Driving with cell phones
 

Yesterday the NTSB recommended an outright ban on cell phones in cars (including hands free).

Sure a ban would save lives but so would dropping the national speed limit to 10mph. It makes me wonder, what is an acceptable level of risk?

Americans take 1,100,000,000 car trips per day. That's 1.1 Billion trips every day

In 2008 448,000 people were injured and 5,474 people were killed by distracted driving.

That means that on any given day, your chances of being injured by a distracted driving is 0.000001%. Literately one on a million and I'd guess that number drops dramatically if you are not the one doing the distracted driving.

Your chance of being killed is 0.00000001% or 1 in 100 Million

Those are pretty slim odds.

Here's my question - if this becomes law, are we all going to get refunds for the bluetooth devices we had installed in our cars (due to being all but mandated by law) that are now illegal to operate?

I think the 'meet in the middle' will be all 50 states adopting no texting/emailing/Facebooking while allowing hands free/bluetooth talking.

I guess I should learn how to make voice activated dialing work.

I was also wondering how you'd enforce it with most people already having some kind of hands free to comply with current laws. And I must see 20 people a day chatting away with their phone up to their ears anyway.

And I can't use voice activated because the flip farking flip things never recognize my voice. Sync will call random people if I try to use voice dial.

I don't know what form the laws will take or how they will be enforced.

But I'm fine with just saying:

Having a phone conversation, whether hands free or not, while driving is simply stupid. So stop doing it.

Using devices that require more than a second of contact to use while also taking your eyes off the road is simply stupid. So stop doing it.

Doing stupid **** that risks other people's lives because you think, without any evidence beyond the fact you haven't killed anybody yet, that you're one of the people who doesn't suffer the same cognitive and motor failings as general human beings is stupid. So stop doing it.

So, rather than criminal penalties for it, I think the law should be that if you almost or successfully harm or kill me because you're being stupid while operating a car I get to kick you in the balls. Or the lady balls if you're a lady (which you aren't because you're being an idiot while driving). And I get to keep doing it until I feel you've learned an important life lesson.

Does this include talking to others in your car?

When you do it stupidly. Yes.

That said, as a cognitive distraction, conversation with a fellow passenger is not the same impact as the exact same phone conversation on a phone.

If you want to hold a phone conversation with another person in your car then I'll have to give that some thought.

Is everyone on a cell phone in those 1.1 billion car trips? If not, what if they were? I imagine the odds would go up. There are close to 300 million people in the United States. If everybody fired four random gunshots out their window or on the street every day, you'd have about 1.1 billion shots fired every day, the overhelming majority of which would not kill anybody, but, in real numbers, a lot would.

Given that for years, people drove without talking on the phone, the inescapable conclusion is that every single cell phone conversation that occurs in a car is unnecessary. It is, perhaps, a preference, and, like firing gunshots in public, an expression of the cherished freedom to threaten our neighbors, but banning it wouldn't bother me.

I would also add re the statistics that some other driver usually makes me go, "Hey, what the f***!" at least once a week, and that driver is usually on the phone.

I wish we had taken a picture of the West Covina Police officer talking on his cell phone while driving on the 57 freeway yesterday.

Would I be in trouble for continuing to use my phone as a music player? Would selecting the next podcast to listen to be verboten? Is it somehow more dangerous than someone scrolling through their poorly organized directories via LCD display on the MP3 CD that's in their car stereo simply because theirs is built into the dashboard?

I understand, and possibly even agree with, the impetus behind the recommendation. But enforcement I think will be inconsistent at best.

I was mistakenly pulled over for talking on my cell phone because I was resting my head on my hand and my long hair covered me ear, therefore a cop decided I must be on the phone. If they can't even determine accurately whether someone had a device physically against their head, what chance do they have of accurately determining other far less obvious uses of portable devices?

I see cops talking on their phone and driving all the time. According to traffic school they are allowed to since that is how they communicate with their dispatch most of the time now.

Enforcement where there is no negative outcome to draw attention is problematic. But I have no problem with, if you are otherwise involved in a criminal/civil issue related to driving, that it can be shown that you were texting, or taking calls, or setting Spotify playlists, or making a 130-point play on Words with Friends that they could charge you with that (or increase civil penalties) as well.

Car radios, gps devices, kids in the backseat, regular old paper maps -all of them just as, or more distracting than me hitting the button on my ear to answer an incoming call.

I have rear-ended someone twice. Once, 15 years ago, stop-and-go on the freeway, I looked down for an nth of a second at a paper map. Second one, 7 or 8 years ago, again stop-and-go, nth of a second, iPod. Both minor, but made the point that I SHOULDN'T TAKE MY EYES AWAY FROM THE CAR IN FRONT OF ME TO LOOK AT SILLY SH!T!

