Smartphones, and mobile phones in general, make drivers less attentive to external events while driving. It was fine before that, so I don't see why you think we should be blaming humans?
Because it wasn't fine before that. Most drivers take irrational risks, drive with zero margin, and are generally fucking stupid behind the wheel. The other half are even worse. Seriously, there needs to be far more restrictions and punitive damages to bad drivers. With all the media attention on terrorism, there are 10 times as many deaths in the US every year due to stupid drivers as there were on 9-11.
I agree completely, but the human factor will only be removed once we have fully autonomous vehicles. Until then, we need humans to operate vehicles; this is the base case.
Now, do smartphones make humans worse at driving, or does their use while driving still result in the base case? My argument is that smartphone use does in fact significantly worsen a human's ability to drive properly. As a result, I believe that, for the time being, we need to somehow tackle the issue of smartphone use while operating a vehicle.
We will eventually address the root cause; self-driving cars are around the corner. Unfortunately, we cannot do that now. Therefore, we should address the second biggest cause: smartphones.
Besides, eating, doing make-up, and fiddling with a CD player are absolutely nothing compared to what people do on smartphones nowadays while cruising in a hunk of metal at 60 mph.
The UK, Germany and Austria have banned the use of phones in cars entirely with a whitelist of permitted uses (like passively using it for navigation). I am pretty sure that is something that is happening all over Europe now.
New Zealand too. If you want to make calls while driving, you have to have a hands-free system. It baffles my mind that there are countries in which people can legally interact with their phone while driving.
I'm surprised people are allowed to use their phones at all; there is a study showing talking on a hands free causes the same attention impairment level as someone under the influence of alcohol.
Result: Driving drunk, with a cellphone or with a hands-free phone were all equally dangerous. I'm as surprised as you must be.
They didn't test talking to a passenger, but I'm of the opinion that laws don't forbid what is de-facto considered as normal by most people. Besides, talking to a passenger isn't verifiable.
Last thing, I sure remember unfolding my map over the wheel on the highways, so despite what the police says about vocal GPS apps, they're still 100% better for me.
Result: Driving drunk, with a cellphone or with a hands-free phone were all equally dangerous.
Also driving while short on sleep. IIRC it's something like ~20 hours awake approximately matches .08 BAC, not sure offhand how chronic sleep deprivation (like most adults have) factors in.
(My conclusion from all this is that alcohol should not be treated as a special case: if you can't drive safely, proving that it must be for some other reason shouldn't get you out of trouble.)
In Denmark you can legally drive with under 0.05 BAC. If you're involved in any accidents, you automatically get some blame, even if you wouldn't had you had 0 BAC. It's equvivalent to saying: "You can drive home if you've had one beer, but you ought to drive cautiously".
>So you are saying, talking to a passenger "causes the same attention impairment level as someone under the influence of alcohol."?
That is not what they said at all. They are correct in pointing out that there is a great deal of evidence that conversing on a cell phone (even hands free) while driving is as dangerous as being intoxicated while driving.
There have also been studies that investigated why talking hands free on a cell phone is more dangerous than conversing with a passenger. For example:
From "Passenger and cell phone conversations in simulated driving" [1]:
"The results show that the number of driving errors was highest in the cell phone condition; in passenger conversations more references were made to traffic, and the production rate of the driver and the complexity of speech of both interlocutors dropped in response to an increase in the demand of the traffic. The results indicate that passenger conversations differ from cell phone conversations because the surrounding traffic not only becomes a topic of the conversation, helping driver and passenger to share situation awareness, but the driving condition also has a direct influence on the complexity of the conversation, thereby mitigating the potential negative effects of a conversation on driving."
Exactly. With a passenger you share the same locality and when traffic gets tricky, the passenger tends to focus on the situation at hand as well and won't expect immediate responses. With a remote conversation the other side is completely unaware of your local situation; the conversation takes places in some sort of blank virtual shared reality where only the participants and their conversation topic reside — your brain ends up needing to be in two places at once.
Talking to passengers is not the same as talking to someone on a phone when it comes to distraction, because passengers are in the car with you. The conversation with a passenger adjusts to take into account driving conditions.
We do, for professional drivers. Next time you're on a bus, look around; there's usually a sign saying something like "please don't make conversation with the driver." This isn't because municipalities want their drivers to be lonely! It is because carrying on a conversation while driving is distracting.
Far more terrifying are the ones you can't see doing it due to handsfree.
Even better is what I'm increasingly seeing in states that have made texting/hands-on phone use illegal. Of course people still do it - except now they hold the phone down low so they don't get caught. Of course, that means that they can't keep the road in line of sight for however long it takes to finish their business.
Best of all [1]: in cases where this leads to an accident, phones are hidden more quickly than they were since usage is against the law - which means phone usage will get underreported in accidents. That'll create a nice echo effect where it looks like the law is helping. The apparent number of phone-related accidents will drop - while total incidents will remain the same or increase.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4001674/ - or so some of the numbers here can be interpreted. As the authors repeatedly point out, though - there are so many variables that it's difficult to draw any meaningful conclusions.
Not necessarily just apps, how about IOS: The worst for me is the delay in rendering the bar that occupies the top of the screen when navigation is in use or when tethering is in use. I often look at the screen, then tap, but in between those events the bar appears and receives my click.
It's nearly always inconvenient to get the phone back to the intended screen.
It seems that the delayed appearance of the bar is an intentional UI 'feature' because in all cases the state is known prior to waking the phone.
Yeah there is nothing more annoying than looking at where Waze wants me to make the next crazy turn and the directions are blocked by a notification. I take my eyes off the rainy, busy road to ensure I am turning into the right street and instead see that I received recruiter spam.
What does a journalist think when he writes something like "biggest spike in traffic death in 50 years"? The NYT even has a nice plot, that clearly shows that there are two, perhaps three significant, spikes in traffic death, and overall traffic death were reduced to a third of the late seventies. I mean I just eyeball the plot, but to me it seems the story is that there is a plateau since ~2010.
As an aside, sometimes I wonder about how much more efficient we are today due to smartphones. Places where we've lost time:
- at the stoplight, the driver in front of you is too busy looking down to notice the light has changed
- in the bathroom, people check social media on the toilet
- on the sidewalk, folks walk slower because they're pre-occupied with texting
- meeting up with friends, it's more acceptable to be late because one can always send a last minute update, "I'll be there in 10 minutes!" (read: just got on lyft)
- even talking with people present: "Sorry, could you please repeat that? I was just responding to an email."
I know of digital detoxes (gag), but the inevitable seems to be this distracted-presence as our new reality (until we go full virtual-reality).
If those people weren't reading news or playing games on the toilet, they would be reading shampoo bottles. In periods of downtime people need something to do and smartphones can make that time more effective (when not used to look at cats.)
But when you're done with the toilet it's easy to put down the shampoo bottle. It's easier still to sit there for another ten minutes on a page like tumblr or Facebook which endlessly scrolls.
Humans have a pretty infinite ability to fill time, and to always find something new they "should" be doing. Early household cleaning appliances like the vacuum sold on promises of freeing up housewife's time to do other things, but people spend just as long cleaning their houses now as they did pre vacuum.
We just sort of... do things, and it's very difficult to map the relationship between an object and its impact on how much time we spend interacting with it
I think you are spot on with the bathroom. It's unbelievable to me how much time people seem to spend in there now. The last two times I've arrived in SFO and went to the bathroom I had to wait for a stall I ended up waiting about 5 minutes till anyone came out of the stalls. Meanwhile you hear notification sounds coming out of some of them. Likewise at work some people disappear in the bathroom for close to 30 minutes. I am becoming more and more in favor of installing jammers in public bathrooms.
> in the bathroom, people check social media on the toilet
I've always used the toilet breaks to read actual books or newspapers (except at work, where it would look funny carrying a book with me to the toilet), and I hope I'm not the only one still doing that. Otherwise you make very good points, never thought about it that way.
We need automatic driving so people can remain connected.
Volvo has the right vision. See their commercial.[1]
(\Volvo is about to be the first with production automatic driving. Next year, Volvo will put 100 self-driving cars on the road with real customers driving. They'll only self-drive on certain roads in Gothenburg at first. The user is not required to watch the road, and if anything goes wrong, Volvo accepts full responsibility. Tesla talks big, but Volvo gets it and has it.
Compared to other manufactures. We have 150% tax beyond 25% VAT, to make matters worse, there is hardly any tax on micro cars, so price differences are exacerbated greatly.
For the price of an estate Volvo, one can buy no less than 6 micro cars.
For self driving, not many atm, and Tesla is more expensive. But right now, I not going to use self driving abilities as a parameter for buying the car. Maybe if it could handle most of my commute for me, but it cannot.
You make a fair point, but I think you do have to consider that this is already the case in automotive manufacture. At any given point there are a range of cars on the road that have a variety of safety features differentiated on cost: antilock brakes, front and side airbags, "adaptive" cruise control that won't let you plow into a car in front of you etc. Never mind all of the more mundane mechanical fasteners, fire suppression, etc.
This isn't a new reality where there is some degree of engineering culpability inherent on auto makers, it's a moving of the goal posts.
Most accidents don't result in death. Volvo's liability coverage would be a nice comfort if you survived an accident and the people your autonomous car hit are trying to sue you.
I'm of the belief that while phones have contributed, it's just not hard enough to drive anymore. Try driving a manual shift, non power steering vehicle some time and using your phone. That's the world the roads were built for, not this ultra easy, power assisted, auto-speed control, auto-lane control world where you don't even feel the speed difference between 60 and 90.
I used to hear people say they couldn't drive without the radio because they "needed the distraction". I never got that. Isn't driving supposed to be the only thing you're doing while driving?
All the hands free apps in the world can't solve split focus. Even a bluetooth, voice activated system requires you to commit brain cycles to the conversation that's coming through that will take away from your ability to drive.
We sit and argue about how bad context switching is, how important it is in our careers as developers to focus on what we're doing, then we build apps and devices that are competing to be the best attention stealing devices they can be.
> I never got that. Isn't driving supposed to be the only thing you're doing while driving?
Kind of. There are different studies showing various kinds of impact. For example: http://content.iospress.com/articles/occupational-ergonomics... "Music seems to alleviate driver stress and mild aggression while at times facilitating performance. However, during other conditions of music, driving performance is impaired."
