Please, Just Put The Phone Down And Drive | Hacker News Reader

Please, Just Put The Phone Down And Drive

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39 pointsadampopescu58 comments

I moved from a place where it was illegal (NSW, Australia) to somewhere it wasn't (Colorado, USA).

People still did it in Australia, but no where near as much as here.

My biggest peeve is actually because of the people who are holding the phone to their ear. I have almost been sideswiped a stupid amount of times because someone is holding the phone/hand/arm up on the left side and decides to change lanes without looking, while talking and with body position blocking vision. It makes me angry that mine and others lives are less important than delaying their conversation.

This is one of the only "nanny state" laws I find reasonable.

People genuinely need saving from themselves.

It is not really a nanny state law when it exist to protect other people from you.

It just should be all distracted driving in general. Oh the shit I saw when I took my driving lessons, and right in front of a car clearly marked too.

I don't consider it a nanny state law. Its not you I want saved from you, its me.

Even with insurance, most people are not prepared (or often required) to bear the full cost of the damage they can cause with their cars. Because they cannot shoulder the responsibility, they should not be allowed to take the risk. They are risking other peoples' property (and lives) for their own stupid behavior. We don't let people drive as fast as they want or ignore stop signs for the same reason.

Of course this depends on your definition of "nanny state".

Here my definition is: laws that cover specific behaviour otherwise already covered by law.

I'm no lawyer but can I imagine it has all kinds of fancy things written about it in Latin.

Maybe

http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Lex_specialis_derogat_legi_general...

http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Ejusdem_generis

Sometimes the law covers something, but only thinly. The law in most states in the USA(1) surely states that any damage you cause should be paid in recompense. So technically "distracted driving" is "covered by existing law". In practice this does not work out. Its easy to be in an accident that causes more damage than an individual's net worth and insurance coverage combined. If the only people allowed to drive cars were the ones able to afford enough insurance to guarantee recompense(2) in any situation, there would be very few cars on the road indeed. So sometimes existing laws need "helping", as imperfect as that may be. Society subsidizes the risk in exchange for a little cooperation to reduce that risk.

(1) Excepting all of that "no fault" nonsense that a few try to monkey-patch into working.

(2) It gets even more complicated when people die.

So sometimes existing laws need "helping", as imperfect as that may be.

Sounds like you've been indoctrinated good and proper. I'll write this one off as job creation.

If the only people who were allowed to drive cars were the ones able to afford enough insurance to guarantee recompense(2) in any situation, there would be very few cars on the road indeed.

I fear you've severely underestimated the nanny-ness of the state I'm referring to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_insurance#Australia

Nevertheless, the "helping" you refer to isn't helping in reality. The first layer making it illegal doesn't work. Neither do the others layered over that.

I'm not entirely closed to your point of view. I admit to playing a bit of devil's advocate in the above but, dude:

Sounds like you've been indoctrinated good and proper.

That kind of thing just shuts debate off cold.

Only if you let it.

Sometimes God needs an advocate too :)

My parents lost a dear friend who was sending a text that took his eyes off the road and resulted in a fatal crash, fortunately only involving his car, but tragic none the less. Put down the phone, nothing is that urgent.

I'm just glad that the same advances in high performance computing that make smartphones possible will also bring us self-driving cars.

Want to text while you drive? Fine, but you must own a car that has self-driving capability. Problem solved.

can't wait for that to happen.

Self-driving cars can't get here fast enough. How can we get them here faster?

Google folks: There are people out there willing to work for free to help self-driving cars get here faster. Make a way for them to be able to contribute (I volunteer to help push legislation in the 47 states that don't allow self-driving cars yet).

Right there with you, I think about this everyday I drive to and from work. It is absolutely insane to have millions of people "in control" of their cars. Where do I sign up?

Maybe I'm just anti-social, but I love that I can use driving as an excuse to ignore calls & texts, will envoke it every chance I get, and still haven't adopted a hands-free solution so I can continue doing so.

Hands free solutions do not help according to studies.

That's the ironic thing about many laws requiring them.

http://www.baldwinandlyons.com/publications/quill/2011/04/in...

excellent - another weapon in my arsenal of excuses. thanks!

I like the direction of his broader category, "distracted driving". For years I always thought that "baby on board" was pretentious and meant that you should be careful, because if you cause an accident you might kill a baby. Now I'm older, wiser (and have a child now). What "Baby on Board" means is that the driver is seriously distracted.

edit: I'm being sarcastic; I don't see any difference between a properly implemented hands-free environment and having a passenger: you must still keep your eyes on the road, your ears listening for interesting events, and your mind tracking all the vehicles and pedestrians near you.

>I like the direction of his broader category, "distracted driving".

I understand the sentiment, but that's too broad for me. I don't like giving the police unlimited discretion in determining whether I have broken the law or not. Tell me what I can and can't do, and I'll act accordingly.

