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Comment by lpolovets | Hacker News Reader

What do others think about the safety of using Waze? One thing that I have noticed is that the app encourages me to interact with it as I'm driving in order to add data to the system. It's a little hypocritical of me to complain about this because sometimes I text or check email while driving, which I know I should not do, but it still feels weird that Waze actually encourages me to read the screen and interact with UI while I drive. I wonder if there are any liability issues around this or if the core UI will change as a result of the acquisition.

Also, I wonder if Waze will become irrelevant if Google happens to productize self-driving cars (which can presumably talk to each other).

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sometimes I text or check email while driving, which I know I should not do

I don't mean to pick on you here. You are clearly aware, but it still needs to be said:

Please do not email, text, or even talk on a cell phone while driving. Driving is the most dangerous task that is socially acceptable for nonprofessionals to perform. It is very irresponsible to make such a task any more difficult than it needs to be.

IMO only when this is treated like DUI will it be taken more seriously. It sounds radical, but the activity is easily avoidable, seriously diminishes your focus and can have horrible consequences.

It's already illegal to use a cell phone while driving in Ontario, Canada. Hands-free devices are still okay, however (I disagree with that part).

http://www.mto.gov.on.ca/english/safety/distracted-driving/

I'm guessing the penalties are not anywhere similar, however, which was the parent's point. Out here in California, a DUI generally ends up costing someone ~$10,000 after all is said and done (if I remember correctly). A cell phone ticket is nowhere near that.

For context, Driving while texting is already illegal in 41 of the US States, however, I believe what the parent was saying, is that the penalties need to be higher, like that associated with DUI.

Why do you disagree with hands-free devices? What do you think about conversing with a passenger during driving?

One reason I've heard is that when you're on the phone with someone, they don't know what's going on in the car whereas if you're talking with the person next to you and you suddenly need to focus all of your attention on the road, they can stop talking rather than adding to your distraction. Plus they provide a second set of eyes. I don't know how accurate and reliable that theory is, but it makes sense to me.

I also wonder if the mental effort of listening to a voice coming through on a speaker would make it harder to focus. I tend to have trouble hearing people when I'm talking on the phone; but that might just be me.

It's no more distracting than talk radio or some blaring annoying commercial which doesn't stop talking if I need to focus. When you have a handsfree device, just say "Hold on" and do what you need to do. You can always ask them to repeat themselves I you don't hear.

People usually don't talk back to the radio though. Thinking up a response to your conversational partner is where the distraction occurs.

DUI can be accurately tested with a breathalyzer. How would you expect these stiffer penalties to be enforced? I believe the current laws essentially require the offense to be directly observed by police or for the driver to inadvertently admit to it.

What if your car had a slot into which you were required to insert your phone in order to operate the vehicle.

What do you do when your phone is lost or stolen (or broken)?

Or if you have two.

Too bad impairment can't be accurately tested with a breathalyzer. That's what we are really worried about in all these scenarios after all.

Observation by police officers? I already see plenty of people texting while driving. The first hint is that they're driving like they're not paying attention. When you pull up alongside them you see them glancing down repetitively.

Also, the penalty fines are a joke. I think in CA at least they were very low, especially considering IMO distracted driving is way more dangerous than other simpler measures like speeding.

Thank you for posting this. It is incredibly frustrating to see people justify this behavior with "I know I shouldn't, but". You know the jerk weaving in his lane in the car next to you, staring down at their phone? That's you!

I text, call, check email, and web all while driving and I bet at least 95% of people on HN do too.

If you want this to stop then invent a new way to communicate.

Based on the top replies to the top comment, I believe it's way less than 95% and, like, I certainly hope so.

Your request, moreover, seems very difficult to meet. What about the lady who wanted fresh cream cheese on her bagel while driving, and who doing so killed a man? Shouldn't she say, "well, invent a robot who can feed me while I drive"?

I guess Google's self-driving cars will ultimately satisfy all of the above requests.

Preach all you want. Pass all the laws you want. People will do this because they can and they want to. The only real way to mitigate it is through innovation. Not by telling adults on the internet what they can and cannot do or by passing draconian laws telling people when they are allowed to communicate.

Some people "can and want to" steal cars, or commit domestic violence, or dump benzene into rivers. "I want to do this, therefore it should be legal" is not a good argument when there's a compelling argument that it harms society.

True. However, laws will still be passed.

What about listening to the radio, talking to a passenger, or just zoning out and daydreaming?

These can all be just as dangerous as using a phone while driving.

It's not clear those are similarly dangerous behaviors. Talking to passengers can prevent falling asleep at the wheel, which may be a bigger net danger than conversational distraction.