My own experience is that without music or a podcast in the background I get tired much more quickly. (as in, can do 3h drive without getting exhausted -vs- 1-2h) Because if only thing you have is the engine noise and road ahead, that's the only thing you can focus on, and things really don't change that often. (if your mind doesn't start to wonder / phase out in those conditions - great; mine does) It also helps in the evening a lot. If the whole world is just a cone of light 50m ahead, my mind starts to wonder, or just get sleepy really quickly. Having something unrelated that keeps you mildly interested, but not taking attention seems like a good solution.
In all fairness, the 65-70 mph posted on most rural interstates is usually an uneventfully featureless speed, on uneventful, featureless roads. Meanwhile the urban grandfathered interstates are like NASCAR with a concrete wall to one side, and ruthless traffic inches to your side. And even sometimes on a suburban parkway signed for 45, with four lanes going the same way, you fear for your life as SUVs heading home from work weave around you to get two cars ahead.
There is a wide variance in driving difficulty throughout the day, even on the same stretch of road, and varying with the amount and nature of traffic, the sun in your eyes, wind, the weather. And as you say, driver assist and safety systems like widespread adaptive cruise control, electronic stability control, blind spot warning, emergency brake assist, and curtain airbags encourage a style of driving that's 'not truly defensive' at best, oblivious at worst. Because why not go the speed limit if cars are so safe and they've got your back?
This isn't misplaced nostalgia for the days when driving was more dangerous, but I do believe as cars get safer, situational awareness worsens and riskier behaviors are less likely to result in serious accidents -- so some drivers continue to take more risks.
> 65-70 mph posted on most rural interstates is usually an uneventfully featureless speed, on uneventful, featureless roads
This is true. 95% of the time, it would be just as safe to be cruising at 90 mph. But for those other 5% where there's an unexpected tire in the middle of the road, a deer, a driver who swerved into your lane or any other danger... a few extra milliseconds to react and respond is what makes the difference between a close call and severe damage.
This means driving is condemned to be a mostly boring activity, and in our present age where boredom is to be avoided at all costs, it becomes a magnet for distractions.
One solution is to drive a vehicle that requires more immersion: a stick shift car, a convertible, a jeep, a motorcycle, etc. These are vehicles which let you feel the road.
I'd say more like 99.99% of the time, which is the problem. There's very rarely an unexpected obstacle.
Also, with a closing speed of 0, a driver swerving into your lane happens no more quickly at 90mph than at 50. (assuming they use correspondingly less steering input so the lateral speed remains the same).
But yeah, overall I agree with you. I kind of think every new driver should be forced to drive a Geo Metro or a Miata or something for the first couple of years. (as a former Miata owner, motorcyclist, and stick shift driver).
A manual car is only engaging below 50mph, above that you're in highest gear anyway. Any once you learn it, it becomes second nature and you don't really engage anymore, because it just happens as you drive.
The buffer thing amazes me, I know people who drive 70 MPH leaving a 5 foot buffer between the and the car in front of them. I have a close my eyes sometimes it makes me so nervous. And it's rude to comment on other people's driving...
>This isn't misplaced nostalgia for the days when driving was more dangerous, but I do believe as cars get safer, situational awareness worsens and riskier behaviors are less likely to result in serious accidents -- so some drivers continue to take more risks.
You put this into words better than I did. I'm not suggesting we abandon all the improvements we've gotten in the last 30 years, just recognize how less effort required can breed disassociation with the task at hand.
'Driving' in Los Angeles is totally different. You dont need all your faculties when driving consists of waiting 2 minutes, let foot off brake for 30 seconds, put foot back on brake, repeat 100x. Otherwise, I completely agree. I've owned manual shift cars my whole life. I find that a number of drivers dont really understand how a car and basic physics works.
This may be an unpopular opinion, but I would blow my brains out if I didnt have my smartphone to distract me. When you' re driving, everything can be a distraction depending on the ability of the driver. Billboards, eating, applying makeup, smoking, changing the radio and 100's of other different things all can do that. Why pass a smartphones ban, especially since were moving towards a world where most people would get lost driving to their grocery store without gps? It's just an easy, kneejerk response and doesnt solve the real issue.
We have way too low a threshold for who counts as a licensed driver. People who can't parallel park, never use their signals, people who get caught in intersections at a red light, dont look before merging or changing lanes, changing 4 lanes at once to make the exit, elderly people who get their license auto-renewed, etc. The hard truth is that there are far too many people on the road in 2 ton missiles who shouldn't have a license in the first place. One driving test for 10 minutes is not a sufficient way to license a driver.
Off-topic: I'm also amazed at how many people are clamoring for personal driving to be banned once self-driving cars hit the road. Granted, it does solve a lot of the issues I raised above but, if you want to be alpha testers for a closed source product written by software engineers in the auto industry, go right ahead. This is an industry where a company lied about the emissions of their products for years. Since cars can be on the roads for 20+ years, they had to know eventually they would be caught, but they didnt care. No one is in jail and the threat of a fine wasnt a deterrant. And now people implictly trust them with a new technology?
Im going to wait on owning one until an auto company open sources their code and there has been enough time to examine it thoroughly. In short, bring on the self-driving cars but do not make them mandatory. Just make licensing much more strict.
>Im going to wait on owning one until an auto company open sources their code and there has been enough time to examine it thoroughly. In short, bring on the self-driving cars but do not make them mandatory. Just make licensing much more strict.
At some point, we'll need to hold people to the same standard as the machines, and then.. when most people can't, we make it mandatory.
'make licensing more strict' is basically going to bring the standard up to the level of machines anyway... every time there is an accident, lawmakers will create '<victim name>s law', which tightens the requirements a bit further. Sadly, I also predict that this is the only mechanism by which requirements will be tightened.
There are already laws covering most accident scenarios and people violate them and get into wrecks. If Sally runs a red light and smashes into Bob and kills him, what exactly do you think "Bob's law" would entail? It's already illegal to run red lights.
For example, the new law could say that getting a ticket for running a red light would result in revocation of your license. As opposed to just a monetary fine / points like typically awarded now.
> Sadly, I also predict that this is the only mechanism by which requirements will be tightened.
Not going to happen. If this were so, Interlock Ignition Devices (Breathalyzers) would come standard on all new cars and be a requirement on used ones. Also, we already have a law against speed limits, but even a cheap, shitty Toyota Yaris can go faster than the highest posted speed limit. There's a large swath of the population for whom car=freedom.
Not really, because exactly that: car=freedom. That will continue to be true, but it will not be 'drivers license = freedom'. People who lose their license will need to use a self-driving car.
> This is an industry where a company lied about the emissions of their products for years.
Not only that. The individual computers speaking on a common bus are manufactured by the cheapest bidder, which is rarely the same company for all component. They can be cheap because they build to slightly fudged specifications. So the components on the common bus don't even speak the same protocol.
There was a presentation of some contractor using property testing to eliminate a huge number of integration bugs that had been in production for years. Scary stuff.
Apps are a plausible contributor. But I also noticed that some new cars ship with infotainment systems that consist solely of a (bad) touchscreen; as new cars slowly replace old ones, the number of cars with actual physical buttons for the music player or radio is dwindling. This is awful because the lack of physical buttons prevents the tactile feedback needed to operate the device without having to look at it.
Luckily, some manufacturers go the other route and put music controls as paddles on the steering wheel, which is amazingly useful.
Also, the widespread 'safety feature' of cars refusing to pair bluetooth while in motion may actually defeat the point. If one forgets to pair in the beginning, they may just keep using the phone when the need arises -- when a notification arrives, the phone rings, or they remember they want to stream some music.
I can't stand touchscreen systems. Instead of a single physical switch to turn AC on or off it's two latency laden taps. Part of it's menu design but I can't help but feel like it's always gonna happen with touchscreen centric designs.
It would work the same for anything your phone provides if it's connected via Bluetooth. There's likely also a way to get to Siri like on pretty much all Bluetooth headsets.
It's unbelievable how far behind the technology curve most car companies are.
We recently test drove a used 2015 Suburban with a touchscreen console. The MSRP for it in 2015 was almost 90k, and the touchscreen was laggy, unresponsive, and terrible resolution. 20 years ago I worked on a touchscreen point of sale system that was better than that shit.
Consumer electronics are designed to fail in 3-5 years. Cars aren't. If my 2012 Honda Accord started failing this year, I'd be really upset. If my 2012 iPad mini started failing this year... well, I wouldn't be surprised given it's age.
I don't want my car's firmware failing or even slow when my ABS system needs to kick in because of an icy road. We must hold automobiles to a higher degree of quality and consistency than consumer electronics and I don't believe these things are on par at all, nor should they be held to the same standard.
I really don't think it's planned obsolescence - it's just that automotive entertainment systems are subject to the same amount of testing as everything else in the car, which means your average media system is 5 years behind. I have a 2005 Land Rover Discovery 3 with a touch screen, and at 11 years old, it still works the same as on the day I bought it. That's what you want. Software and hardware which continues working fine for more than a decade.
On the other end of the scale we have Tesla, which clearly does very little testing of their media systems, and pushes updates over the air, so things get broken or changed with every update. But "hey, it's not a big deal, we'll just push another update in a month!" - that's absolutely not acceptable with cars.
I would be absolutely furious if my car did this. I would rather have a shitty system that stays shitty for the lifetime of the car, than have a good system that gets broken through an over-the-air update.
And do what exactly? make the car crash? If you want to do that just cut a break fluid line, don't even need to open the car for that.
I mean, I take your general point, but I'm almost certain that 99.9% of people breaking into cars do it to steal them, not to install a virus that will track your location or make your car crash. Both of those can be achieved trivially without even opening the car.
They might not have the internet (although some do via various methods) but most will have Bluetooth which could kill the console in the best case. There has been cases of people getting access to things like the door locks and the brake system.
Remember it's not just the internet that makes you susceptible, it's any network.
Almost everyone is carrying a touch screen in their pocket, complete with internet access, navigation, music, audiobooks, everything. Car manufacturers should just solve the problem of how to plug in the phone since they'll never deliver anything smarter or more powerful anyway. And, yes, physical knobs for things that you might do when driving, such as adjusting sound volume. The rest of the effort they should direct at the thing which they are good at; building cars.
Equivalently, TV manufacturers should stop trying to make their TVs smart and leave this to 3rd party devices such as the Apple TV, Chromecast or whatever. Just make great image quality and make the smartness pluggable. Anyway, I'm digressing.
One thing I miss is my iPod Classic. I used to listen to music in my car and I would feel for the buttons to skip songs. Of course if I needed a newer playlist I would have to wait till the car wasn't moving (red light), now in my newer car I have bluetooth and thankfully it has buttons for skip in the steering wheel. My iPoc Classic is dead though, so I am forced to use my phone, which I wish someone would come out with a phone that had media buttons on the side or back, I get it, there's a touch screen and all, but when I'm driving I don't want my eyes off the road. That or a case that includes bluetooth enabled buttons for skipping through songs would be neat.
