually works.
You can't fix phone-use deaths by telling people it's bad, or showing them the effects of how distracting it is to functionally driving. If you try and implement technological features that make it annoying to use the phone while driving, most folks will disable this, taking great pains to do so.
It's not even that people think that they're immune to distraction, or even that they don't think it's dangerous - folks just don't like driving, and they like/need their phones, and even with death and huge fines as consequences, they'll do the 'bad thing' on statistically overwhelming scale.
The better fix is to automate driving so that folks can do most anything and not have that be a safety factor.
Ryan Fenton
We've also had a steady rise in the complexity and abundance of infotainment systems that needlessly complicate the few tasks you legitimately need to attend to while driving.
Tactile knobs have been replaced with menus and buttons to adjust the temperature. I can't use feel and peripheral vision like on my old car to adjust heat, vents, or volume. Worse yet, the buttons that remain are a smooth surface that I can't even make out without looking at them. Form over function.
AAA has shed some light on this as of late, but until car makers reverse course, it is just going to get worse and worse.
Get rid of your so-called 'smartphone' and take back your lives. All they are is another time-suck and a waste of money, you do not need them AT ALL. Get over it, get rid of it, and spend the time you'd spend staring at your phone doing something useful instead.
it's because I don't want to be distracted while I'm driving that I leave my phone in my pocket while I'm driving. I've had to tell my friends on multiple occasions not to expect me to answer the phone if they call me when I'm driving.
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
It all comes down to enforcement of the traffic laws. It's useless having the laws if the majority of the population has thoroughly self-justified their ignoring the laws and no one is holding them accountable. I've worked with police officers. They hate doing traffic duty. It's boring and, to them, results in too many head aches (paperwork, ticket appeals, etc.). Moreover the city council and/or mayor get complaints when the police are slowing traffic and thus "keeping people from jobs" and "slowing commerce".
They're between a rock and a hard place when it comes to PR... but that'd the job. Enforce the damn traffic laws.
Darwin is an unmerciful god of cleaning out the gene pool. Let us not question His Wisdom nor His Methods.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I drive around 50K miles a year. Nearly all of that time, except when I am transporting my children, I am utilizing the phone. Yet, in spite of that fact, I have had no significant accidents. And the deer I hit, was when I was not using my phone. But it's Pennsylvania, so deer sometimes fall from the sky in front of cars. If you're from PA, you understand.
Considering all of the safety systems introduced into cars, the crashes must've also increased in severity, to result in fatalities.
Also, is there any significant increase in states where marijuana was legalized?
I live in a large, major metropolitan area of the USA and I have to say that both on my commute and just any general driving where I live, everything is getting much worse in terms of other drivers. We have problems here with aggression. Here's an example I see all the time. If you're coming to a stop at a red light, cars behind you will whip over into the next lane if it's empty so they can attempt to go fast and get in front of you once the light turns green. We also have a really big and constant problem here where large numbers of drivers for some reason have decided that left turn people have the right of way, so they will turn in front of oncoming traffic. In a small number of places, poor traffic light planning has made people have to take left turns at intersections with no left turn signal, so there I get this behavior a bit. But I'm seeing it a lot at intersections where they do have left turn signals. Everybody is just extremely impatient. One week on my drive to work I counted 3 different accidents that all seemed to be the result of a left turn driver failing to yield to oncoming traffic. I don't really have a fix for people who magically think the laws of physics don't apply to them (ie. oncoming cars won't hit them) and that they have the right of way when they don't.
NO texts in or out until you are not moving for 1 minute.
Same for browser or wi-fi connection.
Voice and 911 would continue to work.
Might be simple hardware fix.
But the FCC would have to do the specs.
The very title says, "nobody's counting" — how do we know, it is the smartphones, that are to blame and not any of the other things, which we aren't counting either? Like illegal immigrants driving (whether or not they do in substantial numbers is unknown), or relaxed rules for obtaining a license, or increase in speed limits, or even smart-phone use by the pedestrians (victims) themselves?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
People do.