But the larger answer is perhaps that if you are driving poorly you can be ticketed regardless of the underlying reason.

Ideally, people would not drive when they are fatigued enough to fall asleep at the wheel.

I do realize that the reasons for it are often quite complicated, I don't mean to be dismissive. Such levels of fatigue are something society should be taking a closer look at.

New York didn't make texting while driving illegal - it made driving while distracted illegal, so as to encompass all smartphone-related and unrelated issues that make the road dangerous.

Maybe I'm overly optimistic, but I think this is a problem that is going to solve itself. And it will do so more quickly and more effectively than legislation ever could.

It's a fortuitous coincidence that the same advances in computing power that have put fantastically distracting little computers in all our hands will also grant automobiles the computational horsepower to start saving us from our own stupidity.

We're probably 5 years away from accident avoidance technologies being a standard feature in new automobiles. Even sooner if auto insurance companies start giving massive discounts for cars that have them. Not only will auto-braking and auto-swerve technologies solve the distracted driver problem. They're going to solve the much larger issue that humans are just generally very poor at prolonged tasks requiring a high degree of concentration.

And from there it's only a few more years before the car pool lanes are repurposed as auto-pilot lanse. Filled with endless virtual trains of cars whizzing along at 95 miles per hour with 2 feet between each vehicle. While human occupants are mindlessly (and safely) scrolling through Facebook...

"Please do not email, text, or even talk on a cell phone while driving."

I knew of a woman whose husband was killed while driving to work. In the opposite lane, on a narrow road, was a young woman who, while driving, was trying to put cream cheese onto her bagel, so she could enjoy eating it while driving. She unknowingly veered across the center line and the 2 cars collided, almost directly head on. The guy was killed. The woman was saved by the airbag in her car.

I agree that driving is dangerous. I agree that doing anything that distracts you, while you are driving, is dangerous to yourself and others around you. But I would not want to elevate texting and cell phones above other activities that drivers do -- eating is also a big risk, dropping food on your lap is distracting, etc.

The risk of emphasizing texting as uniquely dangerous is that drivers will start to underestimate the risks of other dangerous things they do.

I'm fairly confident his point wasn't that cell phones were the most dangerous possible toy while driving. I think he was trying to convey that driving was the most dangerous possible task people regularly undertake, and any distraction during its performance is recklessly dangerous. The phone-based wording was probably just contextual, given the original post.

If someone posts about doing food preparation while driving I'm sure they'll get called out on that, too.

Waze actually has several features in place to make it safer:

* Waze is designed only to be used by a passenger. Any field that requires typing, etc. warns you if you're moving and makes you acknowledge that you are a passenger to continue.

* Waze has a hands-free capability where you can wave your hand in front of the phone and interact with Waze via voice. It actually works pretty well.

* The UI is designed with big buttons, so even if you choose to interact with Waze regularly, you can usually complete a road road report, etc. very quickly (1-2 seconds).

Regarding its "encouragement". I think alerts and the fact that they're available via audio as well reduces the risk. In the end, it's up the user to configure Waze according to how safe they want to be (which, hopefully is pretty safe).

(I'm a huge fan; I've been using Waze from the beginning. No attachment beyond that though)

Eh, that may be the intent, but I think they could work harder on making giant buttons for things that you are supposed to use while driving. For instance, the popup that says there is a hazard ahead, and you have tiny buttons to say it's not there or to give a thumbs up.

The "work harder" here is that you don't need to acknowledge pretty much any of those popups in Waze. If you leave them alone, they'll timeout and disappear automatically, you don't NEED to interact with the app while driving, I rarely touch it except to report traffic or a wreck, at which point I'm usually stopped anyway.

Same here -- I turn on Waze before I go somewhere, and then don't touch it (or really even look at it) until I arrive. I figure that the social features are meant for a passenger, or MAYBE if I'm totally stopped at a red light and/or in very heavy traffic. But the notion that I would look at my phone's screen, let alone press any buttons on it, while driving is pretty terrifying.

>But the notion that I would look at my phone's screen, let alone press any buttons on it, while driving is pretty terrifying.

Wha? I just have a windshield mount. It's pretty much the same as any other GPS that you can look at while driving.

I'm an avid user, and my main complaint is, precisely, the UI. Sure, some of the main functions (e.g. traffic report) can be done fairly easily with one hand, but almost everything else is terrible:

- Choosing a navigation destination (slide, pick one from the list, wait not this list - my favorites, search - wait, that doesn't do what I think it does, scroll scroll scroll...)

- Closing those damn popups with the tiny X that is almost impossible to hit (at least on my 3.5" iPhone)

- Pretty much anything involving panning around the map or zooming in/out. It's like the gesture experience is way worse than anything else on iOS, and you definitely feel it.