The iPod Classic didn't have buttons to skip songs...you used the sides of the click wheel (which, from a tactile standpoint, was better than buttons).
BTW, there are Bluetooth remotes available for the iPhone.
We had to purchase a new vehicle at the beginning of the year (it was becoming too expensive to maintain our VW camper van), and we purposefully chose a vehicle that did not have a touch screen for any of the controls. We drove several makes that included them, and it was distracting and difficult to do rather simple things.
> But I also noticed that some new cars ship with infotainment systems that consist solely of a (bad) touchscreen; as new cars slowly replace old ones, the number of cars with actual physical buttons for the music player or radio is dwindling. This is awful because the lack of physical buttons prevents the tactile feedback needed to operate the device without having to look at it.
This is a huge issue. I'm fortunate that my car's infotainment system is controlled by buttons & knobs; I worry about folks in e.g. Teslas who are forced to take their eyes off the road.
I've seen so many drivers either texting or using their phones while driving and not paying attention to traffic signals, stop signs, and pedestrian crossings. I wish there was a way to stop smartphones from displaying notifications and other things that distract users.
As a cyclist in SF, Uber/Lyft drivers are the most dangerous thing going. They're driving by staring at their phone's map for directions and pickup/dropoff. Once they stop, they stare at their phone for the next ride. Very little situational awareness.
It'd be nice if there was some sort of way for them to indicate they drive erratically. Perhaps by painting their cars all yellow or something...
My one and only experience using Uber was with a driver who had no clue where anything was, clearly wasn't from around the place, and from what I could tell violated two traffic laws.
So what do I do, give him a bad rating? No, because this person probably needed the money, and a rating under 4.5 gets you shitcanned in an already rigged system.
Yes, except it's not really a fair system. A 4.5/5.0, to me, is an excellent score. That's an A- if it were a grade on a math test. Yet in Uber, a 4.5 means you get your driving privileges revoked. How does that make sense? It isn't a system in which I can fairly and accurately vote someone's work.
Continuing the test analogy, I don't want to eat at a restaurant that got rated a B by the health department. There are many cases where not being good enough to get an A- means you aren't good enough to do it professionally. This is no different.
It depends on what the score represents. If a 4.4 means you take a wrong turn here and there then I don't mind. If it means they constantly speed but other users don't care then I do mind.
> Yet in Uber, a 4.5 means you get your driving privileges revoked.
If that is unreasonable, why is that the system? If I can have nothing but 4.6+ drivers then why wouldn't I want that? If Uber doesn't have enough over 4.6 drivers, wouldn't they simply lower their standards? I can only assume that isn't a problem.
I feel the same happens with Airbnb. All ratings are between 4.5 and 5. I think people feel that they have to give good ratings as they feel the 'know' the host and want to be kind. As a result the ratings are kinda useless. I try to be honest, but don't like to be the outlier either...
You got downvoted but I somewhat agree with you. I almost never give less than 5 stars unless I think the driver is really endangering people out there.
In any other situation in the world when someone is rude to you as a customer you just shrug it off, maybe you tell your friend "The guy at the shoe store was so mean today". And I know at all of our jobs we have some days where we just half-ass things or are short with people. But suddenly in the "sharing economy" I get to constantly vote whether or not people should keep their jobs. It just seems so unfair to me, like I'm the emperor in Gladiator or something. I would hate to give someone 2 stars, they lose the gig, and now can't make rent or something.
If your driver violated two traffic laws, you should most definitely rate them poorly. They're a hazard for everyone on the road and should reconsider their line of work. No one is entitled to any job, especially a job that can very easily kill other people. There's a reason why many work vehicles have "how's my driving?" stickers on the back.
This is the sort of fastidiousness that Krugman talks about in this article[1]. In the old system, that person would probably not have the job in the first place, since the number of drivers was a fraction of what they are today, but since you are now personally forced to deal with the precariousness of their situation, suddenly the situation is disagreeable.
I took an Uber ride where the driver was totally unbelievable, couldn't be more distracted. Swerving while changing Pandora stations, accepting phone calls, diddling with his phone, diddling with every damn control in the car, and ran a red light. It amazes me there's people who not only believe it's acceptable to do this at all but acceptable to so this with paying customers in your car.
I didn't complain though. Why? I had already complained about another driver who was going 50 MPH down a narrow city street as well as being super rude and taking a ridiculously long route way out of the way. So I didn't want to look like a complainer or make it look like I was trying to get a free ride (they refunded my ride when I complained about the other driver).
Whether I am running or driving if I see a driver making dangerous u-turns or 3-point turns as of late it is always an Uber driver.
I always joke on a run it's normal to almost be hit by cars multiple time and typically it is by the same Uber driver. Just last night I am running thru a crosswalk (w/signal) and a car makes a left into the crosswalk almost hitting the first time, this street has no sidewalk so I am running behind the Uber driver who comes to a stop in the middle of the road for a good 45 seconds, as I proceed to catch up to the stopped car and pass it begins to do an unsignaled 3 point turn almost hitting me the 2nd time (this is when I see a phone in the drivers face), and for good measure the driver makes sure to nearly hit me reversing to clear the turn.
I have noticed some drivers have a glowing U on the dash but ride sharing drivers should be forced to have those old school pizza delivery light on the roof the they can be avoided, especially when they come to a full stop in the middle of traffic.
Or maybe we could give drivers tickets for that kinda stuff instead of almost exclusively giving tickets for speeding which I especially on the freeway believe to be a comparatively small problem.
High speed != speeding. Of course a collision at 70 or 80mph will have more fatalities on average than a collision at a "city" speed, but I would argue that safe driving in the city should be our priority, not catching people doing 90 on an 80 mph road.
It's also a bit worrisome that the driver apps only give the driver ~30 seconds to accept a new ride request. The requests almost always come in while they are driving.
Drivers are forced to pay attention to their phone and try to figure out if they want to accept the ride, all while driving. It's incredibly distracting and they never have enough time to pull over and safely accept the request.
This puts the driver as well as everyone else on the road at risk for no reason other than some arbitrary response time for ride requests.
Well the arbitrary response time is driven by users requesting rides. If Uber takes that long to match me with a driver, I assume the app is busted and I switch to Lyft.
Sounds like there is need for some regulation here, because the risks of fast response time to customer are externalized to other people in traffic.
There could be a law that a driver must have at least one full minute to accept a request. That would help this problem, even if one minute is still a short time to pull over and respond.
Instead of building regulations around internet services to discourage bad driving, why not just enforce laws on bad driving directly? If a driver is not paying attention while driving, punish them.
Suppose my livelihood depends on using my phone while driving (which entails all of the distraction, etc. described, and sometimes results in poor driving on my part). I wonder how much enforcement would be required before I would stop using my phone while driving (and incur the requisite loss of income).
Right now enforcement is at, what, 1/1000 rides (to pick an arbitrary number)? If it was 10/1000 would it influence my behavior? I imagine that 10X or even more enforcement would be required, which may not be practicable.
The expectations of the users are supposed to be managed by the creators of the apps. Right now, in my opinion, they are making an unacceptably dangerous compromise in driver safety for a very minor increase in customer convenience.
And is likely illegal in many places where using one's phone while driving is illegal. While this wasn't mentioned in Mr Y Aslam, Mr J Farrar and Others -V- Uber (the recent ruling about worker status in England & Wales), it does further add to the argument that drivers are not able to accept or decline rides at will, as if they are driving they are unable to legally decline them.
What would be cool is using the windscreen for an AR display, with glasses for both head tracking and for stereoscopic display.
I guess it would be expensive, probably too expensive for Uber drivers. Maybe it could still be used in luxury vehicles while full autonomous operation is in the works.
While not AR, Mazda is moving in that direction with their HUD. They display speed, directions from the NAV and speed limit from sign recognition. All on the screen in the CX-9 (or is it 7?) and a little popup display in the 6.
Completely agree, but it's not only Uber. As a motorcyclist in UK in a city without Uber I can tell you I know what you're talking about. Taxi drivers and bus drivers use phones to track times, number of passengers inside, taxi drivers use Google Maps. Easily 90% of dangerous situations I had was with drivers using phones/tables while driving. A lot of normal people who use phones try to "hide it" and place their phones on their legs while driving, so the phone is not... emmm visible to others, but everyone can tell that a driver looking down on their legs while driving is paying more attention to their facebook feed than to a road.
What's the difference? Biggest sounds more familiar to me. Maybe local cultures differ? For that matter, why would you ever need the word "large"? Doesn't "big" always have the same meaning?
The article fails to provide any statistics to show that apps are the cause. It just publishes a few case reports where apps were involved in an accident, and notes an uptick in traffic fatalities.
I think apps have reduced my chance of causing a traffic death:
My cognitive load for driving is much less than it used to be.
I no longer need to scan my environment for street signs, store signs or exit signs. I never need to look at a physical map/notes. If I miss a turn/exit, I'll recover. I don't have to suddenly shift lanes because I'll be in the correct lane a kilometer or two before the actual exit. Confusing signs telling me which lane to use are a non-issue.
I'll also drive fewer kilometers because of optimized routing. Sometimes it's more, but that's because I'll be diverting around congestion. I can also wait out the traffic and know exactly when to leave at a time that has fewer cars on the road.
Music streaming apps mean I don't have to fumble through radio stations, or clunky physical media.
In my locale, possibly for legal/insurance reasons, Uber drivers far too often keep their phones very low, and out of sight from other vehicles. Therefore, they have to keep looking far down.
For Uber drivers, the app is like a slot machine: you have to keep checking/interacting with it, lest you miss your next fare. With a navapp in a personal car, if it says I need to take no action for the next 1/10/100km, I know I can focus on the vehicles around me instead of signs for roughly that time.
- "Safety experts say" that it's true. The experts are not named or quoted. No evidence or reasoning is given to support the claim.
- Highway fatalities are up this year. However, they're still significantly down from 2007, when the iPhone was first introduced. Mobile has been booming for almost a decade - if we should "blame apps", why hasn't it been a concern before now?
- One driver who caused a fatal accident was using Snapchat shortly before the crash. This driver was also going at 115 mph. It goes without saying, therefore, that Snapchat is to blame, not speeding or general recklessness.
- "Insurance companies are convinced", according to one Robert Gordon. Gordon is actually named and quoted. However, the quote again doesn't provide evidence or reasoning.
