And leave those of us who know how to drive alone.
Your comments here suggest arrogance, sociopathic tendencies, and an inability to realistically assess levels of risk associated with driving. All of these factors are strongly positively correlated with increased accident risk.
It is therefore likely that you are in fact a very bad driver. Ironically, building a concrete case against people like you where there is no room for subjective interpretation and legal wriggling is exactly the reason that specific technical offences like this are useful.
I think the effect here is that the below average drivers know that THEY are distracted by their cell phones, and, believing they are above average, assume that everyone must be just as distracted or worse.
Of course you are entitled to your personal opinion. What you cannot do, however, is change the facts.
Research has been done, under controlled conditions, on populations greater than one subject. Over many experiments, conducted by many research teams, in many different places and exploring many different factors, it turns out that the impact of adverse factors on people's actual, measured performance doesn't really vary by that much in most cases. However, the impact that people think such factors will have on their performance does vary greatly.
So, yes, it is possible that you personally are an outlier. However, it is far more likely that you are simply in denial and over-estimating your own ability. Even if you really are that good, you might like to consider the probability of everyone driving nearby cars that could cause an accident involving you also being that good.
The lesson isn't to start outlawing everything
We're not talking about outlawing everything. We're talking about outlawing a practice that is very rarely actually necessary, and which has been shown time and again to dramatically increase the risk of having an accident and the severity of any accident that does happen.
but to remind people not to get distracted by anything.
Unfortunately, people are not machines, and merely telling them not to get distracted by anything will not achieve anything useful. Avoiding the problem by stopping people getting into a situation that is likely to distract them will, though.
That's pretty close to what happened, except that it only appeared to be the Labour MPs who were whipped enough to turn up en masse, and even then quite a few rebelled. The Tories mostly kept awfully quiet, despite earlier seeming like they supported the legislation, and the few who did turn up came down marginally against the bill overall. The Lib Dems who did vote were voting against. In any case, fewer than half of our then-MPs voted, which for a bill this controversial is appallingly low.
Blair made it quite clear he wasn't going to serve the full 05-10 term.
No, he didn't. In fact, he explicitly and very publicly said exactly the opposite, in direct response to popular concerns about voting for the Labour Party at the general election and winding up with Gordon Brown as PM. Try googling "Tony Blair full third term", and get back to us after you've finished reading a version of the quote covered by basically every major media outlet in the UK.
Not only is the DEA not SOPA, it was also pushed through under very dubious circumstances right before the last election (most MPs didn't even vote on it, never mind discuss it properly) and is subject to ongoing legal challenges on several counts.
It's a silly bit of law, made on a technicality, but let's not get hysterical.
With the greatest respect, I think you're misunderstanding in the same way as the other guy.
That's precisely what the video and some people in this forum are advocating.
Maybe I've overlooked a post, but I still can't see anyone here saying it is. And I'm not sure how you've got that idea from Victor's illustrative examples; although many of those are very well presented in their own right, he has gone out of his way on several occasions to stress that examples is all they are and the underlying ideas are what he is interested in.
Are you thinking of the simulations that Victor shows in some of his work? In that case, sure, he varies the parameters of the simulation interactively. That's the point of setting up a simulation as an exploratory tool. He's not developing algorithms that way, though, at least not in any of the work I've seen.
One of the examples he uses is about a binary search algorithm, where he simulates the data flow in real time. Is that what you're concerned about? If so, we took away very different things from that part of the presentation.
The argument is that it is fundamentally wrong to write code naively without properly understanding what it was doing to begin with.
I don't think anyone would disagree with your goal, but realistically, while you might properly understand what you think the code is doing, you usually won't be confident about what it's really doing until you try it.
The kind of development environment mentioned in some of Victor's work is just tightening the feedback loop. Automated test suites can serve a similar purpose. Why wait until you've "finished" to discover you didn't write the algorithm you think you did, when you can discover that immediately and correct it five seconds later?
Of course testing is no substitute for understanding. But even the most carefully crafted algorithm, developed with formal methods and locked down extensively with a strong type system, can have implementation errors.
I find it helpful to remember that Donald Knuth, who is one of the few people on the planet who can probably claim to have developed a serious software product that might actually be completely bug-free at this point, still famously wrote at one point, "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it." I'm pretty sure I'm not as smart as Knuth, so anything that helps me to make sure I'm both writing the code right and writing the right code is potentially a useful tool.
