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Comment by Amezarak | Hacker News Reader

People are making snaps (I see ZILLIONS of stories made by car drivers), scrolling through TikTok, watching YouTube, sending texts, not just making calls.

There is a very simple technological solution to this - disable screens on phones in motion faster than xmph - but people are violently against this minor inconvenience for passengers and mass transport commuters for the same reason drivers can't put their phone down, so this problem will likely continue to get worse, especially as the younger generation becomes drivers.

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We're so far gone that we now bolt garbage touchscreens into the middle of the car to distract drivers by default. The same thing that would get you a fine if caught is OK as long as it comes with the car.

Or is it? My car has a warning when it starts up that basically says that the factory installed touchscreen is to dangerous to use while driving and I'm liable for any distractions it causes me.

I am more or less in favor of this - but how do you solve for the problem that not everyone in the car is actually driving and may not want to be prevented from using their phone when riding as a passenger? If we can solve that one, it sounds like a no-brainer to me.

I don't think you can in an intelligent way. One simple solution would be to only disable the screen if the phone is connected to car Bluetooth - but this would just result in most phone addicts not connecting their phone to the car.

That's why people are against it - the idea of passengers returning to the pre-smartphone era while traveling seems to be considered by most people totally outrageous and and unacceptable price to pay for lowering the accident rate, which has climbed almost solely to due smartphones.

> most people totally outrageous and and unacceptable

What's totally outrageous and unacceptable is the idea that my phone can tell me when I'm allowed to use it or not, based on arbitrary rules set up by tech clowns who are not in my current situation and do not know why I might need it.

It's frankly asinine to suggest I should not be able to look up a map of a city while riding a bus because someone else might be texting and driving.

Most people would find this outrageous because it is.

Even that is stupid. A passenger should be able to add a stop to the navigation while the car is in motion.

I can do this with voice on my iPhone. Worst case scenario you pull over and do it.

Maybe insurance companies can give discounts for installing their app that "locks" your phone while in motion.

If you're the passenger and want to unlock the phone...take a selfie? More psychology than tech here.

This wouldn't affect mass transit commuters since they wouldn't have a car insurance app. The insurance company could sell it as a way to get additional savings...I recently did something similar with safeco that was way more invasive.

Not perfect, but if Im Geico; I have a team mulling over something similar as an easy way to drop accident rates...?

Every phone has a camera. Basically require the forward facing camera to be on if using the phone above X mph. From there, we should have sufficient computer vision processing to identify if someone is driving, and refuse to allow any use until given to a passenger or pulled over.

Additionally we could require all phones to support the SafeDriving protocol, and there be dash mounted camera in all cars with appropriate computer vision to identify unsafe phone use while driving lock ALL phones within the car or slow car to the curb.

There is nothing worse than when techies try to solve social problems with tech solutions.

How about we try and figure out how to train people to be better drivers, and more responsible adults in general, rather than continuing to let people off the hook and treating the whole of society like children that need their phones taken away by big daddy tech?

I hate this sort of petty tech dictatorship stuff.

I sympathize with your sentiments, but the social problem was created by tech solutions in the first place.

> How about we try and figure out how to train people to be better drivers, and more responsible adults in general,

You can't. You may improve things at the margins but it will do nothing to the overall trend. Smartphone use is addictive. Consider that decades of cradle-to-grave anti-smoking education with huge amounts of funding combined with immediate financial disincentives (high taxes) succeeded only in lowering the smoking rate to 12%. People are not ideal rational actors.

And smartphones are an even more intractable problem, because we're suggesting educating people out of smartphone addiction, but only out of not using it while they drive. It is simply not possible to educate a sizable proportion of the population out of this. Even strict police enforcement will not make a big difference.

> social problem was created by tech solutions in the first place.

No it wasn't, people have driven with distractions since cars were invented. Eating in the car, arguing with passengers, wrangling children, looking at paper maps, doing their makeup. etc.

The problem is people

And yet, right in the title, pedestrian deaths are soaring.

Yes, distractions have always existed.

I don’t think it’s controversial to say that smartphone addiction increased the scale and severity of the problem by orders of magnitude.

No, it's not controversial at all, we're in complete agreement.

Tech has taken a lot of social problems and poured gas on them, it's not just this one.

In some of those cases it may make sense to place limits on the tech to try and curb that.

And yeah, if there is a tech way to solve this without negatively impacting passengers or commuters, it might be worth exploring.

But my point still stands. This is a social problem, it was not created by smartphones and it therefore cannot be fixed by changing smartphones. At best you can try and mitigate it.

And an effort to mitigate it will never fly if it has to affect every other person that may not even ever drive themselves.

That’s an excellent set of points. For analogy, people used to smoke on their cars (another very addictive thing), but smoking was not nearly as distracting as smartphone use.

Likewise, listening to the radio is habit forming (some people don’t seem to be able to sit in quiet in their car). But it’s also not nearly as distracting - just turn the radio on and maybe try to change the station.

Ultimately the tech industry needs to first be held responsible and liable for the problems it creates.

Enough of the population simply doesn't have the self control to resist the dopamine IV drip that comes from phone use.

As someone who used to commute every day by public transport for >1 hour for years, I sincerely wish someone would disable the screen on all your devices, permanently.

I've seen plenty of delusional shit on HN when it comes to solving societal problems, and this is easily in top ten.

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