We now need an ignition interlock device for these people -- that will shut down the car if there's a phone inside that's not in airplane mode. Like they have for DUI doofuses.
Sounds like something that could be easily abused for cracking down on filming police or similar. Filming ICE agents arresting someone and posting on tiktok? "obstruction of justice", plus they're obviously doing it "for social media". Same for whistleblowers or security researchers.
You don't need to convince them that the penalty is high, you need to convince them that the risk is high.
On top of that, people are less likely to know whether there is even a law against those things since it's much less intuitively obvious.
What you need to do is make them understand that it's dangerous, not to make them understand that it's illegal. People don't care about penalties unless they expect to be caught and this is one of the things where it's hard to consistently catch people in the act.
So no. We simply need to take away the driving licence of such people.
Someone just needs to put that in a car. We've also got lidar based cruise control systems to maintain distance as well as panic brake systems that can react to something in front of the vehicle faster than a human, which is partially there to account for people texting and driving while flying up on a red light with stopped traffic.
We have all the tech needed to make it damn near impossible for a 2 ton mass of steal to just unflinchingly mow someone down, yet we live in a world where it's cheaper to not make those things standard, even knowing without it, more people will die than with it.
New law: driver's phone must be in semi-disabled mode
The phone can already infer it is inside moving vehicle. The bigger challenge is, how to determine the phone belongs to the driver?
Say N passengers in car (including driver), each with cell phone.
When phone infers moving vehicle, it attempts to mesh with other phones in the vehicle.
If N=1, driver is solo, phone semi-disables
If N>1, phones ask users to vote on who is the driver.
Result: 1 phone disabled (Voting tie disables both/all)
The only inconvenience here is to a passenger with a phone-less driver.
Maybe a warning with a eye tracker or something...
Your last two sentences point in the correct direction: we can't micro-target every behavior that might possibly become a dangerous distraction, because that's just about everything. Driving safely depends on self-regulation, and people incapable of self-regulating (to a minimum standard) shouldn't be granted the privilege of a license.
Yeah, I drove back then. That's not, in practice, what people did, or only what people did. People did map out a route ahead of time, of course, but when they (we) got confused, or missed a turn, out came the map - while driving. Not saying it's good, but that's what happened.
> people driving just fine before satnav
You can check the data. DOT's website is terrible, so I can't link to individual tables, but the relevant one is under Trends > General > Table 1:
https://cdan.dot.gov/tsftables/tsfar.htm#
Fatalities and Injuries are obviously dependent on (very welcome!) advances in automobile safety design and medical care, but if accident rates have been increasing over time we'd expect to see many more "property damage only"° accidents. In fact, the raw number of those have been remarkably stable since 1988, despite a huge increase in miles traveled!
There's even an absolute-number decrease between 2007 and 2013, which corresponds with the years during which mobile phones became ubiquitous, and a relative (to miles-traveled) decrease which continues to this day. None of this (of course!) excuses allowing oneself to use a phone in a distracting manner, but my conclusion is that mobile phones have, on net, made driving safer, rather than the reverse.
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° Or, alternatively "all-type"? I think "property damage" might be cleaner - and, in fact, it's strongly biased against my case, because it's risen from 67% of accidents at the beginning of the dataset to 71% more recently, due to exogenous safety and life-saving improvements.
Mostly the ones I drove were able to tell if I was distracted by checking my instruments or mirrors, or over my shoulder before changing lanes.
I came very close to just abandoning the fucking thing in a car park, and getting a train instead.