Even after skimming his work in a way where I'm more in control and don't have to veg in front of a video, I'm still not excited. Different strokes for different folks.
Did you even follow the links I gave you? Those go to articles on the same researcher's home page, which you can read/skim over/explore interactively as you see fit, and which have a similar flavour to the video posted here but don't require you to sit through anything you don't have the patience for. If you can't even be bothered to do that and decide for yourself, then it really is your loss.
No-one except you seems to be talking about just writing random shit, though. You've created this fantasy world where everyone else is somehow advocating completely arbitrary trial-and-error programming, but I don't see anyone else posting here that actually did that.
In any case, I don't think any developer on the planet, including you, actually lives up to the artificial standard you seem to consider minimal for acceptable work. It's just that everyone else here is acknowledging that reality and considering potential ways to do better, while you're burying your head in the sand and saying that anyone else who doesn't is a dumbass.
Unless somebody wants to give a better executive summary, there's no way I'm weeding through an hour of video.
That's your loss. The guy behind these ideas is, IMHO, one of the most interesting researchers in the field of computing today. Go ahead and check out Bret Victor's home page directly if you don't like the blogspam link. He has manyotherideas about the interplay between visualisation, mathematics, and software development.
There are way too many people in this Slashdot discussion whose only contribution is either "TL;DW" or "it's a dumb idea that only applies to GUIs". Those people obviously haven't understood the fundamental ideas that Bret is suggesting, and I suspect didn't even bother to watch the whole presentation before diving in and criticising. It's sad.
Genuinely interesting and innovative ideas are rarely conveyed in 140 characters, or in a three-paragraph echo chamber blog post with 5 Google Ads attached. You have to invest a little of your own time if you want to do anything worthwhile. I recommend that you do invest some of your own time in studying this guy's work if you're at all interested in what's wrong with maths and/or software development today and some ways we might improve it. Or you could just spend the same hour reading another five troll blog posts about things like whether it's the year of Linux on the desktop yet and then getting involved in the inevitable more-heat-than-light comment threads, I suppose.
People who choose the right tools for the job typically achieve more in weeks than people who flail about refusing to acknowledge (and therefore compensate for) their weaknesses achieve in years.
I think you're reading an argument into the posts you're responding to that the other posters were never actually making, and consequently you keep attacking a straw man.
You sound like you've studied tis: so is the danger significant for hands-free calling while driving? How many actual deaths per year are we talking about here.
The serious studies fairly consistently find driving while using a mobile phone increases the risk of having an accident roughly four times. Whether the phone is handheld or hands-free makes very little difference.
In terms of fatalities, it's hard to compare stats from different data sets, but I can give you a couple of data points to get the general idea.
In the US, an NHTSA report on distracted driving reckoned that in 2009 just under 1,000 people were killed by drivers distracted by a cell phone, a little under 1-in-5 of all distraction driving fatalities that year, although the report doesn't claim a direct causal relationship in all cases.
In the UK, the official STATS-19 report for 2010 found that mobile phone use was a factor in 26 fatal accidents. This type of data is meant to record definite causal relationships. The data is recorded by accident rather than by casualty, i.e., each of those 26 accidents could have resulted in multiple deaths. The reports are filed by officers shortly after the accident, and so tend to under-report factors that can be easily concealed in the immediate aftermath, such as whether a phone was in use at the time. We therefore cannot tell exactly how many fatalities really resulted from phone use, but it is likely to be many more than 26. (Note that use of handheld phones while driving was already illegal in the UK by the time period covered. Stats for both accidents generally and accidents where phone use was a contributory factor in particular were higher a few years earlier before the ban was introduced.)
Of course studies like these provide only absolute data, and so don't tell us much about the relative risk of driving using a phone without additional data for context. They do show that there are very real consequences to a substantial number of people each year, though, with many people dying and of course many more injured but not fatally.
If that were a sufficient explanation, the roads would be littered with the burning hulks of vehicles with two-way radios. They are not.
You aren't making a fair comparison.
For one thing, only a small proportion of vehicles actually have two-way radios. Even if a high proportion of those that do did have accidents, that would still only represent a tiny fraction of the vehicles on the road.
