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Comment by bshaughn | Hacker News Reader

A horrifying number of people flagrantly use their phones while driving. Im not talking about peaking at a text or google maps, but straight up scrolling tik tok while driving. At the end of the day there is going to be a lowest common denominator of selfish morons on the road, and the two practical solutions I see are 1) aggressive surveillance state grade distracted driving enforcement 2) self driving cars.

I used to bike to work in Chicago and it was surreal being able to look right into someone's car and see hardly anyone is paying attention.

I'll also never forget the first time getting hit by a car (car did left turn when I was biking straight through a green light) and right before impact seeing the driver's face illuminated by their phone while looking straight down driving into me.

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It doesn't have to be a surveillance state for enforcement. Just preventing repeat offenders would practically remove that lowest denominator. For example, I knew a guy in high school who totaled 4 cars and had other minor accidents in 2 years. There's no reason for that person to be allowed to operate a vehicle. On the prevention side, we could require more training.

If you tried to enforce self driving cars, you'd still need some level of surveillance too.

> There's no reason for that person to be allowed to operate a vehicle

Doesn't much of america outside of cities also have the secondary problem of you physically cannot feed yourself, get to appointments, or do anything without operating a vehicle?

> you physically cannot feed yourself, get to appointments, or do anything without operating a vehicle?

You also physically cannot feed yourself, get to appointments, or do anything else once you've been fatally run over by a vehicle.

Sounds like a great incentive to make sure you don’t lose your driving privileges.

Or maybe - build a world where you don't need driving privileges just to exist

That is certainly something we have done horribly wrong in most of the US.

Or to lobby to make sure driving is an inalienable right. Which path are you seeing being realized in the US?

At some point the cost has to be high enough to get the attention of the offender.

I hope you wouldn’t be saying this if they had killed someone in one of their crashes. How about injured? They must have. Get some standards instead of saying everything is ok.

I am not saying anything is ok, where did you read that?

>For example, I knew a guy in high school who totaled 4 cars and had other minor accidents in 2 years.

Wait, he did all that in high school?

I heard something about "20% of drivers are responsible for most of the insurance claims" but it sounds like that one guy is jacking up the averages!

> Just preventing repeat offenders would practically remove that lowest denominator.

That requires enforcement which no longer exists in many cities.

I play the "who is staring at their phone" game as passenger sometimes. From my sampling, the number is pretty damn close to 100%.

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