Texting and driving ought to be treated similarly to a felony DUI.
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.
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.
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.
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.