Seriously, every auto fatality involves a car, but not every fatality involves a smartphone.
Let's ban cars, that will fix the problem!
Correlation does not equal causation.
"Grab them by the pussy" -- President of the United States of America
Don't care if they kill themselves, it's when they hurt others that we have a problem.
Seems to be a focus on those inside cars.
There will definitely be a rise in fatalities with pedestrians who seem to unable to stop looking at their phones, walking out into traffic...
It could be darwinistic, might be a bunch of people injuring or killing themselves falling down unexpected basement stairs because they just can't take their eyes off their phones.
Maybe because three times as many people are killed in traffic accidents versus shootings.
You really shouldn't take anything that uses total numbers in the way this article does to seriously. If you really want to get to the meat of the matter, the correct way to view the data is "per 100,000" and/or "per x million traveled miles". Makes it much easier to control for other factors (e.g. urban vs rural, harsh anti-texting law areas vs. unrestricted, high fatality areas vs low, high DWI area vs low, etc.). Same is true with most of MADs DWI figures, gun control, pot based DUI, etc. Totals are not only misleading, but often inflammatory (37k sound like a big number...but what is it really in the context of 300 million people driving trillions of miles a year?).
We've done a great job of reducing risk to manageable levels.
However, reducing risk to zero is unnecessary and astoundingly Orweillein. Stupid people dying is a fact of life and keeping them from killing themselves especially in this day and age of padded safe everything is probably not the best course of action.
Your observation would be relevant, if not for the innocent smart people being harmed and killed.
Guns are more dangerous than phones. Why all this concern over phones? Consider the essential purpose of each item. A gun is meant to kill. It should be banned. A phone is meant to help. It shouldn't be a concern.
Guns: 30,000+ deaths per year (22,000 of those deaths are due to suicide.)
Cars: 40,000+ deaths per year (and you do this activity every day.)
Alcohol: 80,000+ deaths per year.
Cigarettes: 400,000+ deaths per year.
Wake me when you're ready to start talking about banning the real killers.
I don't know about the stats, but my wife was waiting at a red signal in the left turn lane with a car in front of her. The light turned green but the guy in front of her didn't move as he was busy on his cell phone. Another woman smacked her from behind then because, you guessed it, she was busy talking on her phone and didn't notice that the cars in front of her were not moving. This woman didn't even get out of her car. My wife was stunned from the hit but fortunately, her granddaughter was able to get out and get the woman's info. Scientific studies show that talking on the phone is a distraction whether or not your holding it. I gave up riding my motorcycle years ago because I had too many close calls at intersections because of folks driving distracted talking on their cell phones. As an aside, my stepson is a truck driver and can look down at drivers as they pass him and sees people texting and driving all the time even though it is illegal in my state.
As a firefighter I've seen the most horrendous MVAs due to cell phone use, including an accident on Xmas Eve which killed the daughter of one of our firefighters. (http://www.cnn.com/2013/12/25/us/new-hampshire-holiday-tragedy/index.html). So go ahead, contemplate cutting your dead friend's daughter out of her car on Xmas Eve, and see how anxious you are to pick up your cellphone while driving. That's the message we should be sending, perhaps in a VR simulation.
That will also prevent people on the bus from using their cell phones. I hate distracted driving too, but yours isn't an acceptable solution.
So what? Somehow the world survived for thousands of years without having people use smartphones on buses. It's amazing how entitled people get. I assure you you would survive the experience of not being able to use every feature of your phone for a few minutes. Furthermore there would be nothing preventing you from using a wifi enabled device like a tablet on a bus. It just means you aren't going to be texting or making phone calls while the vehicle is in motion. The point is to keep people from making calls and texting and similar activity while in motion.
I reject the premise that your right to play with your phone is more important than the right of people to travel without fear of dying because some idiot cannot pull off the road to send a text message. If you have a better solution to keep people from literally causing deaths then I'm all ears. Right now forced disabling during transit seems to be the only solution that would actually work. I agree that it isn't an ideal solution but I have yet to hear any other solution that would actually fix the problem.
