Feds want nationwide ban on cell phone use in cars
networkworld.com
networkworld.com
The existing laws (I'm in San Francisco) are completely ignored and unenforced as it is. I see people using their cell phones while driving all the time. I'm sure the cops have better things to do with their days than pull over people talking on their cell phones. As a result, I'm now trained to really watch out for drivers who are on phones because I know they are dangerous and not paying attention.
I feel that even hands-free is distracting to drivers, I know it is distracting for me and I'm a great driver. If I need to use the phone while in the car, I either hand the phone to my wife, I pull over or I just hold off until I get to my destination.
On the contrary, I think the cops should be busting people left and right for that. First of all, driving-while-cellphoning does create a genuine risk for other road users, not just the driver - I live in SF too and entirely agree that drivers here pay no attention to the law. Second, if drivers become aware that chattering or texting on their phone imposes a real risk of being busted and ticketed, then if anything it's likely to make them more cautious about other aspects of their driving.
I think you're looking at it from the perspective that if the police are busting cellphone users, they're not chasing reckless drivers; but that assumes a flattening of both geography and time. As it is, if a cop is there to see you using your cellphone while driving, there's no logical reason to assume that ignoring you increases the cop's chances of detecting other kinds of illegal driving. Usually police are assigned to particular duties, so if a cop is on the traffic beat it's not like s/he is being diverted from investigating murder or robbery by pulling someone over.
So, instead of banning the use outright, which a lot of people will object to because nobody likes to be told they can't do something (ignoring the whole driving is a right motto). I'd just say, increase the fines to the level of a red light run and increase the enforcement. The only people who will object to the fines are the people breaking the law. ;-)
When I'm driving in an unfamiliar city, I often keep my phone in a windshield holder, and leave the navigation display on. This allows me to glance down for an instant, and see the big arrow indicating the direction of my next turn.
Done right, this takes about a quarter second, and it gives me a half mile of warning before changing lanes. This seems like a net safety win, especially around cities like Boston, where last-minute lane changes can be dangerous.
Do the Feds have studies showing that dashboard GPS navigation makes us less safe? I'd love to know one way or another.
I think they're less worried about electronic devices as such, than by people futzing with them while they're supposed to be driving. If you set your destination at the beginning of the journey and merely look at the GPS screen occasionally, there's very little cognitive overhead. It's when you have to interact with the device and divide your attention between the different tasks of operating the device UI and operating the vehicle that you become highly distractable.
Nor autonomous cars are spread enough yet.
So I would say banning phone is good measure for now.
Where I live, these laws only apply to people under 18, and we don't have a motorcycle helmet law either.
If you build your own road network, you don't have to follow any traffic laws. But most people are too cheap to do that, so they deal with a little regulation.
In this case, people aren't capable of making the right decision about cell phone use. They know there is a tiny risk of killing someone while distracted by their phone, but they feel that driving is so safe that it won't happen to them. Unfortunately, "it happens to them" rather frequently now, and a lot of people are being killed or injured unnecessarily. So it's clear that people aren't handling the freedom very well, and it's time to adjust it down to see what happens.
Take the train if you want to txt during your commute.
We really don't have many "rights". Most "rights" people talk about are priviledges, like health care, schools, a job, etc.
The real rights we have, such as privacy, free speech, and the permission to own firearms, are being assailed by the government every day.
And the original point of my post is that to ban texting is arbitrary; you can't ban everything before the fact. If anything, put additional punishment on someone whose accident was found to be caused by texting.
Making more laws that people won't follow (as noted elsewhere in this discussion) just erodes more of our freedoms, but doesn't really protect us anymore. For example, I don't wear my seatbelt.
However, just please be aware that not wearing a seatbelt can easily turn a 20mph walk-away accident into a fatal one. Despite the stupid laws surrounding them, buckling up isn't a bad habit to develop.
Have you considered that the point of these 'stupid' laws is to save the public the expense of emergency medical care/roadside cleanup for non-seatbelt-wearing people who end up flying through the windscreen or pinballing around inside the vehicle? The government is not very interested in your private behavior, it's interested in minimizing the risk your behavior presents to others - both directly (DUI or cellphone bans) and indirectly (through the financial impact of accidents on the public purse).