For another thing, most such vehicles are driven by professional drivers, who for reasons unrelated to their communications equipment typically have lower risk of accidents in the first place.
Except you can't win the phone fight either. Things like Siri and wireless headsets make it difficult-to-impossible to spot a driver using a phone.
Perhaps, but you could at least introduce penalties that would apply in the event of an accident while using the phone, as a deterrent.
For example, perhaps it would be reasonable to introduce a presumption of fault if a driver were involved in an accident while talking on a hands-free phone.
Alternatively, you could extend the current ban to include driving while using a hands-free in non-emergency situations, and automatically treat anyone who did get caught breaking the law as not only driving while on the phone but also attempting to pervert the course of justice.
At least if you took some measure like these, you wouldn't be shouting from an official loudspeaker that using hands-free is just fine and we're all perfectly safe doing it.
I would argue that the most common uses for phones are making calls (which in this context could be either hand-held or hands-free) and sending/receiving texts. Those have each been properly studied, by multiple independent groups in each case, and typically they impair driver performance at least as much as being over the legal drink-drive limit where I am. (The pattern is not uniform: some categories of drivers perform much worse when so impaired than others, though that is not surprising because driver performance generally is highly variable with levels of experience, education, etc.)
In that context, I think it is fair to say that (a) all of the most common uses have been investigated, and (b) all were found (independently) to be highly dangerous. This is not to say that other uses, such as a phone that can be configured as a voice-activated sat-nav tool for example, would necessarily also be dangerous; as you say, the same research does not necessarily support that conclusion.
It's worse because a passenger is there with you and most passengers will naturally react to the surroundings and the driver's temperament, including knowing when to shut up and let the driver concentrate.
Misbehaving kids in the back can be a real problem, but it is impractical to ban all driving with kids on board and most of the time most kids aren't severely degrading the driver's performance. That is rather different to the situation where almost no-one actually needs to make a call while driving, and most of the time most calls will severely degrade the driver's performance.
Of the things you mentioned, almost every one has been the subject of specific controlled experiments.
Speaking on the phone has, for both hand-held and hands-free devices. Some of that research was the justification for the driving+mobiles ban in the UK, for example.
Obviously texting has been, because we're having this discussion right now.
There has been increasing concern about posting to social networks with the increased prevalence of smartphones, but on this one I haven't personally seen any controlled studies yet (which doesn't mean no-one has done them, just that I haven't looked recently). I'm not sure I'd want to be the guy arguing that posting to Twitter/Facebook/whatever is safe given the dramatic increase in risk known to result from regular texting, though.
So you're right that we should not generalise unreasonably to any use of a phone. However, all of the most common uses have been investigated and found to be highly dangerous.
Ah, obvious but well-debunked counter-argument #27.
Actual passengers usually have some basic level of situational awareness, and will instinctively shut up when the driver needs to concentrate. Someone on the other end of a phone line can't see the road ahead and be quiet when a hazard is coming up.
(Having misbehaving children causing trouble in the back of a vehicle is a problem for the same reason, but unlike using a phone while driving, it is not practical to prohibit ever transporting unruly children by car. We fight the battles we can win.)
There's ovewhelming numbers of people making this up and repeating it on the internet, to be sure.
There might be lots of people repeating it, but some of us most certainly aren't making it up. In fact, some of us have been serious road safety campaigners for years, and by serious I mean people who advocate measures like improved driver education and driving laws based on a critical analysis of empirical data, not wishful thinking.
Keeping your eyes on the road and your hands on the wheel is not even close to 90% of the battle. Neither is worth a damn if you aren't situationally aware. Things like driving while drunk, drugged, or distracted are dangerous conditions because someone in such a state is nowhere near as situationally aware as they should be. That significantly delays effective response when dangers arise, and that in turn sharply increases both the risk of being involved in an accident and the expected severity.
Also, "X might be ban, lets just banX and worry about it later"
No. There is no "might". Driving while distracted by using a phone is extremely dangerous. Those who do it should be denied their freedom, explicitly, by locking them in jail until they understand that wilfully endangering the lives of everyone else is not OK. There is absolutely no way you can credibly turn this into some sort of anti-freedom rant.