Oh and I have no illusion that this will become a reality. I'm just pointing out that forced compliance is the only solution that would actually work. I don't see it actually happening.
Our society has things called "laws" that we use to coerce the citizens into proper behavior. Welcome to civilization!
Yes and those laws have completely eliminated drunk driving as a problem and nobody ever talks on their phone while driving in a state where it's illegal. Spare me. Laws only provide a means to punish after the fact. They don't bring people back from the dead.
If automakers added a mount which let you view your phone while driving, and you got into an accident while using it while driving, you'd sue the automaker for encouraging dangerous behavior. But if they don't add a mount, forcing you to add it yourself, and you get into an accident while using it while driving, you have only yourself to blame.
I think it would be relatively simple to determine who the driver is especially if you got the car manufacturers and/or the phone manufacturers involved.
How do you figure? You have some way to unambiguously and reliably determine who is in the driver's seat? I've never seen such a solution though I'd certainly welcome one. I think that would be an extremely difficult problem.
Problem #1 is that the car/phone company would be adding a "feature" that makes their product less desirable so you would have to get everyone to do it at the same time.
Easy to get most people with software updates and even if you can get most of the people it should have a herd immunity effect similar to vaccines. Make it a law that after a certain date all phones sold as new have to have the ability to limit use while on roads and force manufacturers like Apple and Samsung to update devices that can be updated. I don't think this is the difficult issue you make it out to be.
Problem #2 is that people now use their phone for navigation so you would likely want to exempt certain apps and who would decide which apps are exempt.
You'll note that I didn't suggest shutting off all functionality. Just functionality that results in distracted driving. GPS would be fine as a general proposition.
Banning texting was maybe a solution 5 years ago but today the majority of people using their phones while driving are likely doing stuff other than texting like facebook.
So apps are banned unless they get white listed in. GPS = fine. Facebook = no. Twitter = no. Basically if it doesn't serve the purpose of navigating the car or operating the vehicle you would have to pull off the road and stop the vehicle to use it. 911 and other emergency services would of course always be available. You can live without facebook while driving I assure you. Even as a passenger.
Unfortunately, the cat is kind of out of the bag on this one. Let's forget about people who will go out of their way to disable this safety mechanism as there will probably only be a small subset of the population who knows how and wants to do that.
If they intentionally disable it of course they can do that but then they should be exposed to liability in the event something goes wrong.
There are tons and tons of cell phones out there now, and by all accounts their turnover rate is slowing down already. If all new cell phones have this technology from now on it will still take probably a decade to get the old ones out of circulation. I'm not saying we shouldn't do it, just that it won't solve the problem overnight at this point.
So we should do nothing because it won't solve the problem instantly? Stop making perfect the enemy of good. With a simple software update you could get huge swaths of the smartphones out there updated overnight and the rest could be handled over a few years as they get traded in. We don't have to get every phone out there to make a huge dent in the problem.
I do agree with everything you just said*, but...
...everything you just said is not the whole story.
There are many situations in which the "stupid people", doing stupid things such as using their smart phones whilst driving, are killing others who just happened to be in their vicinity. It's the deaths in this category that are vexing our minds in trying to find a solution.
*other than your spelling of 'Orweillein' (sic), obviously.
Are the exonerated because their actions are justified or are they exonerated because they are being investigated by fellow officers and prosecutors that a sympathetic to their situation?
Smartphones Are Killing Americans, But Nobody's Counting
My ass. Americans are killing themselves. The smartphones aren't shooting them, or electrocuting them, or even burning them in most cases.
It's called personal responsibility. Have some.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
if he notices _anybody_ besides the cashier. Unless he's nuts and/or on drugs. In which case he's not going to care. But in that case congratulations, you just bought yourself a 20 person firefight.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Think of it as evolution in action.
