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My horn usage has gone way up. Driving stick in the US you have to pay attention to be in gear at the right time. In the past 10 years I've seen it get exponentially worse as people put their heads down coming up to a red light. Laws are written but not enforced. Friends and relatives die from drunk or distracted driving and it's frustrating because even though driving is a privileged and not a right people with multiple DUIs get back behind the wheel. Honestly, texting and driving should have as strict punishments as a DUI and I know that's an unpopular stance.

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Probably more unpopular, I think it should have worse punishment than DUI. Or maybe both need to get worse punishment equally? Texting and driving to me is the ultimate sign of vanity. A person is knowingly breaking the law, and putting their own desire for instant communication/social media above the lives of others. As in, 'me posting to instagram is more important than whether you live or die'. I'm hoping most don't feel that way, but their behavior says otherwise...

You have a point. At the time they decide to use a device/phone, their faculties are not diminished and yet they decide to do it anyway.

Maybe we need one of those corny ‘80s throwback PSAs to shame people into conscientious behavior.

You're assuming they made a conscious decision, as in the thought actually crossed their mind that "this might not be a good idea." I'd wager the thought never crossed their distracted mind. They're chasing dopamine rushes. In fact, I doubt many are making conscious decisions to pick up their phone and look at it. It's automatic at this point. They've programmed themselves.

Have you ever watched someone sitting alone lately? It's like this nervous tick happens where they get irritated and uncomfortable if they don't check their phone every 5 minutes. There is no attention span. We've programmed it out.

It's amazing how fast we went from "talking on or looking at your cell-phone in public for any length of time, or frequently, is something only self-important dicks do", to the point that we could use such behavior as universally-understood shorthand in fiction for "this character is a self-important dick", to its being totally normal. I'm pretty sure the gap was bridged in about five years. Crazy.

I remain skeptical that the switch from "the Internet exists at some physical locations, you must go to one to use the Internet" to "the Internet exists at all physical locations all of the time" was anywhere near being a net (haha) gain for our collective wellbeing.

I agree with most of what you are getting at;

"They've programmed themselves." - Isn't there evidence that the apps (like fbk and msgr, others) - and phones (apple) have been programmed to create this like - dopamine - want - get - more - behavior (?)

Supreme court is now allowing people to sue gun manufacturers when people use their tools improperly (at least in one case) - it won't take a top 10 law firm to copy the tactics deployed there and convince jury's that big tech was taking advantage of lil johnny and lil mary who are not that smart - and they were using the devices and apps as intended - as so they should be liable for the pain, suffering, deaths, etc

right? (not a lawyer, but I'd go that route for that kind of ambulance chasing maybe)

Cyclist here. I've heard multiple other cyclists say things along the lines of "my life is not worth 15 second of your time". Typically in response to drivers making rather bad driving decisions, e.g., passing a cyclist too closely, that often don't actually lead to much time savings. It's the same logic. The benefit is much smaller than the cost, but the cost is typically paid by someone else.

I think both ought to carry a permanent lifetime ban on owning, operating, and possessing any sort of motor vehicle. You've demonstrated your willingness to kill people through your negligence, you will not have another opportunity to do so.

Permanent? For touching your cell phone? With no consideration of the circumstances? A mandatory minimum sentence of permanent removal of driving privileges for touching a phone?

How do you define touching the phone? Can you imagine some circumstances where that shouldn’t be a permanent removal of driving privileges?

For distracted/technologically impaired driving, which in my mind is using technology in some empirically-defined unsafe manner. How we would determine that threshold is something we as a society would have to determine, but I would hope that we would use evidence-based processes to make that determination.

I just look at laws and how they’re set up now; and I just can’t imagine the legislature actually doing what you want.

You're in all likelihood correct, but that's the sort of policy I would hope for.

Agreed. I saw some report that reaction times for distracted driving are actually worse than DUI.

On top of that, you can avoid the vast majority of drunk drivers if you stay off the roads at night. Distracted drivers are on the road at all hours.

This isn’t a fair comparison, you need to compare a person texting while driving with a person who is texting while drunk driving.

Hot take: I'd rather share the road with someone completely focused who's slightly above the legal limit, than someone who is sober and distracted.

>completely focused who's slightly above the legal limit

This may not be possible. One of the effects of alcohol on cognition is that it increases distractability while simultaneously making you less aware of it's occurrence which is a compounding issue.

It’s also not possible to make a completely sober person be at peak focus and attention all the time as they drive.

That's right, any amount of alcohol reduces awareness and increases reaction time.

I think what the poster meant is that while a person driving under influence might be slightly distracted (there is full spectrum of being under influence) the person fidgeting with a phone is always very distracted.

You can't be only slightly distracted when you are not looking at the road but reading or replying to message.

