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Comment by quotemstr | Hacker News Reader

Do you yourself drive? It's easy to make these demands when you're not affected by the resulting inefficiency.

I drive 2+ hours round-trip for work every weekday, and my work often has me visiting client sites during the week. I find nothing difficult about setting my destination via GPS before I begin my drive, and I find that my attention to what's going on around me is significantly diminished should I attempt to modify my route while driving. An inconvenience of, say, 5-10 minutes to find a place to pull over and input new coordinates is absolutely worth it to prevent an expensive collision or running into, say, a motorcyclist I haven't seen because I'm staring at my phone.

I cannot believe people are arguing for "efficiency" over traffic safety.

> absolutely worth it

Can you demonstrate, using numbers, that the tradeoff is positive?

> I cannot believe people are arguing for "efficiency" over traffic safety.

People prioritize efficiency over safety all the time. It's a good thing. So do you, if you support non-zero speed limits. The current animus against cell phone use while driving is the result of a moral panic, not a rational cost-benefit tradeoff.

> If I pull over to a safe place to use my phone, nobody is harmed.

Untrue. The act of pulling is itself is a complex maneuver that practically invites accidents. Most accidents occur at low speed, and often, when you pull over, you pull over into an area where pedestrians are active. It might be the case that pulling over instead of using a phone at a red light results in more people being injured or killed.

https://www.recyclingtoday.com/article/lytx-fleet-accidents-...

> My wife was rear-ended while waiting

Anecdotal personal misfortune is not an argument for society-wide policy.

>Can you demonstrate, using numbers, that the tradeoff is positive?

Are you kidding? If I pull over to a safe place to use my phone, nobody is harmed. If I'm driving and take my attention off of the road and over to my phone, and I smack into a motorcyclist because I didn't see them, I could kill them.

>The current animus against cell phone use while driving is the result of a moral panic, not a rational cost-benefit tradeoff.

Moral panic? My wife was rear-ended while waiting to turn because the driver of the car that hit her was on their cellphone and didn't see her - they admitted as much. She's still suffering from pain from that accident and the car she was driving was totaled. How is not getting into an accident "not a rational cost-benefit tradeoff"?

There are 268 million vehicles in the United States. If we assume that each vehicle makes two trips per day on average, and than the number of minutes of inconvenience taken up by pulling over to operate a phone is 5, that’d be 2.68 billion minutes of inconvenience per day alone!

We can be generous and put the intrinsic value of a human life at the average lifespan in the US of 78 years, or 41 million minutes. That means you’d be inconveniencing people at the rate of 65 human lives per day by implementing your law.

Why do you hate human life so much? Think of the children. Hail Satan, etc.

> If we assume that each vehicle makes two trips per day on average, and than the number of minutes of inconvenience taken up by pulling over to operate a phone is 5,

Once you need to pull over to check your phone you realize that you can just wait until your destination. I never touch my phone while driving, but I'd estimate the time I spend pulled over to use my phone to be more in the area of 5 minutes per couple thousand km.

But how will tech companies extract value from you if you don't pick up your phone even when driving?

That was funny. Looks like it cost a few karma points, but I appreciated the humor at this point in thread.

Although I'm hardly losing sleep over my loss of karma, I'm glad someone appreciated it.

Gonna respond with this separate post, since OP edited their post to respond to mine.

>Untrue. The act of pulling is itself is a complex maneuver that practically invites accidents. Most accidents occur at low speed, and often, when you pull over, you pull over into an area where pedestrians are active. It might be the case that pulling over instead of using a phone at a red light results in more people being injured or killed.

As I've said before, driving is always an inherently dangerous act, and I'm not disputing that point. It seems to me as though you don't believe risks should be mitigated; that you're saying, "Well, pulling over could be pretty dangerous, so I think you should still be allowed to distract yourself with your phone while driving". Is that correct?

Driving in an area with a lot of pedestrians is certainly dangerous, but to my point, it's far more dangerous if the driver is staring at their phone rather than consciously looking for people walking around in an effort to avoid them.

>Anecdotal personal misfortune is not an argument for society-wide policy.

Again - how is not getting into an accident "not a rational cost-benefit tradeoff"? Can you provide any sort of valid argument in support of taking your eyes off of the road? Do you have any kind of data that shows that not looking at the road is safer, or for that matter safe at all?

> The current animus against cell phone use while driving is the result of a moral panic

Spend some more time walking then, it'll feel a lot more personal when you have daily close calls with multi-ton monsters doing rolling stops with their eyes glued to a screen.

Here are some stats on rates of crashes while driving with phones in the U.S. https://www.edgarsnyder.com/car-accident/cause-of-accident/c...

> The act of pulling is itself a complex maneuver that practically invites accidents

Well, 100% of car trips involve at least 1 pull-over. Of the major causes of crashes, injuries and fatalities, attempting to pull over safely isn’t even listed as a major cause of accidents in any stats I can find anywhere for any country. Can you demonstrate with numbers that pulling over is dangerous?

> Most accidents occur at low speed

Your link is talking mostly about commercial vehicles bumping into walls at 3mph. Most injuries and fatalities do not occur at low speed. The number one cause of vehicle fatalities in the US is speeding, second is alcohol. https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/Publication/8124...

Same is true in Australia https://www.qbe.com/au/news/the-most-common-causes-of-car-ac...

Same is true worldwide https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/189242/9789...

> People prioritize efficiency over safety all the time.

This is true, if they didn't we wouldn't have cars in the first place. 40,000 people are killed by drivers every year, that is more than gun deaths.

heaven for bid we impact "driving efficiency" for something as low-priority as public safety...

Why is "safety" the most important consideration? A world that values safety above everything else is a pretty dismal world --- and it's a world without cars at all.

A single distracted person in a vehicle can inflict an incredible amount of death and damage upon those around them. This isn't just the government making you wear a straitjacket to protect you from yourself.

Also, I'm on board with a world that minimizes ape-driven cars. I can't even imagine how much more amazing my city would be in that utopia.

I don't understand why pulling over before fiddling with your gadgets is so much to ask of you, though.

>Why is "safety" the most important consideration?

Because driving is an inherently dangerous act, and we should be doing as much as we can to minimize said danger. We wake up and leave the house understanding that there are a litany of risks in the world that could bring harm to us. Many of these risks, such as driving, are accepted because we put restrictions on drivers to minimize the risk of harm that they would otherwise pose.

Driving requires a significant amount of focus and attention from the driver. What you're arguing for is to allow drivers to remove their attention and focus from the situation entirely. Should they use their GPS while operating their car, they then become unaware of what is happening around them and are unable to respond quickly and safely.

Do you really think that is OK?

> and it's a world without cars at all.

And a wonderful world that would be.

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