Maybe it is actually true. I don't know. However, the evidence given is nowhere near strong enough to be convincing. There's also the issue that newspapers are direct competitors with the apps they're railing against (for ad dollars), and have been losing badly: http://charman-anderson.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/newsp....
"One driver who caused a fatal accident was using Snapchat shortly before the crash. This driver was also going at 115 mph. It goes without saying, therefore, that Snapchat is to blame, not speeding or general recklessness."
The Snapchat was taken by the passenger. They were even hinting at racing being a factor. It seems like a bad example all around. I am sure apps contribute to some road fatalities but this was clearly a case of a driver crashing because they were going 115 miles a fucking hour on a populated road.
Standard NY times reporting quality. You have to take it with a grain of salt or be in a position where their editorial viewpoint aligns with yours enough for you to ignore these evidence requirements.
Also, just look at that graph they posted (can't be linked to because the labels are not included in the png file). Biggest spike in 50 years? More like a minor blip in a steady downwards trend.
There were 1.25 million estimated road fatalities worldwide in 2015, so a 1% blip would amount to 12.5 thousand. So yes this blip represents very real entirely avoidable deaths, as the offset of the traditional downward trend suggests.
Who said anything about worldwide fatalities? Apples and oranges.
"Entirely avoidable" is a strange term in this context. All 1.25 million deaths were technically avoidable, but not without causing significantly worse harm, suffering, and death instead.
We don't actually know what caused the increase, right now we're just speculating.
Now, the NHTSA puts a $6.0 million price tag on the economic value of preventing a US traffic fatality, and based on that figure we prevent as much as we can.
I'm not sure if I've become more cognizant of bad journalism over time or simply hold journalism to a higher standard with the rise of publicly available data sets which could be used for real insight into questions like this. Whichever one, I am infrequently satisfied with the level of evidence that supports an article's conclusion. I would love to see a truly data-driven news publication that made quantifying uncertainty a priority over creating a digestible narrative for people who'd rather the author does the thinking for them.
Unfortunately, news today isn't meant to be as accurate as it is meant to be popular. Sure, accuracy will provide stability in the long term. But for immediate popularity, appealing titles are what creates viewers, which is revenue in terms of ads.
It's the sad reality of click bait, and it's hard to place blame. Is it the ad network? The"news" outlet? The viewers?
Maybe it's all three, but what I do know is that there is a problem with news on the web.
I'm not sure if their understanding of data or statistics has decreased, but the level of journalism has definitely taken a nosedive. A friend of mine in journalism school says they are taught that accuracy isn't as important as being first or having a clickbait thanks to social media
>I'm not sure if their understanding of data or statistics has decreased, but the level of journalism has definitely taken a nosedive.
Not really surprising. The number of professional journalists is shrinking yet those that remain are expected to produce the same volume of output as was possible with a much larger staff.
Well said, and I share this intuition and desire 100%. I’ve been working on building a platform for data-driven journalism at https://numer.al -- It’s a prototype that turns public APIs into live D3 charts. (Working on embedding those into articles so that they stay up to date, link back to show their provenance, etc.) I think there’s a lot that can be done to bring journalism into the 21st century. If you’re interested in the things we’re working on, feel free to drop me a line: brian@numer.al.
This is pretty neat! My only complaint is that you haven't labelled the axes. You can estimate the Y-axis pretty well based on the listed number, but the X-axis is a mystery until you click the graph. Even two date labels at either end would be welcome.
Interesting reaction to the quote from Robert Gordon of the Property Casualty Insurers Association of America. PCI is an umbrella lobby for insurers; their website says they represent writers of 42% of automobile policies in the U.S. Since insurers are in the business of understanding and quantifying the risks they insure against, I'm willing to assume that he and PCI are knowledgeable about this issue.
I see so many people looking down now at their phones while driving. I'm not sure why it's acceptable now, but it's commonplace. I counted at least 10 drivers on my 12 minute commute yesterday. The scariest one was someone coming in the opposite direction who didn't look up in the 5 seconds I was driving past him. It would have been easy for him to drift into a head on collision.
I'll check my messages at a traffic light, or flick to the next song whilst driving. I don't see any particular danger in these things (apart from possibly angering the poor bugger behind me if I'm slow to notice the lights change). Much like ye olden days of changing a cassette or tuning the radio - there are times and place to pay less attention. People just need to be sensible.
Do that in the UK in front of a police officer, and expect several points on your licence and a fine.
You're only allowed to use a distracting device in similar circumstances as you are allowed to be drunk. Arguing with an officer that you are parked by the side of the road is not sufficient if for example you have the engine on. In some circumstances just sitting in the driver's seat while in possession of the keys and drunk is enough for a conviction.
I drive but rarely, and finally had a chance last month to use my phone's voice-prompted turn-by-turn navigation mode. It was great! Like any human navigator I've ever worked with, except never hesitant or uncertain and always on the ball with the next turn well in advance of reaching it.
I really have no idea why anyone would want to navigate by looking at a moving map display. If you know where you're going, you're far better off to keep your eyes on the road and use the voice prompts to get there. If you don't know where you're going - well, that's a bigger problem, and one that no navigation system will solve.
When traversing an intersection with odd angles often the voice prompt will say something like "slight right" for the road I think of as straight ahead, or vice versa. A glance at the map clears these up.
Mine did that a couple of times even in the short route on which I tried it out. I didn't have trouble understanding what was meant, because the configuration of the intersections made only one interpretation sensible. I can see how that might not be true in all cases, but I'm not sure the occasional disambiguation is worth the distraction of a visible moving map display.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of people doing it are never spotted by police officers. I walk to work most days, and I can't remember the last time I didn't see at least one person (usually it's at least half a dozen on a 30 minute walk) texting while driving.
This morning, as I dropped my daughter off at school, some woman pulled off from the side of the road and drove about 30 yards before bothering to look up to see if there were any kids crossing.
Do anything in a car in the UK and you can expect several points on your licence. They don't even have to be in front of you any more: they just record it on a camera
The idea that using my iPod to play music results in a completely different response to using my iPhone despite the mechanism being functionally identical is laughable. I don't need to look at the screen to queue up the next song on shuffle, it's also no different from hitting next on the cd player...
I also use google maps on my phone as a sat nav (audio only is plenty effective to get me places). Again, this is somehow dangerous and illegal to be using but the same behaviour with an actual sat nav, which in my experience is far more labourious to set a destination on, is fine.
I am, of course, aware of the law (I'm in the UK). However in this case the law is an ass. "Driving without due care and attention" properly covers every eventuality.
I wonder if this law will sit around ad infinitum whilst we ignore the ever more complicated computers sat on the centre console just as (if not more) distracting than a phone...
It is just as illegal to drive distracted by a satnav as it is to drive distracted by an iphone in the UK. If you're holding it in your hand or looking away from the road to use it, then it is illegal.
Even if you aren't holding it in your hand of looking away from the road, but are significantly distracted, you can be prosecuted under the "Driving without due care attention" law as you state.
> It is just as illegal to drive distracted by a satnav as it is to drive distracted by an iphone in the UK.
Correct. However it is illegal to use a phone without being distracted dangerously, whilst using a satnav without being distracted dangerously is perfectly safe.
The Driving without due care and attention is a perfect catch all for dealing with bad driving behaviour. You can be done for eating crisps as easily as using a sat nav. The specific "using a mobile phone whilst behind the wheel of a car is 6 points on your license + a fine" is completely disproportionate in terms of what behaviours it implicitly approves (such as using sat nav safely whilst not moving) and the burden of proof (requiring the user to be "unsafe").
The reality is that policemen (of whom there are simply not enough) have discretion and a bit of common sense most of the time and use the tools at their disposal to punish people for driving badly whilst using their phone. This is good. I fundamentally disagree with singling out unsafe mobile phone use in law, however.
As an American who recently did some driving around the UK: things are different there! The level of attention needed to drive safely in the UK is off the charts compared to the US with all the twisty, narrow roads, one-lane bridges, and limited visibility. I knew that shit was about to get real when I saw my first "Oncoming Traffic in Middle of Road" sign. Touching my phone while driving never entered my mind—that was all outsourced to my wife in the passenger seat.
Family killed by a truck driver doing exactly this, including dashcam footage showing how quickly this happens if you are distracted for even a tiny amount of time. Very scary.
Timing at high speed has a lot to do with it, and lots of things can distract drivers from the road but the margin of error is slim here and so it seems very reasonable to legislate against this.
Oh god... here I go... as a motorcyclist (sorry) this is something that is utterly frightening.
I'm out there on the road doing my fu-cking damndest to make sure that I'm driving defensively and predictably, kind of just trying to ensure that I see my wife and twi girls that evening.
I'm at standing height next to your window, so I can see right in there while you text and check Facebook whilst piloting a 2 ton machine at upwards of 100kph.
The mind boggles at just how common this is, I'd say one in three on some days. At highway speeds.
Yes, some cell phone use/distracted driving is allowed for adults in most states[0], but most states do not allow 'young drivers' to use a cell phone at all[1]; and texting is specifically banned or partially banned for all drivers in all but two states (Montana and Arizona)[2].
Not OP. In my state, it is illegal, but we're pansies, and so a cop can't stop you for it - they can only cite you if they pull you over for something else.
Hand-held Cell Phone Use Ban: 14 states, D.C., Puerto Rico, Guam and the U.S. Virgin Islands prohibit all drivers from using hand-held cell phones while driving.
All Cell Phone ban: No state bans all cell phone use for all drivers, but 37 states and D.C. ban all cell phone use by novice or teen drivers, and 20 states and D.C. prohibit any cell phone use for school bus drivers.
Text Messaging ban: 46 states, D.C., Puerto Rico, Guam and the U.S. Virgin Islands ban text messaging for all drivers.
-2 states prohibit text messaging by novice or teen drivers.
-3 states restrict school bus drivers from texting.
If caught you you can be stopped and your phone impounded for one week and released only upon payment of a fine.
There was a news report recently indicating that only a very small percentage of these phones are ever recovered from the police which ties in with the stereotype for this kind of behaviour: Porsche SUV, Chanel sunglasses, ten spare phones at home.
I'm not a motorcyclist, but there's no way I'd do it now. People pay so little attention to what they do. And people get in their cars and they think they're the only ones in existence (except who they're texting); not courtesy at all.
How many days in a row do I need to see this anecdotal evidence for it to be valid? At this point I'm up to probably a year solid of seeing folks fiddle with their phone instead of watching where they drive on my twelve minute commute.