This is actually a great study - comprehensive, rigorous, and quite recent. The overall estimate of accident costs is just shy of $300bn/year, which is something like 1% of GDP. Even if we assume only 1/10th of fatal accidents involve innocent victims of careless drivers - probably somewhat low - that's still a substantial burden on the economy, which the public has a collective interest in mitigating.
I think we're somewhat talking right past one another on that more-philosophical thread. I'll respond there tomorrow.
When roads are the sole form of developed transportation infrastructure in an area that's too sparse or weather-adverse for practical biking, one's right to travel implies a right to drive.
Philosophical rights and their interpretations by courts are quite disconnected, with courts mostly choosing to not restrict themselves (surprise, surprise).
The whole US legal system has been bursting at the seams for quite some time based on this flawed idea that rights are axiomatic rather than universal qualifications, with technology and privately-owned commons forcing the issue. For example, a communications network shouldn't have the ability to censor based on the contents of messages (this is currently mostly taken care of by lesser statutes, and luckily it's also easily solvable with encryption).
Seriously, if you want to be left alone you can go live in the woods like Theodore Kacyzinski (before he started mailing bombs to people, obviously). Why is it that you think these universal rights are objectively real and articulable, but you are so opposed to the institutions that people collectively invest with agency in order to protect those rights - constitutional government, the UN and so forth? Laws are the accumulation of mutual agreements, when you get down to it. If you hate courts so much, go live in a civil law country where statute prevails over all else and the courts are limited to mechanistic applications of that. From what I can see, you enjoy substantially greater freedom in a common-law jurisdiction like the US than you do in most civil law jurisdictions, which is one reason that people are not fleeing the US to live in Latin America.
For example, the primitive-based view of the right to free speech defends my ability to discuss whatever topic I'd like while in a public park (with the usual caveats about speech that incites actions). But if that public commons is sold to a private entity, those protections magically vanish and I can be kicked out arbitrarily based on the contents of what I am saying, even though society continues to have the same relationship with the park. The internet is one such privately owned public commons; should an ISP be able to cancel my service based on what I posted on a message board?
The standard ways of addressing the above problems are private contracts or additional laws. Both create unbounded complexity that isn't understandable by the common person and thus contrary to the very idea of 'rights'.
PS It's funny that you call me out for hating on institutions, because I think am starting to come around to seeing the importance of them as a concept. I just think many 'respected' institutions are calcified and bankrupt, with their actual behavior very different from what they purport. (Hm. I wonder if this is why people cling to process ('democracy') as an institution - there's little else left.)
Allow me to suggest this book, which is a great introduction to law and economics without being too technical in either subject: http://www.amazon.com/Legal-Analyst-Toolkit-Thinking-about/d... or if it is not to your taste, this one is good too: http://www.amazon.com/Laws-Order-What-Economics-Matters/dp/0... At the very least, check out Arrow's theorem: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrows_impossibility_theorem which explains why ideal procedural outcomes are not possible.
Care to elaborate why? I'm not arguing because I think you're going to suddenly acquiesce, but because I'm trying to refine my own viewpoint.
I obviously can't quickly read the linked books to see what they're actually saying, but they clearly have their own set of philosophies. This is fine, but these philosophies are not beyond reproach.
And as to Arrow's theorem and the problems of procedural outcomes - that's precisely my point! You're the one coming from the viewpoint where we're all bound to an ever-growing system that possesses the mandate to regulate whatever is economically prudent. If a system is incapable of adequately taking into account the conflicting desires of its inhabitants, it should be decentralized so that everybody doesn't have to agree!
system that possesses the mandate to regulate whatever is economically prudent
I don't agree that it's necessarily ever expanding, but insofar as it involves regulating whatever is economically prudent then sure, because I'm a utilitarian. Of course, I only have limited foresight, so I support the democratic approach as a necessary evil although I'd rather a pure technocracy. As long as it produces a reasonable approximation of Pareto optimality, I'm OK with that. It's imperfect, of course, but at least it's a methodology.
[...] it should be decentralized so that everybody doesn't have to agree!