The difference is that drunk people don’t stop being drunk when the red light turns green whereas most distracted drivers do stop being distracted.

They may stop being distracted at some point, but I can assure you that it's not when the light turns green. Every single day I see many people staring at their phones while hurtling down the highway at 70 mph.

Where I live, we have a charge called "care and control of a vehicle" which I think should be applied to both drunk and distracted driving.

We do have "driving while intoxicated" (which covers alcohol and drugs - controlled, illicit or medical) and "distracted driving" (which covers everything from lighting a cigarette to adjusting your radio, to talking on your phone, to turning around to high-five the passenger in the back seat).

I'm not recommending removing those charges. I'm advocating that the charges should be made stiffer by adding "care and control of a vehicle" on top of the dwi or distracted driving charges.

That way, there are more points taken off your license, and it gets even more expensive to deal with in court (or jail, as the case may be). The tools are there for us, but we don't use them as effectively as we could.

> even though driving is a privileged and not a right

I would like to agree but in reality the vast majority of the population get a driver's license (and drive on the regular) and you have to fuck up really badly to lose it.

For better or for worse, most of our built environment is absolutely dependent on driving so society as a whole is way too lenient on drivers and their statistical externalities.

Driving is treated as a revocable right, not as a privilege.

This more than anything is a good example of self-driving cars actually increasing safety in the net even if there will be loss of life from algorithm failures. Self-driving cars can be put in situations they don't understand but they don't lose focus, don't drive angry, etc.

As a passenger, my usage of the phrase "I can help you with your phone if you want; either way, please put it down" has also gone way up

Driving stick doesn’t mean anything. You can be texting and driving stick at the same time easily. You don’t constantly need your hand on the shifter.

You're correct, but if you don't want to be that guy you generally want to notice the light is about to change and get into 1st gear. Vs head down facebooking waiting for the honk to step on the gas.

I dunno I'd prefer to be regularly slightly inconvenienced to having some person on their phone slam into me while they run a red.

You must not actually drive stick then. The only time I can see myself being able to text while driving stick is on the highway and even then I wouldn’t really be comfortable doing so.

When I used to drive auto I could literally have my phone in my right hand with my left hand on the wheel at all times if I wanted to...

>you must not actually drive stick then. The only time I can see myself being able to text while driving stick is on the highway and even then I wouldn’t really be comfortable doing so.

He probably just drives something made in the last ~15yr. In a modern vehicle the power band is wide enough that you have about 3 gears that can be used in any given situation and the gear shift is basically a 6-way toggle switch. You could definitely use your phone if you wanted to.

I used to eat a bagel on my way to work in stop and go traffic with my gear shift hand and that's in a 25yo vehicle with a really long shifter and such little power you really only have one good gear for a given situation. In a vehicle like that it is much harder to be distracted and drive comfortably.

Just leave the clutch pedal down all the time. Proven method

And then you get the added bonus of constantly having to replace your throw-out bearing /s

There are plenty of countries where the majority of cars are manual transmission and trust me, there's still plenty of people texting whilst driving.

The US is predominately automatic, but outside of N. America most of the world still uses manual.

I learned stick on a working holiday, driving utes in Western Australia

Driven stick my whole life. Maybe it's just that I have large hands, but I don't need to put stuff down while shifting.

The hard part of texting while driving stick is taking your eyes off the road, not having three things to manipulate with only two hands. That's like saying it's impossible for humans to drive stick because there are three pedals but only two feet.

What's your driving style like? I imagine the people who accelerate as quickly as their car is capable of, consistently drive 15-20 over the speed limit, often have to speed up and slow down and dodge between lanes will have to shift a lot more than the rest of us.

It just strikes me as weird that other people think it's impossible to drive stick and text at the same time. Sure you can't do it safely, but that's nothing to do with the transmission.

> You can be texting and driving stick at the same time easily.

I've driven stick shift for over a decade and this is completely false.

> You don’t constantly need your hand on the shifter.

Constantly? No. Frequently? Yes.

You don't need your hand on the phone constantly to text, so I don't see why you couldn't both shift and text.

My first car didn't have cup holders, and I remember managing to drive while holding a cup of soda or a shake when bring food back from fast food drive-throughs, holding the cup the entire trip. It was stick and I had no problem doing this.

With a phone, I'd expect you could just set it down between messages, which should make it easier than carrying those cups was. Setting those down risked spilling them.

It's very difficult to text and drive, driving stick you require far, far more attention to speed/gear/etc at all times. When I drive a stick car I can't doze off, I can't really go on mental autopilot like when I drive an automatic car. This is coming from someone who drove stick for 10 years, now driving an automatic vehicle. - Personal Anecdote.

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