Oh man, that feeling when you're stopped at a traffic light or an accident causes a sudden slowdown, and in your rearview mirror the car behind you is coming in way too fast but the driver isn't even looking because there's something on his or her lap that's more important. Or the people who think they have a heads-up display because they're holding the phone at the top of the steering wheel while typing on it. The thing that makes it extra scary is that you really can't do a dang thing about it once you're on the road next to these people. Like in the sudden-stop scenario, I try to leave a bit of extra space in front of me and have sometimes needed to use it to give extra stopping space to the texter behind me, but sometimes you're really packed in and all you can do is cross your fingers that the person will finish the message and look up in time.
Yes but... evidence like this is hard to acquire - the most you can get is convincing circumstantial evidence (if the phone survives get accelerometer and activity use from it. That sounds like a worthwhile branch of forensics)
And even if we do it's hard to go from circumstantial to causal
But as a driver, I can (un)happily attest that I am distracted from the road if trying to do anything non trivial with my podcast app (the only thing I will let myself use)
Having physical on steering wheel buttons will reduce this but not end it.
Perhaps we just ban radios, phones etc as a precaution.
(Ok actually we can do an experiment - force 50% of drivers to never use a phone or similar and 50% donwhat they like. See who's dead after six months)
There have been quite a few simulator studies that have shown significantly worse driving for cell phone users. Granted it's a jump from that to the real world. I remember one from a while back that showed that cell phone users were as bad as drunk drivers with a relatively low intoxication but they were bad in different ways (distraction vs. aggression).
I'm sure there must be similar studies in real world settings or at least fenced of tracks or something (I only remember because I researched 3d simulation and these studies showed up).
Figuring out the cause of an accident post accident in a methodically clean (and legal) way is probably non-trivial though. I don't think it's horrible to hypothesize that more accidents could be related to some recent tech trend. I'd say texting would be a good variable conduct some research on (as opposed to cell phone calls etc.). Obviously the author went beyond formulating a hypothesis though.
> Granted it's a jump from that to the real world.
Not that much of a jump though.
I wonder how much more evidence is needed for people to accept that having an active smartphone within range of your eyes and ears while driving is a major risk factor? You don't even have to use the thing; just knowing that notifications can show up any time now is enough to distract our primate brain. We've evolved to be able to detect and act on minute movements spotted in the corners of our eyes on the grassy plains, because it might just be a tiger lurking there. It's a (very effective, if you are a hunter-gatherer on a steppe) survival mechanism.
By now there are plenty of studies performed in driving simulators that proof that smartphones distract you significantly. Of course hard empiric real world data is hard to get by, because people involved in a crash will tend to deny or downplay the use or presence of a smartphone, so data from real world accidents is of limited use. What we do have is a lot of anecdotal real world observations by participants and traffic experts, where people conclude that a smartphone did indeed distract them to the point of (near) accidents, or where police officers on highway patrol can pick out someone texting based purely on the swerving of their vehicle (which they then confirm when the overtake them). But the point is that real world data cannot be ethically obtained in a controlled scientific manner for this topic — you can't let one group drive using their smartphone and another not.
Even here on HN it seems like a lot of people are downplaying the risk of smartphones in traffic, despite ample evidence pointing to just that conclusion. Is this one of those inconvenient truths?
If we're talking about the same studies, then they also found that it was equally distracting to be talking to a passenger. God knows how dangerous it must be to go on a family outing.
In short, I'm skeptical about what those results really tell us.
Having said that, I have some sympathy with the article. I fundamentally don't like touch screens in cars (it stops me from considering a Tesla). They require all of your attention when you're using them and this is a bad thing imo.
Everything I've ever read indicated talking with a passenger was distracting but not as distracting as a cell phone. And cell phones are still distracting even of they are hands free. The most distracting activity is math problems.
> One driver who caused a fatal accident was using Snapchat shortly before the crash. This driver was also going at 115 mph.
I've always thought it was irresponsible that snapchat has a camera mode that overlays your current speed on the picture. What else is it going to be used for? Showing how fast your bus is travelling?
Great point - so is it possible the fleet as a whole got less safe last year? Or less more safe than usual?
My recollection is that car buying is doing just fine lately so I doubt it, but would have been a good point to make in TFA instead of another anecdote.
while the headline is sensational the use of mobile devices leading to more accidents is not. as an avid motorcyclist I tend to pay more attention to what people are doing around me and especially those who can cross my path.
I cannot count on my drive to work the number of times I see people looking at their phones. The head down move which is all to obvious to the arm out towards the driver seat to the blatant on top of the steering wheel. I used to think it was bad they were using the phones while driving, but that isn't near as bad as what goes on today.
There is enough tech in smart phones to know when they are in modern cars and definitely to know they are moving. If anything they could blank the screen and with full connectivity of Apple and Google play type technologies they easily can tell if the car is operating. I know, but what about passengers. Well what about safety.
Distracted driving is as dangerous if not more than impaired driving. At least the impaired driver is making an effort at driving
I'd say this is one of the greatest challenges journalists face: Sometimes you talk to a lot of people and do a lot of research only to find out there is no story.
"Smartphone usage increase while driving has caused more accidents" is a nice narrative that totally _makes sense_, but unfortunately only becomes newsworthy if there is evidence that the reporter can find-- perhaps from highway patrols and police officers, mobile data usage stats, or I suppose anecdotally from someone who studies this stuff.
But sometimes that's not available, or it is and goes against the original narrative. At that point the reporter can either choose to tell their editor that there is no story, or go out seeking confirmation of the original narrative.
It is likely not true as this was printed in the New York Times.
Their journalists and editors are mostly Socialists so they are bound to generate one article after another following the narrative that we should ban something because smart technocrats in their infinite wisdom have again found a reason why they know best what we ignorant masses should do.
The mentioned safety expert is probably the NYT journalist who wrote the article. They are experts on every single issue they have an opinion on.
Look, it's even printed in the NYT, so they must be experts by definition.
Edit: You can even see that they are Socialists by looking at the headline. Blame apps instead of reckless individuals.
That's because it's always the fault of some outside force when something goes horribly wrong, people are just dumb sheep in dire need of upgrade to the Socialist Übermensch, didn't you know?
Every solution is a central planning solution, in this case a new regulation. Forget liberty, this is only for backwards rednecks clinging to their guns and religion.
It seems like Mark R. Rosekind, head of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, is being quoted and is among those experts. Then it goes on to cite a couple cases and claim that the Department of Transportation and the National Safety Council are also worried. I mean really the citations keep going so I don't get your argument
How is it possible you haven't noted that these devices affect a subset of population in a manner that can be fairly described as 'mesmerized'?
"going 115 mph" on Snapchat. Isn't the mere fact that someone would feel compelled to chat at 115 mph enough? I remember my younger days when I edged closed to that number going from NYC to Troy on 95 and even adjusting the tune or lighting a cig was a very deliberate operation.
If you are texting at that speed, some part of your rational mind has been short circuited.
Should be titled: "Traffic deaths slightly spike, but remain lower than 2008 or any other year after 1956."
It has increased slightly since 2011, but less than 10%. What we might be seeing is that vehicle deaths has plateaued. We kept seeing decreases because technology kept being introduced (e.g. seat belts, air bags, ABS brakes, crumple zones, partial overlap resistance, safety cages, better safety testing, etc). That kind of slowed at the end of the 2000s and is now picking up again (e.g. automatic braking, lane keep assist, blind spot warning, cross traffic alert, backup cameras, full automation, etc).
The whole article is trying to manufacture a story out of statistical noise. We'd need more data (more years) to even start to speculate on an actual increase in deaths.
The author neglected to mention that miles driven in the United States increased by a record 107.5 billion last year, up 3.5% [0]. Even at 2014's all-time low death rate of 1.08 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles traveled [1], that increase in driving would lead us to expect 1,161 more deaths on the roads. There were actually 2,417 (7.4%) more deaths in 2015 than in 2014, so the increase in driving accounts for "only" 48% of the increase in deaths.
What accounts for the rest? More notable than the increase in deaths is that the death rate increased from 1.08 per 100 million VMT to 1.12 (3.7%), only the second year-on-year increase in the death rate in the past two decades. The only other increase in the death rate occurred between 2011 and 2012, and the biggest decreases in the death rate over the past two decades occurred in 2007–8 and 2008–9.
What was happening in those years? First the Great Recession, then an economic recovery. The years of the Great Recession were saw the steepest declines in miles driven in decades, and the last several years of economic recovery have seen the sharpest increases in driving (to an all-time high last year). The recession years were also the only years vehicle registrations fell in recent decades, and the number of licensed drivers flatlined for the first time since the previous recession in the early 2000s; licenses and registrations ticked up again during the recovery years, and were up strongly in 2014 [2].
So we saw the death rate fall as the recession hit and people drove less, fewer people got licensed to drive, and fewer vehicles were on the road. Then during the recovery we saw the only increases in the death rate in decades, as people started driving more and more new drivers got licensed and hit the roads.
Here's a hypothesis: the death rate fell sharply during the recession because (a) fewer cars were on the road, making roads safer, and especially because (b) the cohort of drivers changed, shifting older, more experienced, and more cautious as fewer young people (who were hit hardest by the economic downtown, and who have the highest rate of death by car) could afford to drive. Then during the recovery those changes reversed and people began to die on the roads at a higher rate.
Corollary: this article about apps causing driving deaths is mostly journalistic nonsense.
I drive three to four hours a day in Los Angeles a few times a week, mostly on the 405. The number of people I see looking down or down an to the right at their phones is staggering.
Now I can call it from afar because there's a commonality to the lack of speed control and lane keeping. They meander left-right on the lane, don't maintain speed and break abruptly as they look at traffic and have to re-synchronize with it.
So, yeah, I don't know if I'd blame apps in particular but the advent of "smart" phones is definitely having an impact on our highways and, from what I see often enough, it isn't positive.
In the Netherlands, a possible cause also is cyclists using mobile phones in traffic. Bicycles apparently are too easy to drive with all that nice infrastructure.
The lure of the smartphone is pushing a number of drivers over the threshold of insufficient attention. They would be less distracted without.
It's not like drivers had an individually fixed amount of distraction that they would distribute on whatever media at hand, it's the attention that is limited and far too many drivers don't allocate it correctly when their phone is around. Unfortunately, using a smartphone while driving is far more common than using the newspaper while driving has ever been. This has everything to do with the difference between smartphones and newspapers.
You'll probably can't prevent this. That's why cars should be self-driving asap and common safety features like autonomous emergency braking, lane assist have to be mandatory in the meantime.
