Comment by prirun | Hacker News Reader

Comment by prirun | Hacker News Reader

Most people think handsfree is okay, but it's bullshit. The problem with phones is that drivers' brains are distracted from driving, not that their hands aren't on the wheel (although that too is problematic).

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?

> Most people think handsfree is okay, but it's bullshit. The problem with phones is that drivers' brains are distracted from driving, not that their hands aren't on the wheel (although that too is problematic).

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.

It’s also socially acceptable to just ignore the passenger when navigating a tricky section.

The fines for driving in the US are absurdly low in general. Through our laws incentivizing driving cars at every stage we have created a car centric society. Part of this is our laws with low fines and punishments. Realistically, someone texting and driving should have their license revoked, and probably a 4 or 5 figure fine. And many other driving offenses should as well.

Fines unfairly affect the poor. The punishment should be community service, say highway trash pickup.

Not sure how that's better. Poor people are more likely to have jobs with inflexible hours.

Because when you're poor getting screwed out of hundreds of dollars because Karen who has the ear of legislators thinks we need to be tough on on <class of petty misdbehavior> causes a cascading problem in which you have to choose who to stiff (landlord? utilities? phone bill?) this month, who to stiff slightly less next month, etc, etc as you get back on track. It's like perverse version of that 9-square tile puzzle with one tile missing where if you make any wrong moves your standard of living gets kicked down substantially and you spend months to years getting your financial stability back to where it was.

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....

What if you get fired from your job because your mandatory community service is at the same time as your shift?

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.

> thinks we need to be tough on on <class of petty misdbehavior>

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.

sliding scale? https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/06/in-finland-speeding-t...

Almost any penalty one can come up with will be harder for the already-disadvantaged, and still shrugged off by someone with sufficient resources.

Imagine how fast public transport would improve if we just skipped fines and handed out multi year license bans instead.

Would disproportionately affect rich people living in suburbs.

>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.

Just fine x% the value of the car being driven.

The standard of proof in non-criminal US traffic courts is usually "preponderance of the evidence" and the various problems that entails. For license revocation it's even lower as that's administrative. I've been fined near 4 figures on the basis that "the cop says he counted the lines and time it took to pass them."

Fix the courts before making the fines higher.

In the case of my accident, the driver was clearly 100% at fault and did not dispute that. She should permanently lose her license for all the damage she caused.

Absurdly, people think speed or red light cameras that automatically ticket are some insane thing. Here in Chicago people complain that you get a ticket for going 6+ mph over the speed limit, as if that is somehow not really speeding...

Speed limits often seem entirely arbitrary, and specifically with red light cameras municipalities have been repeatedly caught shortening yellow-light durations to increase ticket revenue.

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).

> Speed limits often seem entirely arbitrary, and specifically with red light cameras municipalities have been repeatedly caught shortening yellow-light durations to increase ticket revenue.

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.

> Insofar as these are problems, this is an implementation detail about how to do it properly.

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.

Anecdotally, in the hellscape sprawl of Phoenix, lights tend to be longer in the outer reaches of the suburbs. The grids are larger, the roads are wider, and there you must sit while each disparate line of cars takes its turn rushing off to wherever. And there is where I tend to see people brazenly running red lights.

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.

You can work around perverse incentives by making the programs revenue neutral (like, any extra revenue gets mailed to transit riders, or something like that, and don't contract out red light cameras to some private company, have them be run by the DOT or something).

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.

Phones are the perfect storm of distraction: eyes, hands, and attention.

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