I think I have the solution but it will take an act of government because it will never happen any other way. I know we all don’t want the government to control us more but this I think is a situation that would warrant it.
Cell phone companies must make their phones turn off all distracted items when the built in GPS senses that the phone is traveling fast than 10mph. They will never do this voluntarily. To much profit involved. Text apps will become disabled. The keyboard will become disabled. I’m just giving you the basic idea here more details would need to be worked out. Also right off the bat i can hear people saying “Hey wait a minute, I’m in the passenger seat”. To bad driving is a privilege not a right and passengers have even less of it. There is no emergency where you could validate a need to text or type while driving. Need to use google maps? Pull over my friend before you kill someone.
Many cars now can send and receive calls via bluetooth, there is probably an app that will read you text messages and turn voice into text responses. I used the bluetooth app once for my phone when borrowing the wifes car for a trip. More distracting than no phone, but probably ok in my book.
A certain segment of the population has a tendency to self destruct. Some otherwise complete law abiding citizens end up killing themselves and/or their loved ones.
Agree that passing laws won’t work. A family of 8 were killed in Montana when their van driven by the teenage son crashed as he fell asleep returning from a religious retreat.
A similar fate befell a family in a minivan who left the West Coast at 1 am to drive across the Rocky Mountains.
We will see a rising death toll from distracted driving and more when pot gets legalized and "stoned " driving will become a major cause of traffic fatalities. There is no medical test for pot inebriation.
Some organization issues the “Darwin Awards” each year and mercifully these winners are a tiny minority of the population.
turn off all distracted items when the built in GPS senses that the phone is traveling fast than 10mph. They will never do this voluntarily
One company already DID do this voluntarily. AT&T smartphones come with this feature built right in. The app is called DriveMode. It is the phone user that decides whether to use it or not. It turns off the ringer and text message alerts and sends a text back to the sender that the receiver is driving right now.
Mustangman: That is something I would love to have. I would never touch my phone while driving but occasionally get an idiot who will keep calling or texting. When I finally reach my destination and get back to them they seem to have no comprehension of why I didn’t do it while driving! I bought an AT&T Nokia Lumia 640 recently. When I get it activated I will ask about the app.
If you disable the phone when it is moving, then even if you are a passenger in a car, bus or train, you still can not use it.
I think the key is more education. They are also coming up with an app that would give info to law enforcement after an accident showing whether you were texting/etc.
As much as the Ford Sync gets a bad rep, it used to read out my text messages from my android phone. Actually sounded a bit like my wife too-the first time was a bit freakish. Now the rest of the car was not built as strong as Ford would like to advertise.
So, the technology is there. I think every new car should have the ability to display/mirror your phone screen on the radio. That would help with navigation, phone calls/etc. Then it should lock out the texting out feature, unless it is a generic & automatic “I am driving now, wait!” text.
Police In New York May Use ‘Textalyzer’ To Determine If Texting Caused Accident The new state Senate bill is going to allow police in New York to submit drivers to a textalyzer, which is basically a device that scans the phone for recent activity, after an accident to determine if the driver was distracted because he or she was using their phone behind the wheel.
I don’t talk or text while driving because I’m from an era before instant gratification became so popular. Sometimes I leave my cell phone at home and not even realize it until later in the day. That era didn’t have technology that makes it possible.
When I grew up we had one phone in the house, on the kitchen wall. We weren’t chatting on it all the time. Most long-distance calls were expensive. We didn’t walk around or drive around with a phone (with “free” long-distance) in our hand.
We mailed letters and waited for responses, no e-mail or texting, drove to libraries for books, not downloaded them.
We watched we ate and got exercise. Gaining weight? Eat less and exercise more was the solution and it took a while. Now, feast on fat food and go and have fat sucked out of your body or get your stomach stapled shut.
I never have bought on credit and still don’t. Want something? Wait and save up. Often the urge passes while you wait. Now, it seems that half of the people in the country are in debt because they have to have, have to do, something right now.
Solve the instant gratification problem and you can solve the distracted driving problem, but you know, I think it’s getting worse, not better.
My children grew up learning how to wait, some apparently don’t and don’t have any role models to help them learn. CSA
But . .the motion sensing lockout would somehow . .somehow . .need to know you’re the driver.
When I drive , my daughter and friends will text.
When she picks me up from work, I need to get on that phone, on the way, and arrange dinner and other kids’ rides before traveling even a block or two.
So , techies, how would it know who’s driving and who’s not ?
What are we doing with all the time that we save through the convenience of cell phones? Or could we be using the convenience of the cell phone to take care of what we should have planned ahead for and taken care of without the drama of a last minute phone call?
Self-driving cars will solve DD. Once people start using them and the only accidents are caused by the people still driving, we’ll get the picture. Plus you can’t steal them and can’t run them unmaintained.
Most people don’t want to drive: they want transportation. The next step is not-owning a car, but ordering up a self-driving car from Uber (or the other guys), which will already be there unless you live in the boonies.