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[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 262 ms ] threadNo, that's secondary. Blame smartphones.
Perhaps that too is secondary. Blame humans.
Now, do smartphones make humans worse at driving, or does their use while driving still result in the base case? My argument is that smartphone use does in fact significantly worsen a human's ability to drive properly. As a result, I believe that, for the time being, we need to somehow tackle the issue of smartphone use while operating a vehicle.
Eating and applying makeup (women) also contributed.
Humans have to recognize that driving demands 100% of their attention.
Besides, eating, doing make-up, and fiddling with a CD player are absolutely nothing compared to what people do on smartphones nowadays while cruising in a hunk of metal at 60 mph.
For sure there is a distraction, but it is definitely not on the level you described.
Result: Driving drunk, with a cellphone or with a hands-free phone were all equally dangerous. I'm as surprised as you must be.
They didn't test talking to a passenger, but I'm of the opinion that laws don't forbid what is de-facto considered as normal by most people. Besides, talking to a passenger isn't verifiable.
Last thing, I sure remember unfolding my map over the wheel on the highways, so despite what the police says about vocal GPS apps, they're still 100% better for me.
Also driving while short on sleep. IIRC it's something like ~20 hours awake approximately matches .08 BAC, not sure offhand how chronic sleep deprivation (like most adults have) factors in.
(My conclusion from all this is that alcohol should not be treated as a special case: if you can't drive safely, proving that it must be for some other reason shouldn't get you out of trouble.)
That is not what they said at all. They are correct in pointing out that there is a great deal of evidence that conversing on a cell phone (even hands free) while driving is as dangerous as being intoxicated while driving.
There have also been studies that investigated why talking hands free on a cell phone is more dangerous than conversing with a passenger. For example:
From "Passenger and cell phone conversations in simulated driving" [1]:
"The results show that the number of driving errors was highest in the cell phone condition; in passenger conversations more references were made to traffic, and the production rate of the driver and the complexity of speech of both interlocutors dropped in response to an increase in the demand of the traffic. The results indicate that passenger conversations differ from cell phone conversations because the surrounding traffic not only becomes a topic of the conversation, helping driver and passenger to share situation awareness, but the driving condition also has a direct influence on the complexity of the conversation, thereby mitigating the potential negative effects of a conversation on driving."
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19102621
We're just not very good at that.
Even better is what I'm increasingly seeing in states that have made texting/hands-on phone use illegal. Of course people still do it - except now they hold the phone down low so they don't get caught. Of course, that means that they can't keep the road in line of sight for however long it takes to finish their business.
Best of all [1]: in cases where this leads to an accident, phones are hidden more quickly than they were since usage is against the law - which means phone usage will get underreported in accidents. That'll create a nice echo effect where it looks like the law is helping. The apparent number of phone-related accidents will drop - while total incidents will remain the same or increase.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4001674/ - or so some of the numbers here can be interpreted. As the authors repeatedly point out, though - there are so many variables that it's difficult to draw any meaningful conclusions.
https://www.distraction.gov/downloads/pdfs/the-impact-of-han...
http://www.nsc.org/DistractedDrivingDocuments/Cognitive-Dist...
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-36475180
http://www.nsc.org/learn/NSC-Initiatives/Pages/distracted-dr...
Better late than never, I guess.
Ill admit, I have not read it yet, I'm reading an ecology paper currently, but I will read it tonight.
It's nearly always inconvenient to get the phone back to the intended screen.
It seems that the delayed appearance of the bar is an intentional UI 'feature' because in all cases the state is known prior to waking the phone.
So I guess the title makes sense, but I think it's extremely misleading.
- at the stoplight, the driver in front of you is too busy looking down to notice the light has changed
- in the bathroom, people check social media on the toilet
- on the sidewalk, folks walk slower because they're pre-occupied with texting
- meeting up with friends, it's more acceptable to be late because one can always send a last minute update, "I'll be there in 10 minutes!" (read: just got on lyft)
- even talking with people present: "Sorry, could you please repeat that? I was just responding to an email."
I know of digital detoxes (gag), but the inevitable seems to be this distracted-presence as our new reality (until we go full virtual-reality).
We just sort of... do things, and it's very difficult to map the relationship between an object and its impact on how much time we spend interacting with it
I've always used the toilet breaks to read actual books or newspapers (except at work, where it would look funny carrying a book with me to the toilet), and I hope I'm not the only one still doing that. Otherwise you make very good points, never thought about it that way.
'I'm sorry, I scheduled this meeting so that we could have a conversation. Let's reschedule for when your email-checking schedule is clear.'
(\Volvo is about to be the first with production automatic driving. Next year, Volvo will put 100 self-driving cars on the road with real customers driving. They'll only self-drive on certain roads in Gothenburg at first. The user is not required to watch the road, and if anything goes wrong, Volvo accepts full responsibility. Tesla talks big, but Volvo gets it and has it.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDB6fFflTVA
Nice comfort I'm sure as you lie in your casket.
I think the idea of mentioning it is that it is a comfort as you hand control of the car over to the automated system.
For the price of an estate Volvo, one can buy no less than 6 micro cars.
Only expensive ones ;)
This isn't a new reality where there is some degree of engineering culpability inherent on auto makers, it's a moving of the goal posts.
I used to hear people say they couldn't drive without the radio because they "needed the distraction". I never got that. Isn't driving supposed to be the only thing you're doing while driving?
All the hands free apps in the world can't solve split focus. Even a bluetooth, voice activated system requires you to commit brain cycles to the conversation that's coming through that will take away from your ability to drive.
We sit and argue about how bad context switching is, how important it is in our careers as developers to focus on what we're doing, then we build apps and devices that are competing to be the best attention stealing devices they can be.
Kind of. There are different studies showing various kinds of impact. For example: http://content.iospress.com/articles/occupational-ergonomics... "Music seems to alleviate driver stress and mild aggression while at times facilitating performance. However, during other conditions of music, driving performance is impaired."
My own experience is that without music or a podcast in the background I get tired much more quickly. (as in, can do 3h drive without getting exhausted -vs- 1-2h) Because if only thing you have is the engine noise and road ahead, that's the only thing you can focus on, and things really don't change that often. (if your mind doesn't start to wonder / phase out in those conditions - great; mine does) It also helps in the evening a lot. If the whole world is just a cone of light 50m ahead, my mind starts to wonder, or just get sleepy really quickly. Having something unrelated that keeps you mildly interested, but not taking attention seems like a good solution.
There is a wide variance in driving difficulty throughout the day, even on the same stretch of road, and varying with the amount and nature of traffic, the sun in your eyes, wind, the weather. And as you say, driver assist and safety systems like widespread adaptive cruise control, electronic stability control, blind spot warning, emergency brake assist, and curtain airbags encourage a style of driving that's 'not truly defensive' at best, oblivious at worst. Because why not go the speed limit if cars are so safe and they've got your back?
This isn't misplaced nostalgia for the days when driving was more dangerous, but I do believe as cars get safer, situational awareness worsens and riskier behaviors are less likely to result in serious accidents -- so some drivers continue to take more risks.
This is true. 95% of the time, it would be just as safe to be cruising at 90 mph. But for those other 5% where there's an unexpected tire in the middle of the road, a deer, a driver who swerved into your lane or any other danger... a few extra milliseconds to react and respond is what makes the difference between a close call and severe damage.
This means driving is condemned to be a mostly boring activity, and in our present age where boredom is to be avoided at all costs, it becomes a magnet for distractions.
One solution is to drive a vehicle that requires more immersion: a stick shift car, a convertible, a jeep, a motorcycle, etc. These are vehicles which let you feel the road.
Also, with a closing speed of 0, a driver swerving into your lane happens no more quickly at 90mph than at 50. (assuming they use correspondingly less steering input so the lateral speed remains the same).
But yeah, overall I agree with you. I kind of think every new driver should be forced to drive a Geo Metro or a Miata or something for the first couple of years. (as a former Miata owner, motorcyclist, and stick shift driver).
You put this into words better than I did. I'm not suggesting we abandon all the improvements we've gotten in the last 30 years, just recognize how less effort required can breed disassociation with the task at hand.
This may be an unpopular opinion, but I would blow my brains out if I didnt have my smartphone to distract me. When you' re driving, everything can be a distraction depending on the ability of the driver. Billboards, eating, applying makeup, smoking, changing the radio and 100's of other different things all can do that. Why pass a smartphones ban, especially since were moving towards a world where most people would get lost driving to their grocery store without gps? It's just an easy, kneejerk response and doesnt solve the real issue.
We have way too low a threshold for who counts as a licensed driver. People who can't parallel park, never use their signals, people who get caught in intersections at a red light, dont look before merging or changing lanes, changing 4 lanes at once to make the exit, elderly people who get their license auto-renewed, etc. The hard truth is that there are far too many people on the road in 2 ton missiles who shouldn't have a license in the first place. One driving test for 10 minutes is not a sufficient way to license a driver.
Off-topic: I'm also amazed at how many people are clamoring for personal driving to be banned once self-driving cars hit the road. Granted, it does solve a lot of the issues I raised above but, if you want to be alpha testers for a closed source product written by software engineers in the auto industry, go right ahead. This is an industry where a company lied about the emissions of their products for years. Since cars can be on the roads for 20+ years, they had to know eventually they would be caught, but they didnt care. No one is in jail and the threat of a fine wasnt a deterrant. And now people implictly trust them with a new technology?
Im going to wait on owning one until an auto company open sources their code and there has been enough time to examine it thoroughly. In short, bring on the self-driving cars but do not make them mandatory. Just make licensing much more strict.
At some point, we'll need to hold people to the same standard as the machines, and then.. when most people can't, we make it mandatory.
Not going to happen. If this were so, Interlock Ignition Devices (Breathalyzers) would come standard on all new cars and be a requirement on used ones. Also, we already have a law against speed limits, but even a cheap, shitty Toyota Yaris can go faster than the highest posted speed limit. There's a large swath of the population for whom car=freedom.
Not only that. The individual computers speaking on a common bus are manufactured by the cheapest bidder, which is rarely the same company for all component. They can be cheap because they build to slightly fudged specifications. So the components on the common bus don't even speak the same protocol.
There was a presentation of some contractor using property testing to eliminate a huge number of integration bugs that had been in production for years. Scary stuff.
Luckily, some manufacturers go the other route and put music controls as paddles on the steering wheel, which is amazingly useful.
Also, the widespread 'safety feature' of cars refusing to pair bluetooth while in motion may actually defeat the point. If one forgets to pair in the beginning, they may just keep using the phone when the need arises -- when a notification arrives, the phone rings, or they remember they want to stream some music.
