Man, this is why self-driving cars can’t come soon enough. Everyone else’s replies to this already sort of answer your question, but for me this hints at the bigger issue: people don’t take driving seriously. My counter is: why do you need to be looking at your phone in a car? What text is so important that you can’t pull over and read it? Why give up the situational awareness that is absolutely required to safely operate a machine that can kill people?

Life is about trade offs and constant cost/benefit analysis. How is reading/responding to a text message slightly sooner worth the decrease in situational awareness and possible accident involving a 2 ton vehicle?

I think we have normalized the dangers of driving a vehicle to the point where we sort of just shrug at the monumental number of vehicular deaths. I’m confident that when my kid is an adult, he’ll look at us with astonishment when we say we used to drive vehicles around, poorly trained, staring at phones, half-drunk, kind of paying attention sometimes, a bit sleepy and it was not only legal but _normal_. It’ll be like us hearing about how our great-grandparents had a 2 year old work dangerous farm equipment alone. You think “How the hell did anyone survive?”