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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

They don’t need new technology, just a bus. Sit a few officers in it where their vantage point is about a meter over the top of cars, drive around the highway a bit, and mail merge a bunch of citations.

I was bored on a 2 hour bus ride the other day and easily spotted hundreds of drivers fooling around in their phones while driving at highway speed. Mostly texting. Insanity!

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The police do use buses here in Ontario. My friend got a ticket after following behind a bus which had a single officer in the back and a trailing car.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuJf8ZyjVVg

https://www.narcity.com/ca/on/toronto/news/ontario-police-ar...

Honestly, it might be cheaper and easier to just issue tickets to everyone. I’m mostly kidding, but the number of people I see daily driving distracted because of their phones is enormous.

Traffic police around here seem uninterested in enforcing any rules other than red lights and speed limits.

Stop, why!

Aiming to catch people on their phones is a perversion of the laws because we have made it too easy to get away with driving while distracted.

It used to be that distracted driving was subjective; but with dash cams on police cars, why can't police crack down on actual distracted indications objectively. All of us anecdotally can guess that someone not moving on green, going slow in the left lane, crossing multiple lanes at the last minute is on their cell phone; So let's start enforcing a law that applies more broadly (eating, intoxicated, cell phone, distracted by passengers, rubber necking) and start seriously enforcing it.

If we seriously enforced distracted and reckless behavior, maybe cities wouldn't even have to worry about congestion taxes.

The root of the problem is bad driving. You can be stone sober, fully rested and have your phone locked in the trunk of your car, but none of that matters if you lack the skills needed to operate a vehicle at speed. Drivers education is woefully inadequate and the only driving laws I see enforced are the ones which have a clear easy to obtain financial incentive attached for the police.

I think the lack of decent public transport in many places contribute to this. When I've lived in cities with good public transport I would usually take the bus, especially if I wasn't feeling in a good mental state to drive (tired, stressed, other). In Orlando that's not an option, here I can chose to stay home or drive.

That is a very valid point. Even the best city I've lived in as far as public transit goes had issues such as stopping service around midnight, even on weekends. If the goal was to reduce drinking driving and/or driving tired you'd think they'd keep those going, but instead they just bring out the DUI checkpoints.

Where I grew up the last bus would leave downtown around 4am and the trams stopped for an hour between 6-7am on Sat-Sun (after basically all the bars and clubs had closed). That aspect was pretty good. Most other aspects of Swedish drinking culture is not great...

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