- Radio on/off
- All radio controls on the wheel
- Heating/cooling, physical knobs
The touchscreen is treated as an optional, secondary interface, as it rightfully should be.
I'm assuming people are listening to podcasts/Pandora/spotify/audiobooks just as frequently , not to mention looking at/listening to directions.
And it doesn't even have a siri/google assistant button? I'd consider that vital.
We recently test drove a used 2015 Suburban with a touchscreen console. The MSRP for it in 2015 was almost 90k, and the touchscreen was laggy, unresponsive, and terrible resolution. 20 years ago I worked on a touchscreen point of sale system that was better than that shit.
I don't want my car's firmware failing or even slow when my ABS system needs to kick in because of an icy road. We must hold automobiles to a higher degree of quality and consistency than consumer electronics and I don't believe these things are on par at all, nor should they be held to the same standard.
On the other end of the scale we have Tesla, which clearly does very little testing of their media systems, and pushes updates over the air, so things get broken or changed with every update. But "hey, it's not a big deal, we'll just push another update in a month!" - that's absolutely not acceptable with cars.
For example: https://medium.com/@michaelmeier_90534/tesla-model-s-is-grea...
I would be absolutely furious if my car did this. I would rather have a shitty system that stays shitty for the lifetime of the car, than have a good system that gets broken through an over-the-air update.
I mean, if an attacker has physical access to the insides of your car, all bets are off and is now his vehicle.
I mean, I take your general point, but I'm almost certain that 99.9% of people breaking into cars do it to steal them, not to install a virus that will track your location or make your car crash. Both of those can be achieved trivially without even opening the car.
Remember it's not just the internet that makes you susceptible, it's any network.
Equivalently, TV manufacturers should stop trying to make their TVs smart and leave this to 3rd party devices such as the Apple TV, Chromecast or whatever. Just make great image quality and make the smartness pluggable. Anyway, I'm digressing.
BTW, there are Bluetooth remotes available for the iPhone.
This is a huge issue. I'm fortunate that my car's infotainment system is controlled by buttons & knobs; I worry about folks in e.g. Teslas who are forced to take their eyes off the road.
It'd be nice if there was some sort of way for them to indicate they drive erratically. Perhaps by painting their cars all yellow or something...
So what do I do, give him a bad rating? No, because this person probably needed the money, and a rating under 4.5 gets you shitcanned in an already rigged system.
Quite the revolution indeed.
I've never had a bad Uber experience but I have had some downright frightening cab rides and I'd love to be able to rate that.
If that is unreasonable, why is that the system? If I can have nothing but 4.6+ drivers then why wouldn't I want that? If Uber doesn't have enough over 4.6 drivers, wouldn't they simply lower their standards? I can only assume that isn't a problem.
If someone drives badly they need a different career and rating them highly regardless just makes sure the feedback system doesn't work.
In any other situation in the world when someone is rude to you as a customer you just shrug it off, maybe you tell your friend "The guy at the shoe store was so mean today". And I know at all of our jobs we have some days where we just half-ass things or are short with people. But suddenly in the "sharing economy" I get to constantly vote whether or not people should keep their jobs. It just seems so unfair to me, like I'm the emperor in Gladiator or something. I would hate to give someone 2 stars, they lose the gig, and now can't make rent or something.
This is the sort of fastidiousness that Krugman talks about in this article[1]. In the old system, that person would probably not have the job in the first place, since the number of drivers was a fraction of what they are today, but since you are now personally forced to deal with the precariousness of their situation, suddenly the situation is disagreeable.
[1] http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/smokey.html
I didn't complain though. Why? I had already complained about another driver who was going 50 MPH down a narrow city street as well as being super rude and taking a ridiculously long route way out of the way. So I didn't want to look like a complainer or make it look like I was trying to get a free ride (they refunded my ride when I complained about the other driver).
I always joke on a run it's normal to almost be hit by cars multiple time and typically it is by the same Uber driver. Just last night I am running thru a crosswalk (w/signal) and a car makes a left into the crosswalk almost hitting the first time, this street has no sidewalk so I am running behind the Uber driver who comes to a stop in the middle of the road for a good 45 seconds, as I proceed to catch up to the stopped car and pass it begins to do an unsignaled 3 point turn almost hitting me the 2nd time (this is when I see a phone in the drivers face), and for good measure the driver makes sure to nearly hit me reversing to clear the turn.
I have noticed some drivers have a glowing U on the dash but ride sharing drivers should be forced to have those old school pizza delivery light on the roof the they can be avoided, especially when they come to a full stop in the middle of traffic.
Drivers are forced to pay attention to their phone and try to figure out if they want to accept the ride, all while driving. It's incredibly distracting and they never have enough time to pull over and safely accept the request.
This puts the driver as well as everyone else on the road at risk for no reason other than some arbitrary response time for ride requests.
There could be a law that a driver must have at least one full minute to accept a request. That would help this problem, even if one minute is still a short time to pull over and respond.
Right now enforcement is at, what, 1/1000 rides (to pick an arbitrary number)? If it was 10/1000 would it influence my behavior? I imagine that 10X or even more enforcement would be required, which may not be practicable.
https://youtu.be/tiwVMrTLUWg?t=12m30s
I guess it would be expensive, probably too expensive for Uber drivers. Maybe it could still be used in luxury vehicles while full autonomous operation is in the works.
But does anyone know why the title wasn't: "largest spike in..." As opposed to "biggest spike in..."?
I think apps have reduced my chance of causing a traffic death:
My cognitive load for driving is much less than it used to be.
I no longer need to scan my environment for street signs, store signs or exit signs. I never need to look at a physical map/notes. If I miss a turn/exit, I'll recover. I don't have to suddenly shift lanes because I'll be in the correct lane a kilometer or two before the actual exit. Confusing signs telling me which lane to use are a non-issue.
I'll also drive fewer kilometers because of optimized routing. Sometimes it's more, but that's because I'll be diverting around congestion. I can also wait out the traffic and know exactly when to leave at a time that has fewer cars on the road.
Music streaming apps mean I don't have to fumble through radio stations, or clunky physical media.
Both purport situational awareness" to have vastly different consequences and effects.
For Uber drivers, the app is like a slot machine: you have to keep checking/interacting with it, lest you miss your next fare. With a navapp in a personal car, if it says I need to take no action for the next 1/10/100km, I know I can focus on the vehicles around me instead of signs for roughly that time.
Evidence given in the article:
- "Safety experts say" that it's true. The experts are not named or quoted. No evidence or reasoning is given to support the claim.
- Highway fatalities are up this year. However, they're still significantly down from 2007, when the iPhone was first introduced. Mobile has been booming for almost a decade - if we should "blame apps", why hasn't it been a concern before now?
- One driver who caused a fatal accident was using Snapchat shortly before the crash. This driver was also going at 115 mph. It goes without saying, therefore, that Snapchat is to blame, not speeding or general recklessness.
- "Insurance companies are convinced", according to one Robert Gordon. Gordon is actually named and quoted. However, the quote again doesn't provide evidence or reasoning.
Maybe it is actually true. I don't know. However, the evidence given is nowhere near strong enough to be convincing. There's also the issue that newspapers are direct competitors with the apps they're railing against (for ad dollars), and have been losing badly: http://charman-anderson.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/newsp....
The Snapchat was taken by the passenger. They were even hinting at racing being a factor. It seems like a bad example all around. I am sure apps contribute to some road fatalities but this was clearly a case of a driver crashing because they were going 115 miles a fucking hour on a populated road.
Autonomous cars are around the corner and it's the only way to truly make a leap forward in terms of traffic safety.
And people can spend even more time on their apps while commuting, uninterrupted by this soon-to-be-forgotten distraction called "manual driving".
Incidentally wrote a blog about this today: https://medium.com/self-driving-cars/safer-roads-and-cleaner...
"Entirely avoidable" is a strange term in this context. All 1.25 million deaths were technically avoidable, but not without causing significantly worse harm, suffering, and death instead.
We don't actually know what caused the increase, right now we're just speculating.
Now, the NHTSA puts a $6.0 million price tag on the economic value of preventing a US traffic fatality, and based on that figure we prevent as much as we can.
That said, I agree a little more data wouldn't hurt.
It's the sad reality of click bait, and it's hard to place blame. Is it the ad network? The"news" outlet? The viewers?
Maybe it's all three, but what I do know is that there is a problem with news on the web.
But did you see the Supermoon Monday? It was ginormous!
/s
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2012/05/02/th...
Not really surprising. The number of professional journalists is shrinking yet those that remain are expected to produce the same volume of output as was possible with a much larger staff.
[1] https://www.gapminder.org/
I see so many people looking down now at their phones while driving. I'm not sure why it's acceptable now, but it's commonplace. I counted at least 10 drivers on my 12 minute commute yesterday. The scariest one was someone coming in the opposite direction who didn't look up in the 5 seconds I was driving past him. It would have been easy for him to drift into a head on collision.
You're only allowed to use a distracting device in similar circumstances as you are allowed to be drunk. Arguing with an officer that you are parked by the side of the road is not sufficient if for example you have the engine on. In some circumstances just sitting in the driver's seat while in possession of the keys and drunk is enough for a conviction.
Are you not allowed to use Maps for navigation too?
I really have no idea why anyone would want to navigate by looking at a moving map display. If you know where you're going, you're far better off to keep your eyes on the road and use the voice prompts to get there. If you don't know where you're going - well, that's a bigger problem, and one that no navigation system will solve.
This morning, as I dropped my daughter off at school, some woman pulled off from the side of the road and drove about 30 yards before bothering to look up to see if there were any kids crossing.
I also use google maps on my phone as a sat nav (audio only is plenty effective to get me places). Again, this is somehow dangerous and illegal to be using but the same behaviour with an actual sat nav, which in my experience is far more labourious to set a destination on, is fine.
I am, of course, aware of the law (I'm in the UK). However in this case the law is an ass. "Driving without due care and attention" properly covers every eventuality.
I wonder if this law will sit around ad infinitum whilst we ignore the ever more complicated computers sat on the centre console just as (if not more) distracting than a phone...
Even if you aren't holding it in your hand of looking away from the road, but are significantly distracted, you can be prosecuted under the "Driving without due care attention" law as you state.
Correct. However it is illegal to use a phone without being distracted dangerously, whilst using a satnav without being distracted dangerously is perfectly safe.