I've said it before and I'll say it again even though it's not popular. The ONLY way to eliminate the problem is for the smartphones to utilize their tracking abilities and to cease most functioning aside from a few items like 911 calls and GPS when it shows you to be in a car traveling down a road
Well that's the stupidest thing I'll read all week.
The problem with you luddites is that you simply cannot and will not accept human nature is what it is, and keep attempting to force un-natural behaviors on people which has never in in the history of mankind worked. Your same impulses are at work in trying to ban drug use, the prohibition, basically any pathetic attempt to stop people from being human.
There have been numerous studies showing that mounting the phone or even having hands free operation still results in unacceptable levels
Unacceptable to whom? The simple fact is that having the phone in front of you is VASTLY BETTER than having it to the side or below the dash which is where it is otherwise, and people will pay attention to it regardless of placement. So you can either promote a much less bad alternative to what people will do no matter what, or you can condemn tens of thousands to die because a solution is not "pure" enough for you.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
A gun is meant to kill.
I own many guns. Some are meant to kill ... dinner. Like a nice tasty pheasant or dove. Or the critter that used to be a deer but is now a spectacular tenderloin roast I'm serving my friends. There's a farm I visit when running dogs, with adjacent property that as a problem with feral swine. The gun I take along for that occasion is a magnum handgun ... not to kill, per se, but to save my life if I cross paths with one of those 500-pound very deadly and territorial escaped hogs. That gun is meant to save life, not take it. I also own guns that are all but useless for anything but breaking clay pigeons ... an activity roughly like golfing or bowling. You could definitely use a golf club and kill somebody through a single blow to the head ... and golf clubs are only meant for one thing: swinging at high speeds to cause a violent reaction, right?
My wife as a couple of guns, one of which she uses for bird hunting, and the other which is her preferred personal defense piece. Its only purpose is to protect her life. We've actually had to brandish a gun in the service of running off a giant, drug-addled guy screaming threats and well on his way to breaking down our back door with a four foot pipe. Another few minutes and he'd have been through. Took the cops almost half an hour to arrive. You, though, would like to ban the thing that would have saved my wife's life if she were home alone when that happened. Screw you and your arrogant ignorance.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
is probably the main culprit. Massively overcrowded and poorly maintained roads. Combine that with lots more poorly maintained cars since our economy has basically been in recession for anyone without a college degree since 2008.
Of course, addressing Infrastructure spending and poor car maintenance due to wage decline would mean taxing elites to pay for roads and raising wages. It's much cheaper to blame cell phones. And if you're one of those elites you'll survive everything short of a semi anyway.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
to her steering wheel. They're tactile buttons now and much easier to get to while driving.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I still do not understand why people cannot drive 10 minutes without having to be connected.
It's pretty easy to understand, once you have drive more than a day with Waze.
Leave aside the bit about it warning you about here police are in the area, which is nice but not really necessary.
What is much more useful is constantly updated information about road hazards and traffic issues ahead of you. Even if you don't use Waze to take alternative routes around traffic jams, it is incredible helpful to know a traffic slowdown or stop is ahead of you so you can slow down earlier and not be slamming on brakes in surprise, or of large potholes or construction shutting down a lane.
Constantly being connected could actually greatly reduce traffic incidents in fact if more people had access to tools like this in a position that did not affect driving visibility.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If the CDC were able to amplify persistent threats to human life, without regard for politics, we could raise awareness appropriately for distracted driving as well as gun violence.
But that's probably none of my business.
--#
I remember many years ago driving down the road trying to read a paper map to figure out my next turn. That was definitely dangerous, and I was very distracted. I did that more times than I care to admit. Having a cell phone with Google Maps (or equivalent) has definitely made things much better.
Even the act of changing the radio station is distracting. I lose track of what is happening on the road while trying to get a station with a decent song.
Distracted Driving is a serious problem but it is not anything new. Cell phones may have made the situation worse in most cases but in some cases things are less distracting with a smart phone.
This is literally the biggest reason we need to push even harder for fully autonomous vehicles.
