Ask HN: What is “the answer” to distracted driving due to cell phones? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What is “the answer” to distracted driving due to cell phones?

14 pointsjrs23532 comments

It seems like more and more I notice people driving while looking at their cell phones. Even at stop lights when people just "quickly check" their phones it distracts them from noticing the lights change and then only a few cars getting through on green and several more running the red. What's the "best answer" to this dilemma in your opinion? Is it steeper fines if caught? More enforcement? Regulation disabling devices if/when certain conditions are detected? It's getting to where someone leaving the bar after a few drinks but focusing on driving is better at driving then a completely sober person looking at their phone.

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I have an unsubstantiated hunch that the longer traffic lights are on average, the more people text while driving. Why? In cities I've lived in where the traffic lights are shorter, no one gets out their phone because as soon as you do, you'll have to put it away because the light turned green. So you never get into Twitter/Facebook/etc. But if the stop lights are very long, people get engrossed in social media, then when the light turns green, their mental inertia keeps them wanting to read more. So they read while they're driving.

Would be interested to know if anyone has actual research on this.

I think this is the solution. You can't keep chasing with legislation and even if you could you can't spy on drivers all the time.

The key is keeping drivers focused and keeping traffic moving.

Also removing all the things that encourage complacency. Lane assist etc.

There is some evidence for pilots at least that partial automation reduces fatigue, which could very well be safer. I know when I turn on cruise control I get tired slower because of not having to monitor the spedometer.

I agree but I can't help feeling like this anecdote kind of reinforces my first point. I don't believe we should be quite so speed limit obsessed. I think we should be able to keep our eyes on the road and all drive to the capabilities of our vehicles under the conditions. German autobahns have demonstrated this can work (if you have a decent road system).

We shouldn't be getting tired from checking the spedometer, we should be getting tired from driving, and when we are tired we should be stopping.

Yes, hotels in more places would be nice. But I think most people are largely out of control of whether they need to keep going or not when they get fatigued. It's certainly hard to gauge, since it's such a sliding scale. Aviation pilots certainly don't have a choice, once they're in the air, and I don't think that's so different from most highway drivers.

There are laws against this in Australia, enforced with camera detection of smartphone use.

The laws themselves are not perfect but if you can reduce smartphone use down to the acceptable level of distraction in a car already, the problem would largely be solved. Android Auto is complete trash, but it offers some of those features:

1. Big, simplified interface with limited options (navigation, music, phone).

2. Voice controlled (sort of, it's garbage in a noisy car at highway speeds). This fails a lot in rural Australia as the phone networks don't have 100% coverage.

3. Easy voice call answering. This is largely solved.

4. Easy text message creation. This is largely a complete joke as the voice recognition turns your semi-shouted reply into garbage, slowly reads it back to you so you can correct it etc. It's bad and distracting in it's own way.

5. Easy playlist finding for music. Largely solved.

6. Masking other content. Distractions like facebook and instagram should just be hidden - you don't need what makes up 90% of those feeds while you are driving. Facebook messenger maybe.

Having said that, I mount my phone on the dash when driving any kind of distance and the car then becomes a sort of mobile office. I can answer the phone, try to answer SMS messages, listen to music and navigate mostly with voice control and without having to remove my eyes from the road any more than the speedometer / radio in the car usually distracts a driver.

Answering a technical question while driving is kind of distracting though, so I avoid those phone calls or ask the caller to wait until I can stop and answer properly. You can't regulate this, you can just educate people.

It's doable if the limited interface of something like Android Auto was made more functional.

edit: Remind people they don't need to be 100% available 24/7. It's OK to go offline for a while.

British Columbia laid down some laws about handheld devices in cars, along with fines and points. It seems to have made a difference. If we were to sensibly switch to a proportion-of-wealth system for fines, as in Norway, I think we’d see even better results. A few people racking up $20k fines would grab people’s attention.

My solution is to never look at my phone while driving. I have very low patience for someone once it becomes obvious they're on their phone, and ramp up my use of the horn appropriately.

It's unfortunate that you're not allowed to bump someone, like I heard they do if you don't get out of the way on the autobahn.

The first step is levying a significant additional fine when the culpable driver also was using their phone within 5 seconds of an accident. This should be easy to detect since most (all?) modern phones have inertial sensors which will record any sudden bumps like the impact in an accident. If law enforcement were empowered to access the sensors on both drivers' phones (and their cars) involved in an accident, they could definitively link phone use with car impact. This ought to be definitive enough that every court would summarily rule the culpable driver to be guilty of reckless driving, making the added fine impactful and indisputable. I suspect the prospect of incurring the equivalent of a DUI would cure many distracted drivers of this misbehavior.

Typical traffic calming techniques, such as those outlined in this brief Not Just Bikes video, would be helpful: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGOBOw9s-QM

Dash cameras, front and rear.

