Phone use should be treated just like DUI. You don't need a chemical intoxication for your attention and reaction time to be impaired. In CA, this means first offense: 1 year suspension of license, second offense: 2 years, third offense: 3 years. Honestly, I don't understand why people shouldn't lose their license permanently for such repeat offenses but I'm not a lawmaker.
I can tell you that the Tavern League in the state of Wisconsin plays a huge role in why DUI's are enforced like shit here: they want people in bars, drinking. Not necessarily driving but they're fine with it if it means their member establishments make more money.
Rather than draconian punishments that ruin people’s lives for something that millions of people evidently have little executive control over, we could just have a technological solution: have Android and iOS disable the screen on any phone moving faster than 5mph.
This would inconvenience passengers of all sorts but it would immediately eliminate all phone related accidents without getting people with bad impulse control license suspensions. Most people with license suspensions continue driving anyway.
It’s hard for me to see any other solution that really changes anything. Millions of people have a phone addiction and punishing them for using their phone while driving may be just but it won’t be effective. To me this is more than worth the very minor inconvenience of not being able to use my phone while riding in a bus, car, or train.
I hope it all came out well. I can understand the frustration. But many, many more people are killed by distracted drivers on their phones.
At least there’s things you can do to control or ameliorate situations like that. You can learn where the local hospitals are. You can use android auto or CarPlay. You can call 911. You can’t control the guy running a red because he’s on his phone and he’s much much more common. This is a minimally intrusive intervention on devices that already do all sorts of things to “interfere with normal operation” that would save thousands of lives for in the 99.99999% of other cases a minor inconvenience to everyone else. A return to the year 2005.
People commuting by train, bus, taxi, ridesharing...
Having phones disable themselves while moving fast is absolutely ridiculous, imaging if you're on a 4 hour bus ride and can't communicate with people you need to meet at your destination.
Not anyone can or is willing to carry a laptop or tablet with them everywhere, especially if you're taking a bus or are a passenger in a car
They're suffering a very minor inconvenience. They could read a book, pull out a tablet or a laptop, read the newspaper, do nothing, talk to their fellow commuters, etc.
So yes, thousands of lives in exchange for millions of people not being able to doomscroll Facebook and Tiktok during their train commute seems OK. Driving while distracted is already a crime in lots of places, there's variable enforcement, but it's not making a big dent. Something else needs to be done.
It's bizarre to me how strong the reactions against this are. You're talking about suffering: I'm talking about returning to what was the status quo not that many years ago. This is addict behavior.
I do not own a car, but I do take the train lots of places, and I enjoy being able to communicate with people while I commute.
For what it's worth, I agree that distracted driving is a huge problem, which is a big part of why I would like to see a drastic reduction in the rate of car ownership, the number of cars in our cities, and extremely harsh punishments for drivers who kill people. We also should make it much, much easier to live far away from cars, but close to other people, in developments like https://www.bloommerwede.nl/ for instance.
This reminds me of how MADD looked at drunk driving and decided the problem was all alcohol and not, in fact, car dependency.
1. Two software companies making a software change.
2. Convincing (or forcing) hundreds of millions of people to stop driving, reorganizing cities, eliminating rural and suburban living to the greatest extent possible.
I too enjoy using my phone while traveling. But if I couldn't, it'd be no skin off my back most of the time. And, I mentioned only disabling the screen, not the whole phone.
The increased likelihood of negative consequences, like police action, is a deterrent.
The comparison with drug use can only go so far. And even in that domain, despite what harm reduction purists will tell you, supply reduction DOES work to an extent, in that it dissuades casual users. Looking back at phone use, a casual distracted driver really only differs from an addict in how often they’re doing it. If you hear about your friend being raked over the coals by the cops because of distracted driving, I honestly do believe that you’d be less likely do to it yourself.
Where I live, cops routinely drive through lakes of traffic on motorbikes and will tap on your window and signal for you to take the next exit if they see you on your phone. It works.
Even with all the imperfections present, it’s still worlds better than less-than-half-baked ideas like disabling phones travelling beyond a certain speed. Christ. Guess I’ll just never catch a train again.
What you purpose reduces the problem by some relatively low percent. We already know lots of people do not change behavior when faced when this exact deterrent. It’s also very expensive.
What I propose reduces the problem by 100%.l and is very easy and cheap to implement.
Is it really that burdensome to not use your phone on the train? I don’t now and it wasn’t that long ago nobody had phones.
You might want to think a little harder there. Phone conversations themself are a distraction and, per your own arguments in this subthread, would not be eliminated under this proposal.