Some people (myself included) actually enjoy driving. What's not so enjoyable is when you have to be extra careful because some people only drive because they have to and find it's too inconvenient to take any other kind of transportation. (If that's good or bad is another topic) So they "keep living" despite not fully understanding they're piloting a 1000lbs+ metal object down a road full of people doing the same.
Law or no, people are going to use their phones unless you apply some obscene kind of regulation like mandating jammers in every non-emergency vehicle. And even then, some folks come up with the smartest stuff. It wouldn't hold up very long and then you'd have another problem...
If those same people can just own a car that will take them from point a to point b and then sit back and do whatever; death rates will drop significantly. Whether such a system will be affordable... is to be discussed in another topic as well.
I tend to rant.
You're still engaged with the screen, and for an extended (at highway speeds) time.
Why do you think this time is extended? I have driven for many years with dash mounts for phones, It only takes a tenth of a second to verify some information on the device in terms of navigation and and running Waze I have eliminated way more potential for danger than I have caused - I have slower down for objects on the road before they were visible, or prepared for cars suddenly stopping for traffic beforehand by increasing the distance to the car ahead.
Mounting options are plentiful in most cars. Vent holders, cup holderholders, stick ons, mats
But they are all extra things you have to buy and generally do not work very well. I have used them all; vent holders are probably the best, but are prone to failure with cars vibrating as they drive, and sometime vent designs totally mess with vent holders. Cup holders are the worst idea because they drag your attention down and are no better than a phone just set in the holder. Stick ons are too fussy and most people will not use them, mats are terrible because now your phone is at a really bad angle and you cannot read it...
I'm taking about some kind of design that would provide a simple shelf near eye level into which most phones could be placed without falling over or down. But there is nothing like it on any new car I've seen in years...the closest they come is built in shelves which again are way below eye level.
There is, however, no escaping the problem of doing work on a phone for longer than 2 seconds at a time.
Sure there is; the phone being at eye level means you don't need to take two seconds for something, now you can take a fraction of a second instead and have the road in your peripheral vision the whole time.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Which of these is heavily taxed? Now do you see the lack of concern.
The answer is cell phones heavily taxed? Now do you see the lack of ethics.
In a sane society, capitalism isn't a legal defense against manslaughter.
Please stop driving.
Please stop posting.
I doubt either will happen, but my actions make the road safer while yours mislead people and cause harm...
The research is now rather old that shows using a hands free phone to chat is as bad or worse that driving drunk.
"The research" is about using hands free to text or call, not about using the phone for navigation and driving assistance. Nor does it generally factor in placement at all, which makes your precious "research" worse than useless - it is in fact misleading people as to what is safe.
If you did any research at all on use of smart phones to provide heads up about road conditions ahead, you would find it makes you more safe, not less, because you the driver are much less surprised by the actions of drivers around and ahead of you.
The idea that you want to put your cell phone somewhere so you can look at it rather than out of your windshield is horrifying.
That is totally backwards from what I said. I said I want to put the phone somewhere where I can see it IN ADDITION TO the view ahead, in fact the exact thing I said was that the problem is that people are using phones in places (like a cupholder) where the really do have to choose between looking at the road or the phone. My solution means they can see both, thus being far safer and also taking less time to do something like understand what the nav system is saying.
I think it's amusing that otherwise rational Slashdot posters are claiming there is NO DIFFERENCE between looking away from the road completely for seconds at a time, vs. glancing at something in the corner of your eye while still seeing the road ahead quite clearly 100% of the time... when will you start thinking before you post?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It IS your fault if you are not allowing a safe following distance.
/s
Safe Following distance is 2 seconds + the average interval when you look up from your phone to glance at the road.
If you are not following the vehicle ahead to allow this much time to react, then it IS your fault.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Ahh, yes. That's pretty much the same as the combined murder/suicide rate using firearms.
So cellphones are every bit as deadly as guns, eh? Or even more so, since it's likely that a significant fraction of the older population doesn't text at all. Once that group finishes dying off, the remaining population should be killing each other off even faster with cellphones that they ever did with guns...