The Driving without due care and attention is a perfect catch all for dealing with bad driving behaviour. You can be done for eating crisps as easily as using a sat nav. The specific "using a mobile phone whilst behind the wheel of a car is 6 points on your license + a fine" is completely disproportionate in terms of what behaviours it implicitly approves (such as using sat nav safely whilst not moving) and the burden of proof (requiring the user to be "unsafe").
The reality is that policemen (of whom there are simply not enough) have discretion and a bit of common sense most of the time and use the tools at their disposal to punish people for driving badly whilst using their phone. This is good. I fundamentally disagree with singling out unsafe mobile phone use in law, however.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-37823457
Family killed by a truck driver doing exactly this, including dashcam footage showing how quickly this happens if you are distracted for even a tiny amount of time. Very scary.
Timing at high speed has a lot to do with it, and lots of things can distract drivers from the road but the margin of error is slim here and so it seems very reasonable to legislate against this.
I'm out there on the road doing my fu-cking damndest to make sure that I'm driving defensively and predictably, kind of just trying to ensure that I see my wife and twi girls that evening.
I'm at standing height next to your window, so I can see right in there while you text and check Facebook whilst piloting a 2 ton machine at upwards of 100kph.
The mind boggles at just how common this is, I'd say one in three on some days. At highway speeds.
It ain't right peeps.
[0]http://www.iihs.org/iihs/topics/laws/cellphonelaws/maphandhe...
[1]http://www.iihs.org/iihs/topics/laws/cellphonelaws/mapyoungc...
[2]http://www.iihs.org/iihs/topics/laws/cellphonelaws/maptextin...
You may be interested in this site that summarizes the state of the U.S. with regards to cellphone usage while driving laws: http://www.ncsl.org/research/transportation/cellular-phone-u...
Summary:
Hand-held Cell Phone Use Ban: 14 states, D.C., Puerto Rico, Guam and the U.S. Virgin Islands prohibit all drivers from using hand-held cell phones while driving.
All Cell Phone ban: No state bans all cell phone use for all drivers, but 37 states and D.C. ban all cell phone use by novice or teen drivers, and 20 states and D.C. prohibit any cell phone use for school bus drivers.
Text Messaging ban: 46 states, D.C., Puerto Rico, Guam and the U.S. Virgin Islands ban text messaging for all drivers.
-2 states prohibit text messaging by novice or teen drivers. -3 states restrict school bus drivers from texting.
If caught you you can be stopped and your phone impounded for one week and released only upon payment of a fine.
There was a news report recently indicating that only a very small percentage of these phones are ever recovered from the police which ties in with the stereotype for this kind of behaviour: Porsche SUV, Chanel sunglasses, ten spare phones at home.
And even if we do it's hard to go from circumstantial to causal
But as a driver, I can (un)happily attest that I am distracted from the road if trying to do anything non trivial with my podcast app (the only thing I will let myself use)
Having physical on steering wheel buttons will reduce this but not end it.
Perhaps we just ban radios, phones etc as a precaution.
(Ok actually we can do an experiment - force 50% of drivers to never use a phone or similar and 50% donwhat they like. See who's dead after six months)
Figuring out the cause of an accident post accident in a methodically clean (and legal) way is probably non-trivial though. I don't think it's horrible to hypothesize that more accidents could be related to some recent tech trend. I'd say texting would be a good variable conduct some research on (as opposed to cell phone calls etc.). Obviously the author went beyond formulating a hypothesis though.
Not that much of a jump though.
I wonder how much more evidence is needed for people to accept that having an active smartphone within range of your eyes and ears while driving is a major risk factor? You don't even have to use the thing; just knowing that notifications can show up any time now is enough to distract our primate brain. We've evolved to be able to detect and act on minute movements spotted in the corners of our eyes on the grassy plains, because it might just be a tiger lurking there. It's a (very effective, if you are a hunter-gatherer on a steppe) survival mechanism.
By now there are plenty of studies performed in driving simulators that proof that smartphones distract you significantly. Of course hard empiric real world data is hard to get by, because people involved in a crash will tend to deny or downplay the use or presence of a smartphone, so data from real world accidents is of limited use. What we do have is a lot of anecdotal real world observations by participants and traffic experts, where people conclude that a smartphone did indeed distract them to the point of (near) accidents, or where police officers on highway patrol can pick out someone texting based purely on the swerving of their vehicle (which they then confirm when the overtake them). But the point is that real world data cannot be ethically obtained in a controlled scientific manner for this topic — you can't let one group drive using their smartphone and another not.
Even here on HN it seems like a lot of people are downplaying the risk of smartphones in traffic, despite ample evidence pointing to just that conclusion. Is this one of those inconvenient truths?
In short, I'm skeptical about what those results really tell us.
Having said that, I have some sympathy with the article. I fundamentally don't like touch screens in cars (it stops me from considering a Tesla). They require all of your attention when you're using them and this is a bad thing imo.
I've always thought it was irresponsible that snapchat has a camera mode that overlays your current speed on the picture. What else is it going to be used for? Showing how fast your bus is travelling?
So and uptick could actually mean quite a spike if you normalize.
My recollection is that car buying is doing just fine lately so I doubt it, but would have been a good point to make in TFA instead of another anecdote.
I cannot count on my drive to work the number of times I see people looking at their phones. The head down move which is all to obvious to the arm out towards the driver seat to the blatant on top of the steering wheel. I used to think it was bad they were using the phones while driving, but that isn't near as bad as what goes on today.
There is enough tech in smart phones to know when they are in modern cars and definitely to know they are moving. If anything they could blank the screen and with full connectivity of Apple and Google play type technologies they easily can tell if the car is operating. I know, but what about passengers. Well what about safety.
Distracted driving is as dangerous if not more than impaired driving. At least the impaired driver is making an effort at driving
"Smartphone usage increase while driving has caused more accidents" is a nice narrative that totally _makes sense_, but unfortunately only becomes newsworthy if there is evidence that the reporter can find-- perhaps from highway patrols and police officers, mobile data usage stats, or I suppose anecdotally from someone who studies this stuff.
But sometimes that's not available, or it is and goes against the original narrative. At that point the reporter can either choose to tell their editor that there is no story, or go out seeking confirmation of the original narrative.
Let's not paper over it. That's what those newspapers are doing. And then, they wonder why people won't read them anymore...
Their journalists and editors are mostly Socialists so they are bound to generate one article after another following the narrative that we should ban something because smart technocrats in their infinite wisdom have again found a reason why they know best what we ignorant masses should do.
The mentioned safety expert is probably the NYT journalist who wrote the article. They are experts on every single issue they have an opinion on.
Look, it's even printed in the NYT, so they must be experts by definition.
Edit: You can even see that they are Socialists by looking at the headline. Blame apps instead of reckless individuals.
That's because it's always the fault of some outside force when something goes horribly wrong, people are just dumb sheep in dire need of upgrade to the Socialist Übermensch, didn't you know?
Every solution is a central planning solution, in this case a new regulation. Forget liberty, this is only for backwards rednecks clinging to their guns and religion.
Best comment I've seen in a long while.
It seems like Mark R. Rosekind, head of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, is being quoted and is among those experts. Then it goes on to cite a couple cases and claim that the Department of Transportation and the National Safety Council are also worried. I mean really the citations keep going so I don't get your argument
"going 115 mph" on Snapchat. Isn't the mere fact that someone would feel compelled to chat at 115 mph enough? I remember my younger days when I edged closed to that number going from NYC to Troy on 95 and even adjusting the tune or lighting a cig was a very deliberate operation.
If you are texting at that speed, some part of your rational mind has been short circuited.
But you didn't die, so it must be Snapchat.
Should be titled: "Traffic deaths slightly spike, but remain lower than 2008 or any other year after 1956."
It has increased slightly since 2011, but less than 10%. What we might be seeing is that vehicle deaths has plateaued. We kept seeing decreases because technology kept being introduced (e.g. seat belts, air bags, ABS brakes, crumple zones, partial overlap resistance, safety cages, better safety testing, etc). That kind of slowed at the end of the 2000s and is now picking up again (e.g. automatic braking, lane keep assist, blind spot warning, cross traffic alert, backup cameras, full automation, etc).
The whole article is trying to manufacture a story out of statistical noise. We'd need more data (more years) to even start to speculate on an actual increase in deaths.
What accounts for the rest? More notable than the increase in deaths is that the death rate increased from 1.08 per 100 million VMT to 1.12 (3.7%), only the second year-on-year increase in the death rate in the past two decades. The only other increase in the death rate occurred between 2011 and 2012, and the biggest decreases in the death rate over the past two decades occurred in 2007–8 and 2008–9.
What was happening in those years? First the Great Recession, then an economic recovery. The years of the Great Recession were saw the steepest declines in miles driven in decades, and the last several years of economic recovery have seen the sharpest increases in driving (to an all-time high last year). The recession years were also the only years vehicle registrations fell in recent decades, and the number of licensed drivers flatlined for the first time since the previous recession in the early 2000s; licenses and registrations ticked up again during the recovery years, and were up strongly in 2014 [2].
So we saw the death rate fall as the recession hit and people drove less, fewer people got licensed to drive, and fewer vehicles were on the road. Then during the recovery we saw the only increases in the death rate in decades, as people started driving more and more new drivers got licensed and hit the roads.
Here's a hypothesis: the death rate fell sharply during the recession because (a) fewer cars were on the road, making roads safer, and especially because (b) the cohort of drivers changed, shifting older, more experienced, and more cautious as fewer young people (who were hit hardest by the economic downtown, and who have the highest rate of death by car) could afford to drive. Then during the recovery those changes reversed and people began to die on the roads at a higher rate.
Corollary: this article about apps causing driving deaths is mostly journalistic nonsense.
0. http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/travel_monitoring/...
1. http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Main/index.aspx
2. https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/statistics/2014/d...
"Text John"
"I'm sorry, I can't do that right now"
...
Now I can call it from afar because there's a commonality to the lack of speed control and lane keeping. They meander left-right on the lane, don't maintain speed and break abruptly as they look at traffic and have to re-synchronize with it.
So, yeah, I don't know if I'd blame apps in particular but the advent of "smart" phones is definitely having an impact on our highways and, from what I see often enough, it isn't positive.
Could a desire for safe roads be one? Drivers on smartphones kill.
It's not like drivers had an individually fixed amount of distraction that they would distribute on whatever media at hand, it's the attention that is limited and far too many drivers don't allocate it correctly when their phone is around. Unfortunately, using a smartphone while driving is far more common than using the newspaper while driving has ever been. This has everything to do with the difference between smartphones and newspapers.