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Phone use should be treated just like DUI. You don't need a chemical intoxication for your attention and reaction time to be impaired. In CA, this means first offense: 1 year suspension of license, second offense: 2 years, third offense: 3 years. Honestly, I don't understand why people shouldn't lose their license permanently for such repeat offenses but I'm not a lawmaker.

I can tell you that the Tavern League in the state of Wisconsin plays a huge role in why DUI's are enforced like shit here: they want people in bars, drinking. Not necessarily driving but they're fine with it if it means their member establishments make more money.

Rather than draconian punishments that ruin people’s lives for something that millions of people evidently have little executive control over, we could just have a technological solution: have Android and iOS disable the screen on any phone moving faster than 5mph.

This would inconvenience passengers of all sorts but it would immediately eliminate all phone related accidents without getting people with bad impulse control license suspensions. Most people with license suspensions continue driving anyway.

It’s hard for me to see any other solution that really changes anything. Millions of people have a phone addiction and punishing them for using their phone while driving may be just but it won’t be effective. To me this is more than worth the very minor inconvenience of not being able to use my phone while riding in a bus, car, or train.

The increased likelihood of negative consequences, like police action, is a deterrent.

The comparison with drug use can only go so far. And even in that domain, despite what harm reduction purists will tell you, supply reduction DOES work to an extent, in that it dissuades casual users. Looking back at phone use, a casual distracted driver really only differs from an addict in how often they’re doing it. If you hear about your friend being raked over the coals by the cops because of distracted driving, I honestly do believe that you’d be less likely do to it yourself.

Where I live, cops routinely drive through lakes of traffic on motorbikes and will tap on your window and signal for you to take the next exit if they see you on your phone. It works.

Even with all the imperfections present, it’s still worlds better than less-than-half-baked ideas like disabling phones travelling beyond a certain speed. Christ. Guess I’ll just never catch a train again.

What you purpose reduces the problem by some relatively low percent. We already know lots of people do not change behavior when faced when this exact deterrent. It’s also very expensive.

What I propose reduces the problem by 100%.l and is very easy and cheap to implement.

Is it really that burdensome to not use your phone on the train? I don’t now and it wasn’t that long ago nobody had phones.

Why bother with plumbing either

> What I propose reduces the problem by 100%

You might want to think a little harder there. Phone conversations themself are a distraction and, per your own arguments in this subthread, would not be eliminated under this proposal.

I will never forget the Allstate app refusing to let me use Google Maps to find the hospital when my wife was nonresponsive.

Idiots who interfere with the normal operation of someone else's devices need to be locked up.

I hope it all came out well. I can understand the frustration. But many, many more people are killed by distracted drivers on their phones.

At least there’s things you can do to control or ameliorate situations like that. You can learn where the local hospitals are. You can use android auto or CarPlay. You can call 911. You can’t control the guy running a red because he’s on his phone and he’s much much more common. This is a minimally intrusive intervention on devices that already do all sorts of things to “interfere with normal operation” that would save thousands of lives for in the 99.99999% of other cases a minor inconvenience to everyone else. A return to the year 2005.

Limiting the expected use of a device is inexcusable.

Those in power have obvious incentives to implement limitation to harm their opponents. Flagging political emails as spam is a well know example.

Once some limits are tolerated, tyranny becomes inevitable.

So millions of people commuting by train suffer because of selfish drivers who keep killing people?

They're suffering a very minor inconvenience. They could read a book, pull out a tablet or a laptop, read the newspaper, do nothing, talk to their fellow commuters, etc.

So yes, thousands of lives in exchange for millions of people not being able to doomscroll Facebook and Tiktok during their train commute seems OK. Driving while distracted is already a crime in lots of places, there's variable enforcement, but it's not making a big dent. Something else needs to be done.

It's bizarre to me how strong the reactions against this are. You're talking about suffering: I'm talking about returning to what was the status quo not that many years ago. This is addict behavior.

I do not own a car, but I do take the train lots of places, and I enjoy being able to communicate with people while I commute.

For what it's worth, I agree that distracted driving is a huge problem, which is a big part of why I would like to see a drastic reduction in the rate of car ownership, the number of cars in our cities, and extremely harsh punishments for drivers who kill people. We also should make it much, much easier to live far away from cars, but close to other people, in developments like https://www.bloommerwede.nl/ for instance.