Sadly, yes. As I noted in another post, the biggest screw-up the government made in the legislation here was that they didn't ban hands-free kits as well, apparently on the basis that enforcement would be impractical. That sent a clear message that driving using a hands-free kit was OK, which was then used extensively in advertising campaigns shortly after the laws were introduced.
There is a mountain of evidence that driving and using a phone at the same time is highly dangerous, and it has been growing steadily for a long time. This is about as clear-cut and one-sided an issue as you can get, and innocent people are getting seriously hurt and even killed as a direct result of the dangerous behaviour. Outlawing that behaviour isn't draconian, it's making good law in the interests of society based on a rock solid empirical evidence base. Please take your FUD elsewhere.
This is already illegal in the UK, BTW. The problem is more one of enforcement in this case.
We need to get these systems developed and studied before we blanket-ban messaging and driving.
There is overwhelming evidence at this point that the distraction of being on a call or dealing with a message is actually the main danger, and that the physical effort of manipulating the device, while not completely irrelevant, has a much smaller effect.
That suggests we blanket ban these dangerous activities (and enforce it) first, and if anyone thinks they've come up with a safe way of doing it the onus is now on them to prove it so before it is permitted on public roads.
Unfortunately, as the accident stats clearly show, the theoretical ability to just drop your phone or whatever it is you image people doing when they "enter a risky environment" is rarely observed in practice. Presumably this is because while distracted by a conversation on the phone, drivers are significantly less accurate in judging risk in the first place.
Yes, this sort of behaviour is already against the law. It isn't widely enforced, though, and way too many people still do it. It needs to become socially unacceptable, the same way drunk driving now is.
As an aside, driving while using a hands-free kit is hardly any safer. It's just harder to detect and penalise. Unfortunately, that means the government here in the UK didn't outlaw it at the same time, thus sending a clear (but completely wrong) message that "The government says driving using a hands-free kit is safe!". Of course, lots of companies who sell hands-free kits had huge displayboards in stores the day these laws came in playing off that misunderstanding, and to this day a lot of people think they're safe driving and talking as long as they've got hands-free.
Slashdot Mirror
And leave those of us who know how to drive alone.
Your comments here suggest arrogance, sociopathic tendencies, and an inability to realistically assess levels of risk associated with driving. All of these factors are strongly positively correlated with increased accident risk.
It is therefore likely that you are in fact a very bad driver. Ironically, building a concrete case against people like you where there is no room for subjective interpretation and legal wriggling is exactly the reason that specific technical offences like this are useful.
I think the effect here is that the below average drivers know that THEY are distracted by their cell phones, and, believing they are above average, assume that everyone must be just as distracted or worse.
Of course you are entitled to your personal opinion. What you cannot do, however, is change the facts.
Research has been done, under controlled conditions, on populations greater than one subject. Over many experiments, conducted by many research teams, in many different places and exploring many different factors, it turns out that the impact of adverse factors on people's actual, measured performance doesn't really vary by that much in most cases. However, the impact that people think such factors will have on their performance does vary greatly.
So, yes, it is possible that you personally are an outlier. However, it is far more likely that you are simply in denial and over-estimating your own ability. Even if you really are that good, you might like to consider the probability of everyone driving nearby cars that could cause an accident involving you also being that good.
The lesson isn't to start outlawing everything
We're not talking about outlawing everything. We're talking about outlawing a practice that is very rarely actually necessary, and which has been shown time and again to dramatically increase the risk of having an accident and the severity of any accident that does happen.
but to remind people not to get distracted by anything.
Unfortunately, people are not machines, and merely telling them not to get distracted by anything will not achieve anything useful. Avoiding the problem by stopping people getting into a situation that is likely to distract them will, though.
That's pretty close to what happened, except that it only appeared to be the Labour MPs who were whipped enough to turn up en masse, and even then quite a few rebelled. The Tories mostly kept awfully quiet, despite earlier seeming like they supported the legislation, and the few who did turn up came down marginally against the bill overall. The Lib Dems who did vote were voting against. In any case, fewer than half of our then-MPs voted, which for a bill this controversial is appallingly low.
Blair made it quite clear he wasn't going to serve the full 05-10 term.
No, he didn't. In fact, he explicitly and very publicly said exactly the opposite, in direct response to popular concerns about voting for the Labour Party at the general election and winding up with Gordon Brown as PM. Try googling "Tony Blair full third term", and get back to us after you've finished reading a version of the quote covered by basically every major media outlet in the UK.