Police never have unlimited discretion in determining whether or not you have violated the law- that is for a judge and/or jury to determine. Still, I agree with the sentiment- I think we need to focus on the sociology of distracted driving, rather than the criminology.

>"Police never have unlimited discretion in determining whether or not you have violated the law- that is for a judge and/or jury to determine."

Maybe it's up to the judge/jury to determine if you broke the law, but this certainly gives police the right to pull you over because you looked "distracted". That's too ambiguous for me.

Then maybe we should ban babies on cars. It isn't fair to the rest of society that he have to risk our lives because you decied to have a child.

There's a huge difference between hands-free and having a passenger, and the statistics show it. Driving with a passenger is safer than driving alone. Driving while talking on your cell phone, even with a hands-free device is much more dangerous.

Nobody knows exactly why, but there are many plausible theories. When you have a passenger, the passenger is generally also paying to the environment -- in essence they're helping you pay attention.

In the very least, hopefully the hands-free devices will act to discriminate against those without the setup.

So while the problem isn't totally solved, it at least requires extra effort to remain legal.

I believe the term you're looking for is "asocial." Anti-social implies that you're sociopathic.

Depends on the nature of the phone call or text message...

I used to text and drive all the time, and scorned the laws that said I mustn't. I've never caused an accident, never strayed out of my lane, or even close to the edge, never slowed way down, never changed lanes nor turned without appropriate safety precautions first... but I've stopped. Not because of the law, or my wife's pleading, not even because I want to set a good example to my kids. But because a) I realized I was, in fact, subdividing my attention and giving too little to the more complex activity, b) I'm not nearly important enough that anyone needs an instant response to a text to me, and c) it gives me a built-in excuse to enjoy alone-time while I'm driving.

Now I do occasionally sneak a look at my incoming texts or emails when I'm waiting at a red light. That's illegal too, and I don't really understand why. Maybe because it's too tempting to continue the activity after the light turns green.

What really chaps my hide though, are the cops who will write you a ticket for sneaking a glance at your phone, while they have a freakin' laptop on a shelf right there in the front seat, for looking up hot women's license plates while they're tailing them.

If I had a dollar for every soccer-mom in an SUV or minivan that was oblivious to the world as she cut me off, I'd be rich.

Not to mention that even when my life isn't jeopardized, these same yappers are the ones most likely to hold up traffic (like by going -5 in the "passing" lane for miles on end) or something else equally moronic.

Teenagers send and receive an average of 167 messages a day? Is that not a huge number? I suppose we had MSN when I was a teenager. I'm not sure if I'm patient enough to send hundreds of text messages on a touchscreen phone.

I send/receive about that in emails a day. On top of that you have IM's, Twitter, Facebook, Phone calls, etc. In short, that number is not surprising.

A lot of those are "k", "ya", "5 min".

When it comes to distracted driving, is talking to a passenger in the car any different than talking on the phone on a hands-free device? Is there something weird going on in the brain when it comes to having a conversation with someone not physically present?

Yes. The passenger in the car sitting next to you senses when something tricky is happening with the driving and shuts up or otherwise calls your attention to the danger. Someone conversing with you on the phone doesn't. Kids talking to you from the back seat are also a potentially more dangerous distraction for the same reason.

I have seen (although I can't remember where so this might not be worth much) that the freequency clipping cell phones do for compression can make it harder for you to processes what you're being told on a phone.

Put a better way, cell carriers clip the upper and lower ranges of the audible spectrum. While your voice won't get completely cut, sometimes you lose information the brain uses to process language. Without this, you need to work harder to understand what you're being told than you would if you were talking to someone next to you.

One theory is that, yes, something different is going on in the brain when speaking on a phone, as opposed to speaking with a passenger.

"It may be that talking on the phone generates mental images that conflict with the spatial processing needed for safe driving. Eye-tracking studies show that while drivers continually look side to side, cellphone users tend to stare straight ahead.

"They may also be distracted to the point that their engaged brains no longer process much of the information that falls on their retinas, which leads to slower reaction times and other driving problems.

-- New York Times, "A Problem of the Brain, Not the Hands: Group Urges Phone Ban for Drivers" [0]

[0] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/13/health/13well.html?_r=0

Edit: clarity.

Interesting. They eye tracking stuff is especially fascinating.

That one visceral UK anti-texting PSA needs to be mandatory viewing like, everywhere.

This the one? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0LCmStIw9E

I couldn't make it through to the end.

It is just special effects and emotional bullshit (well okay, that is most movies).

Nice touch that the people who help are all men and the driver was female.

New Zealand did similar advertisements a few years back, setting up car crashes with actors and not telling the emergency services that they were not real.

But this recent campaign about telling your mates not to drink and drive is far more clever. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shRzlAiLr2M

The logic is that changing behaviour relies on helping people understand what is 'cool' and what is not cool with their friends. As anti-tobacco campaigns or anti-drug campaigns should also know, this is far more effective than the scare tactics.

I've been patiently waiting exactly 12 months for this precise moment.

Here goes nothing...