This reminds me of how MADD looked at drunk driving and decided the problem was all alcohol and not, in fact, car dependency.

Well, again: which do you think is easier?

1. Two software companies making a software change.

2. Convincing (or forcing) hundreds of millions of people to stop driving, reorganizing cities, eliminating rural and suburban living to the greatest extent possible.

I too enjoy using my phone while traveling. But if I couldn't, it'd be no skin off my back most of the time. And, I mentioned only disabling the screen, not the whole phone.

Honestly I would be more in favour of limiting car speed to 5mph

People commuting by train, bus, taxi, ridesharing...

Having phones disable themselves while moving fast is absolutely ridiculous, imaging if you're on a 4 hour bus ride and can't communicate with people you need to meet at your destination.

Not anyone can or is willing to carry a laptop or tablet with them everywhere, especially if you're taking a bus or are a passenger in a car

I don't have to imagine that scenario, that's how it worked for most of my life and how it still works on some of my travel.

Also, there'd be nothing to stop you from saying "Hey Siri, call so and so." Only the screen would be disabled.

so phones would be unresponsive on all public transport, boats, ferries, for all car passengers, and maybe even in places with shitty GPS?

> The fix for this is easy: pull people over.

Or, as is currently being tested in many European countries, cameras above the road that automatically detect drivers on their phones.

But I am not optimistic about that taking off in the US, where even speed cameras are a rarity (although I do not really know why).

Because Americans have a right to face their accuser, making it easier to just send the cop that caught them. That's the short version. There's been plenty of "scamera" activism and cases won if you want more info. Try 4409

Camera traffic law enforcement in the US has historically been abused to generate revenue rather than used to increase safety. There was, for example, a wave of states and municipalities that banned red light cameras about a decade ago because cities were illegally shortening the yellow light timing to catch more red light runners.

See the links on https://yro.slashdot.org/story/09/03/24/145247/mississippi-p...

Some places in the US use third-parties to enforce traffic laws. I was once in a park and I got a ticket for not coming to a complete stop at a stop sign by a third-party company employed by the park.

I looked into the legality of receiving a ticket from someone who is not a cop and I was under no legal obligation to pay it. However, they can ruin your credit if you refuse to pay, so I just went ahead and paid it. I did not seek legal advice and maybe I should have, but the fee was less than a lawyer would have cost.

People say this all the time, but I've yet to see this demonstrated. I am extremely skeptical of it, since it seems to comport with people wanting it to be true.

I think the biggest issue here is simply that the United States has created a transportation system that is inherently unsafe and ungovernable. By universalizing the automobile as the only de facto mode of transportation, we have made revoking a bad driver's license a hardship.

The only way to fix the problem is fixing the infrastructure which is extremely expensive, and politically would be wildly unpopular. We are currently doing the exact opposite -- increasing vehicle size and weight in a myopic arms race -- which means we will likely live with the scourge of traffic deaths (100+ dead per day) for the rest of our lives...

I do not want more automated law enforcement by surveillance. On balance, I think that would be a fix worse than the problem, even if the problem is this bad. These things creep.

I can guess with a very high probability that a driver in front of me is on their phone just by the way they move in their lane. I hate driving behind distracted drivers -- they tend to do things suddenly (stop, steer, or crash).

Don't forget about the back though: I had a driver slam into me while stopped at a light. She wrecked 4 cars including her own and sent me to the hospital with a $25K ER bill. Took 2 years to resolve that.

I get so sick of hearing people say "It's okay: my car lets me talk hands free!" It isn't just the hands that are a problem ... it's your brain being disengaged that's the problem. No hands-free phone fixes that.

The bottom line is, no one should be using their phone and driving. If you have to use the phone, pull over.

The new thing around here is people driving along while carrying on a video call.

Usually holding the phone up in their hand, but sometimes with the phone in a holder on the windshield.

It's bizarre how culturally accepted it is. I think I'd rather be in a car with someone drinking a beer than dicking around on their phone.

They pull people over in Norway and give them hefty fines (~1000 USD). We don’t have any statistics for number of car accidents where the driver was “probably” using their phone, so it’s hard to say if it works. So same issue was the article brings up.

I feel that the media is partially to blame too. They like to victimise drivers who are caught using their phones, or driving over the speed limit for that matter. Or maybe it’s just my point of view.