But it already is; living in the US gives you a choice between over 50 different legal systems, and that's only at the state level. Some of them provide exceedingly poor outcomes for their citizens IMHO, but there you go.
Where I live, these laws only apply to people under 18, and we don't have a motorcycle helmet law either.
Whoop-de-do. Besides thinking that motorcycle users who don't use helmets are semi-suicidal fools, I might point out that wearing a helmet or not has little bearing on the danger a rider presents to other road/sidewalk users; DUI or using a smartphone while driving does.
How can we apply technology to at least alleviate the problem? Some phones have a speech-to-text mode where you can have texts read to you or you can speak and have it turned into SMS.
What happens when the phone is more integrated with the car? It limits the driver's interaction with it and gives the "system" an opportunity to control when the phone rings (perhaps don't allow it to ring when the car detects it's in stop & go traffic).
Rather than bitching about how "idiots" use their cell phones perhaps we can be more productive in thinking about other solutions to the problem .
Such a system mandated by insurance/government (same thing) would clearly be an abomination of privacy/ownership issues, but if it was developed for end-users to help prove their innocence, it could be implemented properly (user-based crypto+open formats+local storage).
Why do you argue that members of the public or of an insurance pool have no interest in minimizing the economic cost to them of reckless drivers' risky behavior? Sure, if you drive everywhere at 100 mph and we buy auto insurance from the same company, your direct impact on my premium is minimal, maybe a few cents extra annually, because your increased risk is spread out across a large pool of insureds. But risky drivers exist in quantity too, and collectively their impact on the cost of insurance is large, as is the drag they create on GDP or taxes.
Certainly, I think that vehicle telemetry data should be available to defendants in driving-related criminal cases or litigation. And as a matter of fact, it is, via the legal procedure of discovery. You seem to think that this should only be available to the defendant, but never to prosecutors or plaintiffs. Why not? If you're driving on the public highway, then your driving behavior is a matter of public concern to the extent that it impacts others; and to the extent that other people are exposed to the risks arising from your operation of a vehicle, you cannot reasonably claim an expectation of privacy - unless you're willing to move to a regime of strict liability for accidents, and pay correspondingly higher insurance premiums.
What would such a system look like if developed by insurance companies? I'm guessing it would contain a cell modem that would continually upload as much data as possible to the insurance company. They'd then datamine that looking for 'dangerous' drivers and charge them more, even if they have less accidents.
Who would you rather have in your insurance pool going forward - someone who speeds everywhere with no accidents, or someone who drives under the speed limit yet has managed to total their car twice in the past year? There's no answer to that - my point is that we just don't really know who the bigger risk is a priori despite much effort, so the game-changing goal should be better analysis after the fact.
There's no answer to that - my point is that we just don't really know who the bigger risk is a priori despite much effort
What do you think insurance actuaries do all day, other than study insurable risk? Read your insurance policy if you have one, they can and will raise your premium if you have a history of accidents. Honestly, you seem kind of paranoid. Insurers want to reduce risk, but still keep their product cheap enough for people to buy it.
> What do you think insurance actuaries do all day, other than study insurable risk?
This is precisely what I meant by 'much effort'.
Let's make this concrete: If you frequented a lot of bars as a designated driver and the insurance companies gained access to your location data, what do you think would happen to your rates? How do you think this change compares to the change that would occur if they could somehow perfectly predict your expected payout?
And actually, yes, I am paranoid and proud of it. The corner cases of systems are the important ones; expected behavior is dead easy.
Nothing, because my location data doesn't tell you whether I'm a driver or a passenger. Even if the insurance companies do have that information, your example depends on their being oblivious to the existence of designated drivers. I might, for example, be operating a taxi or limousine service, where my job is to drive drunken people around while they have a good time.
I'm all about corner cases, but it does not follow that paranoia is the sensible position to take. I can just as easily suggest corner cases where insurance companies decide to skip the analysis, increase premiums on everyone evenly, and blame inflation, because it considerably lowers their overhead and the administrative savings offset a good deal of the increased payouts, so that the premiums don't rise too much. Unsustainable over any period but the very short term, of course, but many would argue that something very similar happened at AIG in the runup to the financial crisis. Not performing proper diligence on the financial instruments whose risk they were insuring against (via credit default swaps) looked like financial genius until the claims suddenly exceeded the value of the premiums. That's why it's cheaper to pay actuaries than to place your faith in people's common sense.