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
We've had decades of "PUT YOUR FUCKING PHONE DOWN!" commercials and warnings and everything else.
Yet, every year, we have a bunch of people bucking for a Darwin Award (eligible or not).
If it weren't for the fact that they're hurting other people in their quest, I'd say "let them off themselves".
You can't fix stupid. But you can die trying.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
There is a time and a place for using your phone
Doing your homework? Nope, don't use your phone because you'll be distracted by your friends.
Doing your chores? Nope, don't use your phone because you'll be distracted by your friends.
Brushed your teeth? Nope, don't use your phone because you'll be distracted by your friends.
Picking out your outfit for the day? Nope, don't use your phone because you'll be distracted by your friends.
Eating dinner? Nope, don't use your phone because you'll be distracted by your friends.
I feel like it's an important lesson that there is a time and a place for using your phone. I hope that these small lessons will help her when she eventually becomes a driver. Your phone can wait, please focus on the task at hand.
"It's a tarp!" -- Dyslexic Admiral Ackbar
If automakers added a mount which let you view your phone while driving, and you got into an accident while using it while driving
Although that may be a reason why then do a number of cars offer shelves for phones in the car? It would seem to have exactly the same issue, only worse since you must actually look down.
A car is full of potential liability, but that hasn't stopped car makers from doing things like, say, putting in large distracting screens.
I was in a rental car recently, I forget the make, but it had this video screen actually mounted so it came up out of the dash. Once I figured out how to mute the radio that was on, all this screen did while I was driving was sit there glowing with this huge VOLUME MUTED graphic covering half the screen. It was horribly distracting, but they put it in anyway... if car makers can build in a Screen of Doom into most cars you can't even disable, the certainly they could live with the small amount of liability putting in a generic shelf that could hold a phone around the bottom of the dash when someone needed to use a phone for navigation.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If you're coming to a stop at a red light, cars behind you will whip over into the next lane if it's empty ...
I would call that "using all lanes of a multilane road" rather than aggressive driving, unless there is something unsafe about how those drivers are making the lane change.
Something in our society has whittled away at patience. Maybe it is the increasing number of people or their cognizance of time or both, one being the result of another.
I rarely drive in significant rush hour traffic but when I do it is a very shitty experience. These office hours are going to kill us.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
I might have to switch sides on the gun control debate if you try to ban my alcohol.
As sad as this is, but significantly more people get shot every year by the overabundance of guns in the US. The trigger-happy gun hugging Trump voters care even less about that. Repeal the 2nd Amendment!
"By 2015, almost 70 percent of Americans were using their phones to share photos and follow news events via social media. In just two additional years, that figure has jumped to 80 percent."
The article seems to be implying that all those people are doing those things behind the wheel, but the studies linked from the article don't seem to be talking about driving at all. So basically this is an excessively wordy handwaving argument. Let's go ban everything... because it MUST be the phones.
Waze is part of the problem. Who thought encouraging people to fuck around with their phones while driving is a good idea?
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
NHTSA is counting
My state has been keeping distracted driving stats since before smartphones were commonly available.
And then there is the standard correlation does not mean causation.
I guess techie readers of slashdot are just as willing to fall into confirmation bias as the general public. The analysis in TFA is poor. But it supports what a lot of people here want to believe, so who cares?
I've sat through cycles of lights as everyone HAS TO FINISH TEXTING before pulling away. Watch. LIght goes green. Nothing happens. Car one moves.....car two moves....car three.....dit....dit...dit...moves. Light changes red. Don't even get me started about how smartphones are the default for pedestrians. Vision Zero means you never need to look before crossing a street, because it is ALWAYS the driver's fault.
You could save more lives by banning unhealthy junk food (Roughly as many people died of diabetes as traffic fatalities last year) and a whole load of other things.
False equivalence. Eating badly only kills you. Distracted driving risks the lives of other people. If you want to slowly kill yourself with a bad diet or drug habit go ahead. But when your actions start to threaten others then absolutely the state should intervene. That's the whole point of a government and to solve problems that we cannot solve ourselves.
