Still I see huge amounts of people on the phone while driving. I come up on a car 10 mph under the limit, wandering over the lines. It’s either a senior or on the phone. I get in bumper to bumper at the Lincoln tunnel daily. Hard to change lanes. I just wait for the guy texting that leaves an opening. Rear enders every day.
Great, bringing another old thread back to life.
“Unless you are part of an organ transplant team on standby, or have the launch verification codes for our nuclear ICBM’s I say PUT THE PHONE AWAY AND DRIVE.”
I’ve said it before: from a time-and-motion standpoint, there’s little difference between talking to somebody 50 inches from you and 50 miles from you. To be logically consistent, in addition to “NO PHONE CONVERSATIONS” rules, you’d need to enact “STERILE COCKPIT RULES,” too: no conversing with the driver about ANYTHING not directly related to the safety of the drive. Who does THAT?
“Great, bringing another old thread back to life.”
We tend to have this same discussion every couple months or so. It matters little, to me, if it’s one big discussion, or a bunch of smaller ones, started and ended.
Well meanjoe75fan, I agree that people do all sorts of dangerous things while driving, besides talking on the phone. I have seen (to name a few) shaving, reading a newspaper, eating, doing makeup, getting dressed, etc…
The problem, as I see it, is that we have done a poor job at conveying the concept that driving is really the equivalent of trying to control a two to three thousand pound (or more) missile down the road where the slightest miscalculation results in disaster. Instead we have inculcated a sense of invincibility in drivers where they believe that their car will always save them. I am not advocating ditching all of the safety improvements of the last fifty years. I am advocating a change in the way we train young drivers to think about the dangerous task of piloting a car down the road. If people understood the dangers, and the physics, of driving they would be much more careful in general.
I have zero tolerance for those who are self righteous in their zero tolerance.
I was once almost hit while crossing the street by a woman in a big SUV who ran the red light while talking on the phone. And she had kids in the car. No one had seat belts on that I could see.
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Does a smartwatch count as “hands free”? I’ll check my texts by looking at the popup on my watch, but I won’t respond, even by voice, and I still feel slightly guilty about it.
To clarify, the process goes: phone receives text, signal is sent to watch. Watch screen turns on automatically and displays text content. Watch vibrates. I look. I read. I look up. To me this seems less distracting than channel surfing on the radio. Which probably isn’t a good idea either.
In certain situations I won’t look at all, at least not until I feel safer, e.g. limited forward visibility, children/animals near the road, everyone’s suddenly slowing down, a nearby driver is behaving strangely, etc.
Probably not kosher in any case, but it’s just way too convenient to fight the temptation.
(And don’t cry “thread necro!”. This was second from the top on this forum when I posted.)
It doesn’t take much to incapacity cells phones in cars, and I bet it could be retrofit too. But, no one wants to propose a fix for something that they probably do themselves.
@dagosa That requires the driver to voluntarily install an app on their phone. Really has no use case outside a parent/child situation. DEFINITELY not going to work on anyone of majority age and not PoA / ward status.
There are RF jammers, but that would only make the situation more dangerous, as all the offline functions of the phone will still be fully operational, and people are going to be fiddling even more trying to figure out why their phone is behaving strangely. Also, RF jammers in the cellphone frequencies are federal felony tier illegal.
The other problem with that…is it’ll disable ALL cell phones in a moving car. Even the passengers. I use my cell many times when on a trip and wife is driving.
@MikeInNH Only phones that have the app installed, fwiw. Dad’s not gonna have it on his phone, is he?
(On a side note, that’s gonna impact battery too. Torque connected to my OBD dongle gets the phone warm enough to disable charging due to overheat risk.)
Only phones that have the app installed, fwiw. Dad's not gonna have it on his phone, is he?
I understand how the technology works. If the app ONLY is installed on my wifes cell…she can’t use her cell while driving. But what if I’m driving?
Dad's not gonna have it on his phone, is he?
Why wouldn’t he? How about the kids? All my kids have drivers licenses. What if they’re not driving? Many times they’ll drive on long trips. Did that a lot when driving all over the country looking at colleges.
Here in SC (2nd from last to adopt a law banning texting & driving) it is legal to text at a red light, but it doesn’t make it right. The light can change & a texter may be holding up traffic behind, which may get impatient & zip around, creating a dangerous situation. And if you are guilty of texting & driving? A mere $25 fine!
I just witnessed a traffic accident in which a young lady driving an SUV pulled out from a stop sign into an intersection and T-boned an elderly man in a Corolla. It was clear daylight and she bashed him right in the driver’s side door and knocked his car 20 feet sideways. The Corolla had no side curtain airbag, the driver’s window shattered, but the Corolla’s door and side pillar held strong and saved the guy from being crushed.I don’t know how he didn’t break an arm or his head. Both cars were totalled.
Anyway, I can’t prove it but I suspect the young lady was texting on her phone at the stop sign. There’s no way a reasonably alert driver wouldn’t have seen the Corolla coming.
Just turn the phone off in the car. Is it really worth risking killing someone?
Unless you are an international spy or an on call doctor for a transplant team you can keep your phone in your pocket and drive.
There was a story on the news today about some young lady being killed by another woman who was texting while traveling at 85 MPH.
Imagine how much ground is being covered at that speed with just 3 or 4 seconds of texting going on.
ok4550, is this the story? Pretty horrible. How did the woman who caused the crash even survive? That’s a testament to the Prius design. 85 mph frontal impact and the driver walks away. Wow.
http://mynewsla.com/crime/2015/08/13/san-diego-woman-guilty-in-fatal-texting-crash-in-westminster/
That’s the story and it could be that she survived just by luck. I used to live and work right of the San Diego Freeway in Westminster and traffic was horrible in that area even with cells being involved.
About 30 years ago here a performance shop had an early 50s MG TD for sale. A guy wanted to test drive it so they let him take off. Unknown to the shop was that this guy was liquored up and drunk on Vodka. He nailed it to the floor and headed up the main street.
Less than 3 blocks later he rammed a police cruiser from behind that was sitting at a traffic light. The estimate later was that he was doing almost 70 when he hit the cops. Both cops went to the hospital with neck injuries and amazingly the drunk in the MG suffered nothing more than a couple of very minor scratches and a trip to jail.
The story was that the cop car (a Crown Vic) was mangled so me and a buddy went down to look at it. I kid you not; the rear bumper of the cruiser was clean into the back seat and it’s sheer luck I suppose that the car did not go up in flames due to the fuel tank getting squashed.
It’s amazing the drunk survived that with not even a lap belt in place.
It seems I’ve read a lot of stories of drunk drivers who cause terrible crashes walking away almost unscathed. I wonder if there’s something physiological, that if you’re drunk your muscles don’t tense up in a crash and your body stays flexible and absorbs the impact better.