Highways fatalities up 22%. Our smartphone addiction is a big reason why
latimes.com
latimes.com
I had a friend call me while driving on a 35 MPH road with not much traffic. While talking to me, he came to a 4-way stop, ran it because he was distracted, and could have easily caused a wreck. I tell people "don't call me while you're driving!" but they do it anyway. After running the 4-way stop (with other cars at the intersection), he pulled over, told me what happened, and swore off using the phone while driving.
A couple of years ago while stopped at an intersection, some dumb woman slammed into me (and the next 2 cars ahead of me) and her car ended up in the oncoming traffic lane facing the other direction. So not a "she bumped my fender" kind of wreck. My car was totaled, I had $46K in medical bills, multiple CT scans, X-rays, surgery to fixed a smashed nose, a 2nd surgery to fixup the 1st surgery, 25 Dr appointments during the height of Covid, and there was a person with Covid right next to me in the ER the day of the wreck.
Was it really worth it for that person to be able to text while driving?
To top it off, the fine in KY for texting while driving is $25. Big deterrent, right?
Getting screwed out of 4-8hr of your time is much less likely to make your standard of living and financial stability slide backwards in a way that takes many months to a year to correct. Of course the majority of support for people who are in favor of anything other than the status quo comes from people who want petty stuff to be maximally life-interrupting so....
All I'm saying is it's not clear-cut that community service is less disruptive to the poor than a fine. Maybe the fine should be a percentage of your income instead of a fixed number, as is done in some places.
I can see your point, so instead of increasing the fine for texting, I would be fine with losing your license permanently if you are using a phone while driving (talking or texting) and are at fault (any percentage) in an accident.
Almost any penalty one can come up with will be harder for the already-disadvantaged, and still shrugged off by someone with sufficient resources.
Would disproportionately affect rich people living in suburbs.
I.e. the people who are financially secure enough to have spare fucks to give about matters of principal rather than economic survival.
Legislatures that want to get reelected can't just screw those people. It's a long slow process of divide and conqueror and pulling that off assumed continued political will.
Fix the courts before making the fines higher.
I'm personally not convinced (and along with me, evidently, the vast majority of other drivers) that operating a vehicle to the letter of the law is the most salient way toward reducing traffic deaths. I would much, much rather see a reframing of the way people approach cars, including a reduction in car dependency and a CDL requirement for vehicles over a certain dimensions or weight (I have lifted trucks in mind).
Insofar as these are problems, this is an implementation detail about how to do it properly.
> I'm personally not convinced (and along with me, evidently, the vast majority of other drivers) that operating a vehicle to the letter of the law is the most salient way toward reducing traffic deaths. I would much, much rather see a reframing of the way people approach cars, including a reduction in car dependency and a CDL requirement for vehicles over a certain dimensions or weight (I have lifted trucks in mind).
Sure, those things would also help and I'm in favor of them. But cars speeding and running red lights is extremely dangerous to me as a pedestrian or cyclist. As we found out in 2020, reducing the number of people on the road just makes the people on the road drive even more insanely.
Sure. It still makes the cameras insane in practice. And the introduction of red light cameras is, in a statistical sense, not just annoying but dangerous.
It seems to me that adding cameras, with their legal problems and perverse incentives to shorten yellow light times, leads directly to a worse outcome without treating any problem.
Rather to make an actual scalable difference, it needs to be decided if these roads are going to be the highways they're mostly built as and treated like, or streets designed for people. Some certainly need to be highways, but if that is to be the case the designer needs to finish the job. Throwing a stoplight and a 45mph sign at the problem is a lazy solution that no one takes seriously precisely because it does not fit the application. Red light cameras similarly ignore the problem while adding somewhat to it.
But yes, traffic issues run much deeper than that, but the fact that any attempts at efficient traffic enforcement generate so much outcry is telling.
Yup.
Counterintuitively talking with someone who is in the car with you is much less dangerous than talking with someone on a phone.
A big reason for this is that a passenger can see when you are doing something that needs more attention. The conversation can naturally adjust to match the amount of attention that you can safely spare.
Driven in turn by a lack of empathy, and a sense of feeling interconnected with others. As fueled, in turn, by smartphones.
I routinely witness people brazenly running red lights, and my instinct is to throw bricks at them -- so how am I not part of the problem?
I don't really know how we back away from this.
Road rage and aggressive driving aren’t new though. Neither is antisocial behavior on the roads or otherwise. Is there actually more of it?
I would be interested to see comparisons in app usage statistics between countries compared to similar highway fatality statistics for those countries.
For many people in many countries that aren't the US, trading [Whatsapp] voice memos is one of the only ways people interact with each other through their phones. I would imagine that chatting with your friends becomes a lot easier and probably safer if you're doing it that way while driving.
I've seen somewhere on twitter a thread positing that Covid changed people's brains (long covid especially), but let's take that with a grain of sand maybe.