And some others I can't think of right now. So if one good thing comes from this acquisition [1], I hope it's a massive UI overhaul.

[1]: I'm dreading it, and I fear what will actually happen is the integration of the social network into Google+, and the death of the product itself, somehow subsumed into Google Maps.

Definitely. I was using Waze just the other day on a trip with my wife down to Los Angeles. Fortunately, I was the passenger and guiding my wife through traffic. Two things struck me about Waze:

1) It requires a lot of attention to use. 2) It's not that accurate. I mean, I figured it would be collecting data from Waze users and marking the roads with heavy traffic. But, that wasn't really the case. It DID mark some roads with traffic, but it wasn't accurate at all. Most of the accuracy came from people self reporting traffic data, and that was a cumbersome task. I don't recommend people doing it while driving.

What about it requires a lot of attention to use? I use it daily and it's set-and-forget for the most part.

Are you serious? You don't think fumbling around trying to tell people where hazards, traffic, police, bla blah is an attention getting process? What about the whole reward nonsense like giving people the thumbs up. Or, what about when you're warned of a hazard and then asked to verify if it's still there or not. I honestly can't see how a driver can do all that and not have their attention to the road/driving impeded.

Exactly. If Google jerk up Maps on IOS with that noise I'll be back to Apple Maps in no time.

You don't actually have to do any of that to use the app.

A lot of other people need to be doing it, though. Without the crowdsourced info there's no point in using it instead of Google Maps.

The only thing in that list that really needs to be done is reporting hazards and traffic and such, and you only need to do that a very small amount of the time. You don't need to give thumbs ups or verify hazards or anything like that, and you only really need to report hazards a small percentage of the time.

I ride a motorcycle to work. I'm extremely vulnerable to mistakes and bad habits (my own as well as other drivers). I would really appreciate if you'd rethink your priorities as we share our commute.

> Also, I wonder if Waze will become irrelevant if Google happens to productize self-driving cars (which can presumably talk to each other).

Eventually, probably, the front-end will become, if not irrelevant, less important. Of course, much of the back-end could be kept with incremental improvements to handle new forms of data.

That's also a pretty long time horizon.

I found that most of the time it's prompting you when you're stuck in a traffic jam. It auto-detects that and asks you why you slowed down. Since I was already slowed to a crawl, interacting with it (via voice or tapping a button) wasn't much to ask. It's not like it prompts you every half mile with "how's it going?" or something inane.

> if Waze will become irrelevant if Google happens to productize self-driving cars

How far off is widespread adoption of self-driving cars vs lifespan of a company / product? Waze may be obsolete before self-driving cars make the core function obsolete.

I used Waze for the first time last week on a long drive across the mid-South. With self-driving cars on a long haul I can see the social function becoming the primary function.

At least when one is _driving_ one has something to keep one's mind occupied. Passengers on a long-haul only have books, music, games, sing-alongs, naps, and other tomfoolery to keep themselves entertained.

Sure, might be a bit hypocritical but i get your point. Most of the noise that comes from Waze is when it detects you aren't moving. That said there is the light social encouragement if you see a something (something in road) to put it on the map, or confirm / deny it.

I can personally say the pothole and "thing on the road" warnings might have saved me from damaging my car a few times, maybe even helped me avoid an accident (a mattress was on the highway, yikes).

In my experience, Google Nav already does a wonderful job of noticing and routing people around "not moving" without Waze, so I'm not sure what the acquisition is about if not for the feedback channels which I do think are unsafe if not explicitly illegal to actually use in a lot of places unless you are a passenger and not the driver.

But also, I live in Southern California where car passengers are as mythical as unicorns.

As a long time user of Waze, I have begun to notice that their ads are becoming increasingly annoying and distracting. For example, it will give me a pop up covering the screen asking me if I want to go to Taco Bell. While I am a huge fan of Waze, by deviating too far from being just a GPS makes it a bit frustrating at times. If they are looking to monetize the platform, there are surely other ways besides covering up the map!

You can do reports by voice and reporting it is just a few clicks if you don't use voice. I think this will work well even after they get self0driving cars, even when you have self driving cars there's still a need for good traffic data.

I'd imagine they intend for a passenger to use the app, as for productionized self-driving cars -- I think the obsolescence of Waze is the least interesting thing about that scenario. :)

Maybe it will be integrated with the upcoming Google Dashboard(tm)

google glass

I think in a proper world Waze would be banned because of its insane idea of encouraging drivers to socially interact during driving. Certainly it is not safe.

Waze has been generally exploiting people's stupidity, people's keen desire for free crap, and corporate dementia.

This is how you do things: by exploiting shortcomings of this world.

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