Not only is the DEA not SOPA, it was also pushed through under very dubious circumstances right before the last election (most MPs didn't even vote on it, never mind discuss it properly) and is subject to ongoing legal challenges on several counts.
It's a silly bit of law, made on a technicality, but let's not get hysterical.
With the greatest respect, I think you're misunderstanding in the same way as the other guy.
That's precisely what the video and some people in this forum are advocating.
Maybe I've overlooked a post, but I still can't see anyone here saying it is. And I'm not sure how you've got that idea from Victor's illustrative examples; although many of those are very well presented in their own right, he has gone out of his way on several occasions to stress that examples is all they are and the underlying ideas are what he is interested in.
Are you thinking of the simulations that Victor shows in some of his work? In that case, sure, he varies the parameters of the simulation interactively. That's the point of setting up a simulation as an exploratory tool. He's not developing algorithms that way, though, at least not in any of the work I've seen.
One of the examples he uses is about a binary search algorithm, where he simulates the data flow in real time. Is that what you're concerned about? If so, we took away very different things from that part of the presentation.
The argument is that it is fundamentally wrong to write code naively without properly understanding what it was doing to begin with.
I don't think anyone would disagree with your goal, but realistically, while you might properly understand what you think the code is doing, you usually won't be confident about what it's really doing until you try it.
The kind of development environment mentioned in some of Victor's work is just tightening the feedback loop. Automated test suites can serve a similar purpose. Why wait until you've "finished" to discover you didn't write the algorithm you think you did, when you can discover that immediately and correct it five seconds later?
Of course testing is no substitute for understanding. But even the most carefully crafted algorithm, developed with formal methods and locked down extensively with a strong type system, can have implementation errors.
I find it helpful to remember that Donald Knuth, who is one of the few people on the planet who can probably claim to have developed a serious software product that might actually be completely bug-free at this point, still famously wrote at one point, "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it." I'm pretty sure I'm not as smart as Knuth, so anything that helps me to make sure I'm both writing the code right and writing the right code is potentially a useful tool.
Even after skimming his work in a way where I'm more in control and don't have to veg in front of a video, I'm still not excited. Different strokes for different folks.
Fair enough.
FWIW, on the #! thing, it's to allow AJAX-based web pages to be linked/crawled.
Did you even follow the links I gave you? Those go to articles on the same researcher's home page, which you can read/skim over/explore interactively as you see fit, and which have a similar flavour to the video posted here but don't require you to sit through anything you don't have the patience for. If you can't even be bothered to do that and decide for yourself, then it really is your loss.
No-one except you seems to be talking about just writing random shit, though. You've created this fantasy world where everyone else is somehow advocating completely arbitrary trial-and-error programming, but I don't see anyone else posting here that actually did that.
In any case, I don't think any developer on the planet, including you, actually lives up to the artificial standard you seem to consider minimal for acceptable work. It's just that everyone else here is acknowledging that reality and considering potential ways to do better, while you're burying your head in the sand and saying that anyone else who doesn't is a dumbass.
Unless somebody wants to give a better executive summary, there's no way I'm weeding through an hour of video.
That's your loss. The guy behind these ideas is, IMHO, one of the most interesting researchers in the field of computing today. Go ahead and check out Bret Victor's home page directly if you don't like the blogspam link. He has many other ideas about the interplay between visualisation, mathematics, and software development.
There are way too many people in this Slashdot discussion whose only contribution is either "TL;DW" or "it's a dumb idea that only applies to GUIs". Those people obviously haven't understood the fundamental ideas that Bret is suggesting, and I suspect didn't even bother to watch the whole presentation before diving in and criticising. It's sad.
Genuinely interesting and innovative ideas are rarely conveyed in 140 characters, or in a three-paragraph echo chamber blog post with 5 Google Ads attached. You have to invest a little of your own time if you want to do anything worthwhile. I recommend that you do invest some of your own time in studying this guy's work if you're at all interested in what's wrong with maths and/or software development today and some ways we might improve it. Or you could just spend the same hour reading another five troll blog posts about things like whether it's the year of Linux on the desktop yet and then getting involved in the inevitable more-heat-than-light comment threads, I suppose.
People who choose the right tools for the job typically achieve more in weeks than people who flail about refusing to acknowledge (and therefore compensate for) their weaknesses achieve in years.