YOU KNOW I CAN'T GRAB YOUR GHOST CHIPS!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EsFlVWqWHlA

For a year now, I've been internalizing this really complicated situation in my head.

Wondering why this phrase has stuck with me so very much. Why? What does it all mean?

It all makes perfect sense now.

Pack it up folks. The Internet is over.

Take me now, God. It is done.

I once worked with a guy who rigged his phone and car with a gizmo that would allow him to send texts that he would input using just one button that he wouldn't even have to look at: he would just use it to tap out Morse code and when he was finished, the message would be sent via SMS. I don't remember whether he could listen to inbound messages in Morse code, but it would be a logical conclusion.

I imagine it's still somewhat distracting, but a lot less than actually looking at the phone.

The biggest problem with texting or talking while driving is that your attention is focused on texting or talking rather than on the road. Adding the additional cognitive load of interpreting Morse code may make things worse rather than better.

If he were a HAM operator, or someone with experience doing Morse Code for a living, I expect it would probably be as nearly automatic as typing would be for you or me.

Ham is not an acronym.

who is this magician and what is his secret formula? sounds too good to be true, but still distracting.

Any smart phone should be able to do it. You just have to convert touch timing into morse code.

The problem with touchscreens and, specifically, touchscreens in vehicles, is that there is no feedback to let your fingers know when you're actually touching a button and when you are not. No feedback means that I have to take my eyes off the road to look to see if I am tapping the correct area of the screen. As you can imagine, I am a huge fan of "old school" knobs and push-buttons in vehicles precisely for that reason, and the recent trends towards touch-everything drive me crazy.

Back on point towards your comment, maybe "touch" timing wouldn't work. But phones have something in-dash systems don't expose to the end-user: accelerometer. If you could detect a tap from the accelerometer instead of relying on touch, you'd be onto something (of course, you would have to filter out road noise, which is not trivial, but probably doable).

It would be trivial to play a tick sound once the finger has been released from the screen.

It's not about playing a sound on release. It's about feeling where the button is in the first place. When you place your finger on the screen, you can't tell where on the screen your finder landed without looking. It's much easier to feel for and grab a knob and turn it or a physical button and push it, than it is to accurately place your finger on a screen and keep it in the same position for repeat actions (especially on a more bumpy road).

On my car stereo, for example, I have 6 buttons for pre-programmed stations: [1][2][3][4][5][6]

Without looking, I can put my finger just to the left of [1] and select a station by feeling my way across. There is no way to do that with an in-dash touch screen without looking. Maybe you could play a sound to designate which button your finger is currently on, but what if you don't want to press that particular button (i.e. you land on [2] and you want to select [3] instead, but -oops- a bump in the road caused momentary disconnect between your finger and the screen [make no mistake, this sort of thing happens often])? Then you need a way to "confirm" a selection, and we're back to the original problem.

I predict that self-driving cars will take care of this before we come up with another realistic solution.

(Posted from FL, which has no distracted driving state laws)

"Pick up the phone and let the car drive."

Actually, it will not be an option. Once it is possible, it will be mandatory.

We need to have cars that WON'T LET US use our outside tech devices when we're in the driver's seat. That kind of design functionality would HELP this problem. Also, in-dash GPS and the like, it's hurting more than it's helping IMO. 10 years ago, no one had this stuff. Look at a map people, or better yet, know where you're going!!!

I'm not sure that advising someone to look at a map is much better -- a paper map obscures a lot more of the road, and looking at it to figure out not just where the hell you are but also where you are trying to go seems a bit worse than an on-dash GPS that shows the former, and hopefully has been configured with the latter.

Absolutely not. These "restrictive" vehicle systems are horrible, for the simple fact that they don't distinguish between driver and passenger. Being in some more modern vehicles which do exactly as you say is infuriating when you have to ask your passenger -- instead of pulling up the GPS turn-by-turn on the large in-dash screen -- to instead pull out the iPhone 5 because the nav won't let you set a waypoint while you're in "drive".

Artificially restricting controls only results in a user bypassing those controls in some way, which could do more harm than good (e.g. forcing you use your phone instead).

Terrible drivers are terrible at driving while talking on a cell phone. Go figure.

Maybe it's just me, but when I drive, I turn off all distractions: radio off, iPhone on DND mode and not playing any music, GPS voice off, and passengers hushed.

I want to be able to not just see the other vehicles on the road, but also hear them. I've avoided a couple of accidents that way. This is impossible to do with music blasting or other people in the car talking loudly.

Sadly, the people that can't talk and drive can't do anything and drive well simultaneously. Further, they're likely unaware of their shitty driving and will replace "Being on the phone" with something else: eating, makeup, futzing with the radio, otherwise not paying attention to what they're doing.

How about: people pay the hell attention to the roader. As both a driver and biker, I'd be DEAD several times in the last two months and I'm in a medium sized city in the Midwest, it's not like there's an excuse for the times when bad drivers have been a risk to me.

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