Right neighbourhood anyway, it seems the rise in these behaviours coincides with the rise of the pandemic.
Get caught using your phone? Lose your license.
Excessive speeding? $MEGAHUGE ticket on first offense; lose your license on second attempt.
Contextual predictions will make word input and browser automation vastly more useful.
It seems like there's always corner cases that aren't considered (in your proposal above, what if the navigator doesn't have a phone because they're a child, or because their phone ran out of batteries? What happens when the sensors/algorithms are wrong about how fast we're going? What happens when the sensors are wrong about whether or not there's another device? What if that second device keeps disappearing and re-apparing while somebody tries to do a multiple step operation?) ... Trying to build some water-tight mechanism to keep us out of trouble but also with access to full functionality "when we can use it responsibly" is an endless rabbit hole.
IMO it feels like a systemic problem asking for a systemic solution. Whether we think that solution is self-driving cars, rail travel, walkable cities, or taxis probably says as much about our politics as anything else though.
Better option is to roll out the phone detection cameras and hand out 10 year license suspensions.
That’s on you. Like almost everyone over the age of 50, I learnt to drive before mobile phones and GPS, and it was fine. Paper maps and street directories worked well enough. Getting lost was uncommon, and no big deal.
Your phone isn't the state.
Once a penal colony always a penal colony...
(Not to say that a large majority of Western European and large minority of US jurisdictions won't try to do the same damn thing.)
they can't make it illegal to check GPS or look at a map or change the radio station and they can't prove you were doing anything more than that.
I simply can't read messages and type with my fingers if I wanted to, while moving. Do people really do that without immediately crashing?
Or is using Google Maps with Android Auto and tapping to view incoming texts what should be a felony?
If looking away from the road is the problem, then we should prohibit any controls in the center console for climate control or radios, and...passengers?
When I was younger and dumber I used to do literally that. Get a text message, read it, and respond to it, while driving. With a stick shift, too. I can't believe I never hurt anyone doing this.
In BC, Canada, where I now live, this is prosecuted rather aggressively as 'distracted driving'. First ticket is in the neighborhood of $400 + required increase in premiums, and the threshold is touching your phone or having it within reach and not in a cradle. A second offense within a year can lead to a suspended license. It certainly shows. When I go down to the states, it is noticeable how many people I can see interacting with their phones compared to BC.
I'm sure everyone has been in a situation where they are not paying attention. But I think the danger with texting is that it happens more often. It is unlikely to be just one message. Which makes it more likely to result in an accident.
Whilst a passenger (and not a driver), look inside nearby cars sometime. The prevalence of people doing exactly this is shocking.
And that's how we have a police state. Honestly, emotions and laws really don't mix, that's how we have more people incarcerated both per capita and in total numbers than any other country in the world.
"Super-predators," gets votes, but the repercussions were pretty horrible.
Something much less horrible would be to make gasoline super expensive like in Europe, or lower the speed limit to a speed that is much less likely to cause fatalities, or do an old fashioned marketing / awareness push. The More You Know.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_More_You_Know
Also, the article seems to be speculating on the cause:
>How many of those deaths involved distracted driving?
>“It’s much bigger than the data show,” said Bruce Landsberg, vice chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board. Data collection methods are so riddled with problems, he said, that reliable estimates are difficult if not impossible.
So it's bigger than the data shows, but reliable estimates are difficult or impossible, so it seems he's talking out his ass.
Maybe it's because many more people were working at home in 2021-2022.
No, that's how we have a slippery-slope argument.
Studies have shown that texting while driving is about a high a risk factor as drinking alcohol. If not classed as a felony (and intrinsically more difficult to control) - the state should at least do something to seriously discourage people from doing it.
You can tell from accident statistics that risk has not actually gone up as much as if every driver had started drinking alcohol in 2008.
Apples and oranges.
When you are drunk, you might be 20 percent or more impaired - continuously. Sufficient to cause an accident.
When you text - you are 100 percent impaired for 20 or more seconds. Sufficient to cause an accident.
Reducing your comparison to just one dimension ("duration") while completely ignoring the other ("severity") is just - silly.
Also, your estimate of 5 seconds total duration for texting is plainly unrealistic. It takes 5 seconds just to find the chat bubble (assuming your phone hasn't gone into sleep mode) and adjust your cognitive focus.
But this whole exchange is silly, so I'll stop there.
It's plainly obvious that texting causes considerable impairment, not just for driving, but for walking, or just standing there oblivious to everything happening around you ... for just about everything, actually.
Plainly obvious.
Not quite. Second to China by total number, sixth per capital. “Land of the free” my arse. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcera...
But… traffic laws isn’t how you got there. Most of the rest of the developed world has stricter traffic laws, lower rates of car accident fatalities, and much lower incarceration rates.