I think you're reading an argument into the posts you're responding to that the other posters were never actually making, and consequently you keep attacking a straw man.
You sound like you've studied tis: so is the danger significant for hands-free calling while driving? How many actual deaths per year are we talking about here.
The serious studies fairly consistently find driving while using a mobile phone increases the risk of having an accident roughly four times. Whether the phone is handheld or hands-free makes very little difference.
In terms of fatalities, it's hard to compare stats from different data sets, but I can give you a couple of data points to get the general idea.
In the US, an NHTSA report on distracted driving reckoned that in 2009 just under 1,000 people were killed by drivers distracted by a cell phone, a little under 1-in-5 of all distraction driving fatalities that year, although the report doesn't claim a direct causal relationship in all cases.
In the UK, the official STATS-19 report for 2010 found that mobile phone use was a factor in 26 fatal accidents. This type of data is meant to record definite causal relationships. The data is recorded by accident rather than by casualty, i.e., each of those 26 accidents could have resulted in multiple deaths. The reports are filed by officers shortly after the accident, and so tend to under-report factors that can be easily concealed in the immediate aftermath, such as whether a phone was in use at the time. We therefore cannot tell exactly how many fatalities really resulted from phone use, but it is likely to be many more than 26. (Note that use of handheld phones while driving was already illegal in the UK by the time period covered. Stats for both accidents generally and accidents where phone use was a contributory factor in particular were higher a few years earlier before the ban was introduced.)
Of course studies like these provide only absolute data, and so don't tell us much about the relative risk of driving using a phone without additional data for context. They do show that there are very real consequences to a substantial number of people each year, though, with many people dying and of course many more injured but not fatally.
If that were a sufficient explanation, the roads would be littered with the burning hulks of vehicles with two-way radios. They are not.
You aren't making a fair comparison.
For one thing, only a small proportion of vehicles actually have two-way radios. Even if a high proportion of those that do did have accidents, that would still only represent a tiny fraction of the vehicles on the road.
For another thing, most such vehicles are driven by professional drivers, who for reasons unrelated to their communications equipment typically have lower risk of accidents in the first place.
Except you can't win the phone fight either. Things like Siri and wireless headsets make it difficult-to-impossible to spot a driver using a phone.
Perhaps, but you could at least introduce penalties that would apply in the event of an accident while using the phone, as a deterrent.
For example, perhaps it would be reasonable to introduce a presumption of fault if a driver were involved in an accident while talking on a hands-free phone.
Alternatively, you could extend the current ban to include driving while using a hands-free in non-emergency situations, and automatically treat anyone who did get caught breaking the law as not only driving while on the phone but also attempting to pervert the course of justice.
At least if you took some measure like these, you wouldn't be shouting from an official loudspeaker that using hands-free is just fine and we're all perfectly safe doing it.
I would argue that the most common uses for phones are making calls (which in this context could be either hand-held or hands-free) and sending/receiving texts. Those have each been properly studied, by multiple independent groups in each case, and typically they impair driver performance at least as much as being over the legal drink-drive limit where I am. (The pattern is not uniform: some categories of drivers perform much worse when so impaired than others, though that is not surprising because driver performance generally is highly variable with levels of experience, education, etc.)
In that context, I think it is fair to say that (a) all of the most common uses have been investigated, and (b) all were found (independently) to be highly dangerous. This is not to say that other uses, such as a phone that can be configured as a voice-activated sat-nav tool for example, would necessarily also be dangerous; as you say, the same research does not necessarily support that conclusion.
It's worse because a passenger is there with you and most passengers will naturally react to the surroundings and the driver's temperament, including knowing when to shut up and let the driver concentrate.
Misbehaving kids in the back can be a real problem, but it is impractical to ban all driving with kids on board and most of the time most kids aren't severely degrading the driver's performance. That is rather different to the situation where almost no-one actually needs to make a call while driving, and most of the time most calls will severely degrade the driver's performance.
Of the things you mentioned, almost every one has been the subject of specific controlled experiments.
Speaking on the phone has, for both hand-held and hands-free devices. Some of that research was the justification for the driving+mobiles ban in the UK, for example.
Obviously texting has been, because we're having this discussion right now.