There are different interests to be balanced here, but it seems to me you are complaining about the existence of the scales (ie the court).
And as to the scales, one must recognize that they're imperfect. One is in a much worse position with a log of habitual speeding - having to then prove (from a presumption of guilt) that their speed was indeed prudent.
This research examined the effects of hands-free cell phone conversations on simulated driving. The authors found that these conversations impaired driver's reactions to vehicles braking in front of them. The authors assessed whether this impairment could be attributed to a withdrawal of attention from the visual scene, yielding a form of inattention blindness.
Cell phone-induced failures of visual attention during simulated driving. Strayer, David L.; Drews, Frank A.; Johnston, William A. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, Vol 9(1), Mar 2003, 23-32.
http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/xap/9/1/23/
and:
Summary: We used a high-fidelity driving simulator to compare the performance of cell-phone drivers with drivers who were legally intoxicated from ethanol. When drivers were conversing on either a hand-held or hands-free cell-phone, their reactions were sluggish and they attempted to compensate by driving slower and increasing the following distance from the vehicle immediately in front of them. By contrast, when drivers were legally intoxicated they exhibited a more aggressive driving style, following closer to the vehicle immediately in front of them and applying more force while braking. When controlling for driving difficulty and time on task, cell-phone drivers exhibited greater impairment than intoxicated drivers.
Fatal Distraction? A comparison of the cell-phone driver and the drunk driver. David L. Strayer, Frank A. Drews, and Dennis J. Crouch. Proceedings of the Second International Driving Symposium on Human Factors in Driver Assessment, Training and Vehicle Design.
My question is: Will states implement a mapping exception?
There's only so far you can go to try to protect people from being idiots.
There are plenty of data points now that show that texting related accidents and deaths went up when the bans were enacted because instead of doing the sensible thing and NOT texting while driving, these people simply moved the phone into their lap instead of in a place where they could still kind of see the road ahead.
It's an unfortunate fact that people have tendencies to be extremely stupid under the guise of "I can do it, it won't cause me to crash", and no law will fix this.
This isn't about protecting people from being idiots; it's about protecting people from idiots.
DUI bans aren't about the drunk drivers, they're about the innocent third parties they kill and maim. Ditto the requirement to hold third-party insurance when driving a vehicle.
I suspect that what's needed is not merely a ban, but a public education campaign to ram this point home. ("Do you want to be maimed by an idiot who can't pull over to answer a text? If not, don't do it to other people!")
Edit: And yes, I agree with your last point about a PR campaign. Personally, I'm not convinced we should go about banning every little behavior (especially in cases like this which are effectively unenforceable) but instead spend the resources on education about why a behavior is undesirable, uncool, dangerous, etc.
Getting a ticket or even going to jail is a lot more concrete for most people than accidents, which happen to other people.
If the only people impacted were the idiots, I'd agree with you. When some 21 year old valley girl kills a 5 year old kid because she was texting, or some 50 year old investment banker runs down a pregnant woman because he was screaming at someone on his cell phone, then it's not just the idiots who get hurt. Government shouldn't protect you from your own stupidity, but it should protect other people from it.
Do you want roving scan vans on highways looking at every driver on the road for these infractions? Massively increase police presence on all roads (and gl getting anyone to pay for that these days)? Yes the Fed can try to make a full electronics ban, but that won't stop people from using the devices and still causing deaths that shouldn't have happened.
People are selfish by nature. They don't care about how their actions affect anyone else. Trying to put more and more laws in place to try to stop this just leads to societies that have already existed and failed under this massive weight of "there's a law covering absolutely everything you could possibly do".
So really, what is this Fed law going to stop?
By making drivers a bit more paranoid.
