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Comment by bluedino | Hacker News Reader

DUI and driving while using your phone should have equal punishment.

I’m not advocating drinking and driving, but phone use is “no harm, no foul” right now. On the other hand you can drive without crashing into anyone but if you’ve had two glasses of wine with dinner, you can get charged with a crime.

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> DUI and driving while using your phone should have equal punishment.

Totally agree. Tickets, insurance penalties, loss of license, jail if necessary. Every phone-addicted driver is just a murder waiting to happen.

..and "engagement"-obsessed social media/ad platforms are the equivalent of a guy who hangs out in the parking lot handing out free jello shots to people as they get into their cars.

The problem is proving it.

What a DUI perp says: I'm not drunk! Cops check blood alcohol level.

What a phone user says: I wasn't on my phone! Cops can't/won't check anything, and even if they could, how could the accident time be exactly (for proof) correlated?

My wife was rear ended by an SUV and has health effects to this day (it was over 10 years ago). There was no way to prove, or not, the other drive was on the phone. The driver was coming up to a stop sign in her own neighborhood that had a long line of cars that were stopped. It's highly likely she was on the phone or looking down at something. There was no evidence of brakes having been applied.

I argued with the insurance company for weeks about this. They wouldn't do a damn thing.

If they’re texting, you can ask the phone company if their phone sent a text

Sure but a minority of people on their phones are sending text messages at that moment.

True, but that requires more effort on the officer's behalf, and isn't an on the spot check like blood alcohol level is.

Maybe if phone companies allowed officers to see timestamps of texts for a number this would work.

100% agreed. It’s a perfect analogy, they even drive in a similar manner. Slightly off from the flow of traffic, staying too close to the edge of a lane. Heck I even saw a Houston Police officer in his cruiser texting and driving today. As I get older and grouchier I get more and more infuriated by distracted driving. Most people would be infuriated if a passenger put their hand up in front of their face while driving, yet we have people do it to themselves every day. I’m opposed to a nanny state, but this is one area that I wouldn’t argue that loudly about regulation around phone use while driving.

Fun fact in California: police officers are exempt from being barred from using their phone

There should be an instant ban from driving, you are not allowed to continue your journey, and for at least a week after. Plus fine.

It is ridiculous how lenient the laws are. 40,000 people die every year on our roads.

> It is ridiculous how lenient the laws are.

I think it is because people who make the laws are breaking them too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosemary_Lehmberg

> 40,000 people die every year on our roads.

We're largely talking about only the US market here -- in which only (and I say that word relatively) 37,000 people died in any sort of automobile related accident last year.

To put this in perspective, the common Flu (a totally vaccinatable, preventable, and treatable illness) killed about 52,000 people in the US last year alone.

According to the CDC, in 2016, 10,497 people (or 28%) of all automobile related deaths were alcohol-related deaths. Another 16% of automobile related deaths are attributed to drugs other than alcohol in the same year. That accounts for just about 44% of all vehicle related deaths, leaving the true automobile related deaths due to accident at a low number (relatively) of about 21,000 people per year.

According to the CDC, about 3,477 of all automobile related deaths were caused by distracted driving (of all kinds, not just cell phone usage), which amounts to around 9% of all automobile related deaths.

Sure, that number is a lot of people... but it's not some insane cell-phone induced epidemic folks are making it out to be.

Anecdote: As a vehicle driver, I've seen some insane cyclists violate all sorts of road laws, including peddling through red lights and cross multiple lanes of a road without warning... that's just to say, let's not pretend cyclists are totally innocent in all this.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/leading-causes-of-death.htm

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...

[3] https://www.cdc.gov/Motorvehiclesafety/impaired_driving/impa...

[4] https://www.cdc.gov/motorvehiclesafety/distracted_driving/in...

Beyond the number of people killed--which is atrocious no matter how you try to downplay it--there are something like 2 million more people who are injured every year. I find it problematic that that's rarely mentioned, because the "30 to 40 thousand killed every year" figure makes the problem seem smaller than it is and makes it easier for some people to dismiss the scale of the problem.

There's injuries that never fully heal, trauma, lost wages, loss of a vehicle in some cases, the tremendous waste of resources from unnecessary repairs, etc, all from something that's mostly preventable (very few traffic collisions are true accidents).

Also, the comment you're responding to doesn't say anything about bicyclists, and I don't see anyone in this thread "pretending" they're blameless. And they yearly flu vaccines have a certain rate of effectiveness, which is somewhat less than 100% (the CDC says 40 to 60%).

Cellphone use while driving is a primary offense in Ohio, meaning you can get pulled over solely got that and receive a citation

A citation is nothing. A couple drinks will put you in jail, cost you your license for a while, maybe your job, and thousands of dollars.

My wife got her start as an attorney in the U.S. and her first criminal cases as defense counsel were for drunk divers. It ended up driving (no pun) her away from defense work, because these guys were inveterate offenders and never got more than a slap on the wrist. The penalties on the books for DUI and the penalties actually administered are often miles apart. That may have changed in the last decade though, I can’t say.

What do you consider a slap on the wrist? Everyone I know that’s had a DUI lost their license for a min amount of time with exponential increases for repeat offenders (one month, then two years, then 10 years). And that’s only the ones that weren’t involved in a collision.

Lol, a month for the first offence?

Seriously in Denmark you get 20 days suspended prison if your are above 2.0 for a first offense. If you are above 1.2 you lose your license for a minimum of 3 years. If below 2, your fine is "only" your net salary for the month....

Anecdotal, but I can confirm this as well. I've had extended family members get pulled over for (multiple!) DUIs while getting nothing more than a slap on the wrist. Nothing's really changed as long as you're of a certain demographic.

> never got more than a slap on the wrist

Everybody I know in California who got a DUI got quite penalized--it definitely stopped all of them cold so they would never have to go through the penalties again.

Maybe you can get away with DUI in the country club crowd, but certainly not lower than that.

You might enjoy Austria, where being drunk on your bicycle or as of recently electric scooter will cost you your drivers license.

I have never seen anyone get pulled over driving with a phone in Ohio.

My old home state of Georgia is stepping back in time (and not in a good way) on a couple of legal positions recently, but I'm pleased & surprised they, like Ohio, have adopted "no phones while driving" about a year ago. From what I know from friends & family they're backing it up with enforcement and people are changing their habits.

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