There has been increasing concern about posting to social networks with the increased prevalence of smartphones, but on this one I haven't personally seen any controlled studies yet (which doesn't mean no-one has done them, just that I haven't looked recently). I'm not sure I'd want to be the guy arguing that posting to Twitter/Facebook/whatever is safe given the dramatic increase in risk known to result from regular texting, though.
So you're right that we should not generalise unreasonably to any use of a phone. However, all of the most common uses have been investigated and found to be highly dangerous.
Ah, obvious but well-debunked counter-argument #27.
Actual passengers usually have some basic level of situational awareness, and will instinctively shut up when the driver needs to concentrate. Someone on the other end of a phone line can't see the road ahead and be quiet when a hazard is coming up.
(Having misbehaving children causing trouble in the back of a vehicle is a problem for the same reason, but unlike using a phone while driving, it is not practical to prohibit ever transporting unruly children by car. We fight the battles we can win.)
There's ovewhelming numbers of people making this up and repeating it on the internet, to be sure.
There might be lots of people repeating it, but some of us most certainly aren't making it up. In fact, some of us have been serious road safety campaigners for years, and by serious I mean people who advocate measures like improved driver education and driving laws based on a critical analysis of empirical data, not wishful thinking.
Keeping your eyes on the road and your hands on the wheel is not even close to 90% of the battle. Neither is worth a damn if you aren't situationally aware. Things like driving while drunk, drugged, or distracted are dangerous conditions because someone in such a state is nowhere near as situationally aware as they should be. That significantly delays effective response when dangers arise, and that in turn sharply increases both the risk of being involved in an accident and the expected severity.
Also, "X might be ban, lets just banX and worry about it later"
No. There is no "might". Driving while distracted by using a phone is extremely dangerous. Those who do it should be denied their freedom, explicitly, by locking them in jail until they understand that wilfully endangering the lives of everyone else is not OK. There is absolutely no way you can credibly turn this into some sort of anti-freedom rant.
The shame of it is, all the stupid people who don't know better are ruining it for those of us who do.
You might think you do. You might well be incorrect.
Sadly, yes. As I noted in another post, the biggest screw-up the government made in the legislation here was that they didn't ban hands-free kits as well, apparently on the basis that enforcement would be impractical. That sent a clear message that driving using a hands-free kit was OK, which was then used extensively in advertising campaigns shortly after the laws were introduced.
There is a mountain of evidence that driving and using a phone at the same time is highly dangerous, and it has been growing steadily for a long time. This is about as clear-cut and one-sided an issue as you can get, and innocent people are getting seriously hurt and even killed as a direct result of the dangerous behaviour. Outlawing that behaviour isn't draconian, it's making good law in the interests of society based on a rock solid empirical evidence base. Please take your FUD elsewhere.
This is already illegal in the UK, BTW. The problem is more one of enforcement in this case.
There are indeed a lot of bad/populist/NIMBYist laws about driving in the UK.
Banning using a phone while driving is not one of them. It's just a shame it only covers handhelds.
We need to get these systems developed and studied before we blanket-ban messaging and driving.
There is overwhelming evidence at this point that the distraction of being on a call or dealing with a message is actually the main danger, and that the physical effort of manipulating the device, while not completely irrelevant, has a much smaller effect.
That suggests we blanket ban these dangerous activities (and enforce it) first, and if anyone thinks they've come up with a safe way of doing it the onus is now on them to prove it so before it is permitted on public roads.
Unfortunately, as the accident stats clearly show, the theoretical ability to just drop your phone or whatever it is you image people doing when they "enter a risky environment" is rarely observed in practice. Presumably this is because while distracted by a conversation on the phone, drivers are significantly less accurate in judging risk in the first place.
Yes, this sort of behaviour is already against the law. It isn't widely enforced, though, and way too many people still do it. It needs to become socially unacceptable, the same way drunk driving now is.
As an aside, driving while using a hands-free kit is hardly any safer. It's just harder to detect and penalise. Unfortunately, that means the government here in the UK didn't outlaw it at the same time, thus sending a clear (but completely wrong) message that "The government says driving using a hands-free kit is safe!". Of course, lots of companies who sell hands-free kits had huge displayboards in stores the day these laws came in playing off that misunderstanding, and to this day a lot of people think they're safe driving and talking as long as they've got hands-free.