Massively increase police presence on all roads
Not needed. Police manage to enforce seatbelt laws quite effectively without any special technology or vast budget increases. It's pretty easy to see when someone is using a cellphone; I notice it all the time without having any special training whatsoever. You could also use evidence of a phone/text conversation as evidence in accident lawsuits, leading to increased damages or charges of criminal negligence where it can be shown that the driver was operating a phone at the time of the accident. This would probably provide an even larger disincentive than issuing tickets: where the action is unlawful, then liability for an accident involving that activity is much easier to prove and win damages for, so the cost of causing an accident becomes much higher and insurers start looking for ways to discourage drivers from engaging in cellphone use too, such as refusing to provide coverage where it is shown that the driver was on the phone. Emergency use would still be available as an affirmative defense.
So really, what is this Fed law going to stop?
It's not a fed law, it's an encouragement to the state governments to pass laws against cellphone use (and similar). If you read the NTSB report (executive summary: http://www.ntsb.gov/news/events/2011/gray_summit_mo/index.ht...) you'll see that they've anticipated many of the issues you raise and considered the problem in context. Personally, I think the NTSB is one of the best government agencies, along with NIST and a few others which have a strong engineering focus.
This should be a fair discouragement for the practice.
Please pass the law, then in 10 years we can all laugh about how people used to actually drive a car while talking on a cell phone as if that was acceptable!
(Although I hope not to be driving my own car in 10 years. That's robot work. I'll be reading a book or napping until the robot fires the "human attention required" alarm.)
Does talking while driving divert some of my attention? Of course. But driving on an artificially speed limited controlled-access road (with low traffic) requires a limited amount of attention in the first place (a good chunk spent checking the mirror to avoid being hassled by the standard cop driving 95mph).
'Yeah, so we should talk about this...hello? hello? Can you hear me now? I think going through a dead spot...how about nCRUNCH'
http://www.ntsb.gov/news/events/2011/gray_summit_mo/index.ht...
Police patrols identify drivers who're driving erratically, video them if they're holding a handset, then pull them over. If not holding a handset, then (a) it's possible to detect cellphone emissions and pull over those who are driving without passengers, or (b) dangerous driving constitutes Probable Cause for pulling the driver's cellphone usage log to see if it was in use while the vehicle was in motion.
(It's labour-intensive, but it's not rocket science.)
I suppose I don't want to see the police patrols spending all of their time trying to enforce a ban on this one source of distraction. Instead of ticketing people for engaging in one behavior which makes them more likely to drive recklessly, just go after the people who are driving recklessly.
Interestingly, it appears that states where medical marijuana is legal see a lower rate of fatal traffic accidents; stoned drivers are thought to be more cautious than normal, and over-compensate for their psychomotor impariment by driving more slowly and waiting longer at stop signs: http://hometestingblog.testcountry.com/?p=17893
When you're talking to someone in the car, they can react to traffic and act as a second set of eyes for you. And, you're not struggling to hear them over all the noise injected by our 1990s-era cell phone networks. Finally, passengers in your car do not suddenly ring, giving you only a few seconds to acknowledge something potentially important (distracting you from the road). I've seen people when their phone rings; they go into crisis mode and mentally drop everything until they've answered the phone or decided to ignore the call. When you're driving, you can't do that. And it's something a passenger wouldn't require you to do.
As for the radio; you have the opportunity to adjust it at your leisure, typically without even moving your hands off the steering wheel. It's simply not as distracting as a phone call.
Passengers and the radio are dangerous, but not as dangerous as talking on your phone.
Road accidents are expensive for the public finances - think of all the mergency workers and medical expenses multiplied by the large number of road accidents. That really adds up over a year, which is a big reason we have such a thing as a 'national transportation safety board' in the first place.
The most recent stats (2009) show about 30,0000 fatalities a year (http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Main/index.aspx). Thirty thousand deaths! Even in a country with a population of ~300m, that's a lot. On the plus side, it's fallen by about a third over the last 15 years. The most recent fall is probably linked to a loss of economic activity and the rising rice of gas, but regulation of vehicle construction and the like has played a big part too. Consider the loss to the economy of 30,000 people a year, plus the cost of people who are 'just' injured; there's no #s on that FARS page but I've seen estimates of $250-350 billion a year, which is near 2% of GDP. Put another way, if the ~30% drop in fatalities shown at the link above is a good proxy for costs, the US economy benefits to the tune of $100 billion a year. Changing driver behavior only accounts for a fraction of that, but the obvious place to start would be looking at DUI statistics.