I reject your premise that people's fears have any worth in determining rules.
False premise again. What fears? Distracted driving is proven to cause thousands of unnecessary and preventable deaths every single year. All because people aren't willing to delay gratification on their entertainment for a few minutes.
If people are afraid of terrorists attacking shopping malls, should we put TSA stations up at every entrance point?
Oh I get it. You want to get all hyperbolic with absurdities rather than actually point out a better solution. What is your solution to distracted driving? Or maybe you think it is fine. Is your argument is that your right to send/receive text messages while driving is more valuable to our society than the lives of several thousand people and injuries to tens of thousands?
"I don't need my phone on mass transit, so nobody else should be allowed to use theirs."
Nice try. Explain to me what vital need you have for your phone while riding the bus that cannot abide a few minute wait. Then explain to me how your right to post to Twitter or Facebook or make calls while in transit is a civil right more important to society than the lives of several thousand people every year. Frankly I'm not feeling a lot of sympathy for people who have such a sense of entitlement that they cannot delay gratification on non-vital communication for a few minutes for the safety of others.
Furthermore there are technical solutions to the bus rider problem. Put wifi on the bus and use that for example. Poof, problem solved.
Surely you see the irony here. You are happy to give up everyone's freedom for a little bit of perceived safety for yourself.
Do you even know what irony is? Virtually every traffic law we have exists to ensure safe transit of the roads and every one of them constrains your behavior for the safety of yourself and others. That's why you stop at stop signs even when there is no traffic around you. It's why you drive on the proper side of the road even in the absence of oncoming traffic. It's why you have to register your car, get insurance, be trained how to drive, etc. Your argument has a false premise. Is your right to post to twitter while driving really in the best interest of society? I think not.
I agree, but the problem is that they are riding instead of driving. In the driver's seat.
People thought that they would like to get up to date route and hazard information.
You can take the point of view that we shouldn't give people what they want, but remember that would apply to you and what you want as well.
Phones make a mess of intersections too. People on their phones tend to leave excessive space between them and the car in front (causing problems behind them) and take considerably longer to react when the light changes.
I've driven nearly a half million miles, the majority of which in cars with no cell phones.
I've driven a lot more than that, so I recognize a fundamental truth you do not yet - given enough driving, the percentages will catch up to you and you will have close calls, or potentially accidents.
Using Waze for visibility as to conditions ahead improves the odds that I will not have close calls, which may turn into accidents. I have been able to help prevent others from having accidents because I was prepared to help them be able to move lanes if needed due to anticipated hazards...
If youÃ(TM)re driving, you need to drive and put the toys away.
You're among the people I help by knowing what is ahead and you do not... that's fine, I don't mind being partially responsible for you being safe but I wouldn't paint your choice of ignorance as any kind of virtue.
I guess since you don't like knowing what is ahead well before you get there, you must also not use headlights... just toys after all.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
For the single least evolved class of people on the planet: The users of cell phone apps.
PlaynBass
Something in our society has whittled away at patience. Maybe it is the increasing number of people or their cognizance of time or both, one being the result of another.
How about the increasing number of hours spent at work? When you have less free time to begin with, you want to spend as little of it stuck in traffic as possible. Not to mention the stress and reduced sleep hours.
Interesting. I've lived in the US for 2 years, around 2002. Back then, as a European, I found that drivers were *much* more disciplined than people in my home country (France). I came back in the US recently (same place I used to live in, with a rental car), and my impression has been that things have changed a lot on this front. I saw lots of incivilities (e.g. people using empty lanes to overtake other cars, resulting in traffic jams whenever lanes merge...), speeding, reckless driving... In the meantime, driving in Europe has improved significantly (it's still far from perfect). I don't know if there's any conclusion to be drawn from this, but the trend is pretty clear.
Phones did that :-) Someone has to do something: http://www.newser.com/story/25...