Boom, boom, and BOOM. Great posts.

 

Distracted driving is not the only problem. We still have drunk drivers, and addition we have more and more drivers high on drugs, prescription opiods and, of course, pot. I see so many people smoke a joint and proceed to drive. USA has an entitlist car culture, and the only way to break it is mandatory drivers re-education and re-evaluation on federal level.

 

In the US drivers cause 6 million crashes per year, killing on average 40,000 people per year, and permanently maiming 2.3 million. Roughly a quarter of these crashes are due to distracted driving. Let this sink in.

 

^^^ and that’s why self-driving cars can’t come soon enough. Will they be perfect? No. Will there still be crashes and fatalities? Yes. But will those numbers you cite be vastly lower? Yes.

 

And until they do, we should just sit back and wait?

 

If it was an effective deterrent you wouldn't have an issue with this in NYC. Since you do...its not effective.

The FACT is, overall car crashes and deaths are down. Cars being more crashworthy doesn't make them not crash.

Absolutely you will. Look at how far this voice and AI style interface has come in 5 years. The sky is the limit.

Sorry, I have to drive and I have to work while I drive. Technology is making that safer, and encouraging people to make smart compromises as I do is the answer. You will NEVER stop people from communicating while driving their cars.

 

In my opinion, a smart compromise would be to delay your emails and texts instead of responding, even if you're stopped at a light. An even smarter compromise is to have whoever you need to communicate with just call you on your bluetooth-enabled cellphone and talk handsfree. I agree with you in that automakers need to come up with a solution that allows drivers to communicate safely, and they are taking steps towards making communication safer by adding stuff like AA/ACP. But when drivers like you, who insist that they absolutely have to text/email, don't even use the solutions they come up with, what's the point in developing that tech? They develop it specifically for people like you, and you don't use it because it makes mistakes or because its more frustrating to use. Deal with the mistakes and the frustrations, and use the safer tech. It will improve over time. Don't regress to the least safe option just because you're used to it.

 

It's not effective because there is no real enforcement, very few distracted driving tickets are written. If they really cracked down on it, like they cracked down on seat belts and window tints in early and mid 2000's it would be very effective.


The FACT is, crashes due to distracted driving are up, way up. Overall crashes are down because virtually all cars are equipped with ABS and stability systems these days, combined with better suspensions, gripper tires, and stronger brakes - allowing drivers to avoid accidents that in the past were difficult to avoid.


It's not just the matter of technology, but the matter of liability. BMW's i-drive already has a "reply" button when displaying texts and emails, but the button is grayed out. If they enabled it, and someone gets into an accident while replying to a communication, BMW can be held liable in a law suit.

You have to work while you drive, the driver of the car next to you has to update his facebook status, and the instagram model in the car behind you has to book an online appointment to her anus bleaching clinic. There is no excuse for this unsafe behavior, and there are going to be major crack downs on it everywhere.

 

I agree. People flaunt the law not because the penalty is ineffective but because the risk of being caught is low. Why enact a law if it cannot be effectively and efficiently enforced? Even an extremely harsh penalty would not be a deterrent if the people know that the risk of being caught is almost nil.

An imaginative enforcement mechanism I have read about is having police officers riding along in traffic with a higher perspective (such as on a bus) so that they can look down into the lap of a driver to see if there is a smartphone or other device hidden there. So, is this being done? If not, why not?

 

I also agree. And it's not only the low risk of getting caught....it's a basic contempt for the law itself.

 

First of all, you don't know me and you haven't lived a minute in my shoes, let alone a day...so don't judge me. I get hundreds of emails and texts a day. Turning every text conversation into a phone call isn't feasible because of the time commitment, and text is how my customers want to communicate with me. In any event, replying to a quick text at a red light or verbally over Siri Eyes Free is no more distracting than making, receiving, and talking on phone calls.

I'm not driving around typing on my phone or scrolling through emails. I can take a quick peek at my Apple watch and see if a text or email is important. Emails can wait, but if its a text that cant wait for a red light I respond verbally with Siri which works okay. Who said I don't use technologies that are developed to make it easier and safer? I do...but those technologies still need to improve before they will be fully adapted by everyone.

if I didnt reply to any texts or emails while I'm in the car, it would add another 2-3 hours to my workday every day, and I wouldnt be nearly as effective at my job as I am. It is what it is, I have a family to feed and I am going to respond to my paying customers when they need me to respond to them...whether I'm in a car or not.

Then you should run for Mayor or police chief or whatever, because you've got it all figured out.

Use Siri Eyes Free.

Thats ridiculous. Me and others working in our cars is completely different from some guy updating his FB status. I'm not playing on the internet, I'm replying to a text from a paying customer at a red light while my car holds the brake for me. There is ZERO risk there. Come down off your high horse.

I'm glad that you don't need to use your time in your car as work time, I'd rather I didnt either. You also likely spend way less time in a car than I do seeing you live in NYC. I spent 4 hours in the car today. If I wasn't working during those 4 hours, I would STILL be working.

 

This is a perennial topic. I can recall commenting on this in one of my first posts here about three years ago. Then, as now, I argued that some folks (like me, for example) are extensively trained to multitask (instrument single-pilot in the clouds, where you make a mistake and you die) and thus can handle a phone call better than the typical teen. Here in Oregon they make a very big deal about hand-held phones, with huge penalties. Okay, how about hand-held Big Macs? What about talking to passengers? What about the Tesla Model3 screen, which is off-axis to boot?

So it seems to me that the only real way to police dangerous driving is to observe dangerous driving, just as if the driver was blowing 0.12.

 

Yep.....I have to agree. The very definition of being a pilot, particularly in IFR or Simulated-IFR (Hood) conditions and/or under positive-control, talking to controllers, is multi-tasking. But most drivers, most of the time, never face that kind of situation, don't have that kind of training or co-ordination, and sometimes over-estimate their ability to deal with multi-tasking. And, I also agree with some of the earlier posts.....today's complex video-screens in vehicles don't help, either.

 

Because it’s too expensive to implement. Perhaps better would be mounting high up cameras on buses that feed to a system that alerts authorities to egregious behavior.

 

It's more than that. In most cases, there either aren't enough cops, or they make cell-phone enforcement a low priority.