As a guy who drives far up dirt roads into the mountains and maintains my own 30-year-old pickup, this won’t be my world, but it already isn’t. Maybe I’ll end up in a museum; I hope that’ll be better than the nursing home.
CSA: Your comment is like looking in a mirror. My parents were married in 1927. When the depression hit 2 years later it didn’t significantly affect them. They had no debt. They worked on a ranch in Colorado. My Father was a cowboy. My Mother cooked, cleaned, and took care of the non-cattle livestock plus a large garden. She canned food to get the ranch through the Winter. They saved and then purchased things (including new cars). They moved to Oregon in 1936 with my much older Brothers born in 1929 and 1931. My parents built liberty cargo ships during WW2 and of course saved their money. They owned small acreages and houses but never had a mortgage. When I was born in 1952 they had downsized to 1/2 acre with the house they had built in 1947. There was a new (of course paid for) 1952 Chevy in the garage. My Brothers were in the military and the oldest one was married. I have carried on my parents and your tradition. Work for your money and spend it on what you need, not what you want. I have been comfortably retired for over 6 years. No regrets.
Oh boy. I don’t use a phone normally while I drive but my wife sitting next to me does. So I’m supposed to pull off the road so she can make a call? Silly. They’ve done the same thing with the nav systems where “she” can’t enter a destination while “I’m” driving. Like my law professor used to say: “There’s never been a law passed that someone somewhere didn’t want”. It’s called responsibility and common sense.
In teaching my new set of kids to drive I find I’m teaching mySELF as well.
My drive home along RT66 is blessed with wide shoulders so , in telling my 16y.o. daughter to pull over to text or phone, I’ve found so insanely simple to do ( I’ve always pulled over to WRITE the shopping list they phone to me on my way home so pulling over to text is just the simple incarnation of that )
. . so when I do it constantly I see that she does too. AND . . her 13y.o. brother is watching intently as he is learning by watching preparing himself to drive soon too. ANd , I make it a point to say it out loud, so the kids in the car and the family on the phone can hear I’m '‘pilling over so I can get all this.’'
PLUS . .
I now see so many other vehicles on the shoulder that I’d like to believe it’s sinking in to many now that they see others doing the same.
At the gas station when I’m cleaning the windshield, it seems that no one else was until they noticed me doing that.
so . .
I take that squeegee around to the back window ( hey, it’s an Expedition ) AND the tail lights, then walk around front and wipe the headlights too.
GUESS WHAT ?
other people start looking at their own ( the headlights are just as dirty as the corners of the windshied )
contagious.
I’m not an ANTI drinker . . just a non-drinker. I spent thirty years playing weekends in the bars, and at weddings and graduations.
so , as the night progresses and partyers either offer me a drink or ask what I’m drinking . . I politely mention that I have my Sprite or water and I’m good to go.
Many times they’d seem taken aback by that arguing ‘’ but you’re with the band. ‘’ so I’d add that I’m partying just fine without drinking.
So . . guess what ?
Yep, I’d often see many of my regulars jumping on the idea that , you can still come to party all you wan,t but you don’t have to drink if you don’t want to.
contagious.
My first Smartphone was a Windows-based Nokia, and the only feature of this phone that was really good was its ability to accurately translate texts into a spoken voice that I heard via the Bluetooth.
It then asked me if I wanted to respond, and I was able to simply speak into the air in order to compose (and edit) text responses, and then send them.
The rest of the phone’s operating system was…not so good…but I have to say that I miss the text-to-voice capability of that Windows-based Nokia phone.
This means people riding in the passenger seat, and people riding on buses and trains, would not be able to use their phones either. I know you already said you were OK with this, but 99% of the public will vehemently disagree with you, including cops who rely on motorists to call them when they see someone doing something dangerous.
The solution is for cops to stop looking for easy speeding tickets and start looking for bad driving in general. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen people get pulled over for driving 10 above the limit while all around them people are tailgating, and weaving around because they’re fooling with their phones, etc.
I’m an advocate for abolishing cause laws (distracted/etc) entirely because then the requirement becomes that the cop has to prove that you were distracted, and not just a crappy driver.
Instead, I think bad driving should be a catch-all charge. At the end of the day, I don’t care if you’re weaving all over the place because you’re on your phone, or eating, or yelling at your kid, or drunk, or just a freaking terrible driver. The cause is irrelevant to the person you run over, and it seems stupid to only get drunks and texters off the road, leaving all the other bad drivers to keep weaving around until they hit someone.
We need to quit focusing on individual chunks of technology, because if we make it illegal to use a phone while driving then people will play with their Garmin GPS unit until we make that illegal at which point they’ll get distracted by the radio, which is printing out what song they’re listening to until we make that illegal and then they’ll get distracted by their hamburger until we make that illegal, and then they’ll get distracted by talking to the kid in the back seat… etc etc.
Just make driving like an idiot illegal, tack on a significant punishment to it, and then actually enforce traffic safety.
so, how about if you travel in a train or you are the passenger in a car? How does the phone company know what you are really doing and why your phone is moving faster than 10 miles an hour?