Nothing is going to change the habits of these drivers. So be alert and have evidence when one of these idiots hits you.

Seriously, everyone should have a dash cam.

They've really come down in price, even 2-channel (front/rear) cams are under $200 now.

ML-tech could help. Imagine if your friend was in the passenger seat looking things up and conversing with you. You could ask things, hear things, and say/ask other things, moving the conversation from topic to topic. Now this seems like a software agent that could be realized in my lifetime and I can leave my device in my pocket the whole time (or integrated in to the car).

I also don't think this should matter. People should not own cars. Merely call them when needed to be driven from A-B, and they should literally arrive in about a minute, because we can achieve that with many fewer cars than we have use so little each day.

public transit.

No seriously - people aren't gonna not use their phones. But they will let someone ferry/train/bus/drive them while they use their phones (read, watch, create, etc.).

In the USA, when you force everyone to become a driver out of necessity, you get a lot of people who aren't interested in driving, driving on the shared road resource. If they had a viable alternative, they would use it instead - especially one that allowed them to keep using their phones while in transit.

I can observe this with myself. I have times where I want to use my commute to read a nice article, listen to a mix or a podcast, and then I tend to go by piblic transport

The car can have a camera inside and complain and disable features when you use your phone. Some already do that.

Remove all traffic signals, signs, everything that these people rely on to aid their distracted driving.

I don't know which street I'm supposed to turn on, let me get out my phone's Map app to check.

This is the wrong question to ask. The real question is how to force auto makers to design infotainment systems that aren’t extremely distracting and annoying to operate.

But cars already have radios and now they integrate with Spotify.

Self-driving cars. That was an easy one.

they currently drive like they're on the phone ...and drunk

iPhones have Driving Focus built in now (https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208090) which is a good start but I expect anyone who is happy to use their phone at the wheel will disable this pretty quickly.

Drive a manual transmission.

Most European drivers drive manual and use their phones in the car.

Create a localized field that disables the phone except for 911 calls when the car is in motion. If the car is not moving the phone can do anything. Once the car starts moving everything except 911 calls is disabled. Now this can't be just a Bluetooth signal or RFID signal because those can extend far outside the car and disrupt other peoples phones. So you need to limit the transmission of the disabling signal to only the interior of the car, preferably just near the driver. Using the near field effect of radio might be a solution, see this paper:

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3300061.3300120

This could give you fairly precise proximity limits which could be used to define a zone of no operation around the driver. It would likely extend a little beyond the outside of the car, but if widely used and known about would not cause most people any issues, they'd know to move a foot or two away to regain use of their phone. In most circumstances they'd never be close enough to be affected.

A similar solution might be to use skin capacitive conduction effects to create a body area network for the driver. The driver sits on the seat and if the car is moving a signal is capacitively coupled to their body from the seat. The outside of the phone is metal or has an internal capacitive sensor and conducts the signal to circuitry in the phone disabling it. As long as the driver is in the seat and the car is moving the phone does not work (again except for 911 calls). This might be easier to defeat by placing something on the seat, but perhaps some capacitive or radar sensing of the driver could make that difficult or could detect an attempt to defeat it.

If you want the phone to continue to be disabled at stoplights/signs then have the stoplight/sign talk to the car and tell it to disallow use of the phone, just the same as if it was in motion. If a driver wants/needs to use their phone they have to stop the car somewhere away from a stoplight/sign. Or disallow use of the phone as long as the driver is in the drivers seat, though that seems more dangerous since it forces the driver to get out of the car if they want to make a call (though again 911 calls could be allowed).

Probably a machine learning classifier could tell when the phone is in a moving car using accelerometer signals, but I'm not sure I'd trust it to be accurate enough.

Extra points if you can figure out how to let background processes on the phone keep running so that data transfers are not halted while still blocking use of the phone (maybe just as simple as disabling the screen showing only an emergency button? But then there are also voice assistants. Maybe it's ok to let those function?)

The biggest problem with this is you need to differentiate between the driver and passengers. Passengers want to be able to use their phones without restriction.

Apple Carplay, etc.

It gives you 90% of why you check your phone. Reading texts, easy access to songs, podcasts, etc.

public transit

Short answer: steeper fines & more enforcement (traffic cams & tower telemetry)

Long answer: regulation attention-grabbing industries, just like we regulated cigarettes

> regulation attention-grabbing industries, just like we regulated cigarettes

There is surely a good argument to be made for regulating social media for certain age groups.

The entire internet is attention-grabbing to some extent. How on earth would this be enforceable? You couldn't without violating the privacy of individuals.

Hold people accountable if they violate the rules. Perhaps specific cops for enforcement of this in cities as it would likely be self funding until the General public complied.

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