True. They all can be and they should all be done with caution.

But the distraction of talking on the phone is not in the handling if the phone, it is in the cognitive nature of holding a phone conversation and what that does to the human brain in terms of multitasking in a way it simply does not do well. There is now plenty of evidence that talking on a cell phone increases your chances of being in an accident compared to holding conversations with passengers and that it makes no statistical difference whether that phone conversation is hands free or not.

"There is other stupid stuff I do too" isn't really a good defense for doing any particular stupid thing.

I don't think anyone is arguing in favor of distracted driving, but clearly in the vast majority of cases people are able to talk and drive without indecent.

Driving will never be 100% safe. Accident rates go up if you have a radio in the car, cruise control, food and/or drink, passengers (especially kids). Should we eliminate all these as well? What about the speed limit? How low would you like to make that knowing that every MPH you lower it saves lives.

Even if you do eliminate all those things you'll still have traffic deaths and injuries.

I'm all for a public safety campaign alerting people to the dangers of using a cell phone while driving, but I don't want a law that says I can't use a cell phone (for calls) while driving. It's just one more risk that needs to be managed.

I suppose a lot of it is perception. There is speeding and following too closely, both of which are dangerous, but which we all accept. And there is speeding more, following more closely and weaving in and out of traffic, which we don't accept, makes us think "Asshole!" and which we want to see prosecuted.

I think somehow the pro-cell phone/texting folks have moved from the "Everything in life is risky" camp to, well, the other camp, because there's a tinge of the "I'm a law abiding citizen, and I should be able to do what I want" cant to their pitch which, among other things, begs the question.

The first question I would raise on any particular risk is: does it contribute to the utility of driving?

Having passengers in a car obviously does. Increased speed obviously does.

Food and drink not so obviously. Radio not so obviously. Talking with your wife on the phone not so obviously.

I'd say there are two different standards of review for them. If a limit on one of the first sufficiently reduces the benefit of driving it can be argued that it is worth the increased risk of harm and death. I'd argue that the threshold is much higher when the distraction is purely cosmetic to the purpose of driving.

And partly, **** gets grandfathered in that if new today probably wouldn't be allowed.

That said, if the NHTSA statistics are to be believed, compared to the population experiencing all of the existing distractions you already mention, texting while driving increases your risk of an accident by 23x. Speaking on a cell phone (regardless of handsfree or not) increases your risk of an accident by 7x compared tot he population experiencing all of the existing distractions.

Then you add on top of that the research indicating that the cognitive disruption of talking on a cell phone is fundamentally different in nature from the cognitive disruption of kids arguing in the back seat or singing along to the radio and to me it puts talking on your phone squarely into the category of "Doing Stupid ****."

The argument may be that driving with kids should also be "Doing Stupid ****" but because we do one category of "Doing Stupid ****" isn't a great argument for not trying to prevent another type of "Doing Stupid ****" from taking root.

By no means am I one advocating for a zero risk life. But in this case the Doing Stupid **** is almost as likely to hurt someone else as yourself and not Doing Stupid **** causes no real harm to anybody.

So in this case, since driving is already a heavily regulated activity, I have no problem at all with the various state departments of transportation trying to find ways to eliminate this particular form of Doing Stupid ****.

(Plus I have to imagine the rate of cell phone involved accidents is probably a bit underreported since hopefully not too many people would be so stupid as to say "I don't know how I ran into that tree, officer, I was on the phone with my mom and not really paying attention."

Also isn't it about time this molly****ing cocksucking message board got rid of the **** **** **** **** **** vagina censor?

I believe I was the biggest advocate of that since I used to access LOT from work and didn't want to get firewalled by the naughty word police. But now, if not at home I'm using my phone (occasionally while driving - but now that im driving stick I cant seem to multi-task on the phone anymore thus avoiding potential ball kicking) So I'd be happy to let us all cuss like sailors - but I'll let others weigh in on that.

I'd prefer to leave the fvcking censors intact. We all know what we mean, we all know the way around it.

Oh, I don't really care if it stays or not. I'll just keep typing what I'm saying and let whatever gets killed die.

But, personally, I find fvcking and sh!t and pr0n et al. to be awfully silly.

Personally, I am a better driver when conversing on a cell phone than I am when I am conversing with someone in the car. With a person in the car, I tend to glance at them more (especially people in the back seat) and I talk with my hands. On my bluetooth, I can answer and hang up from the steering wheel and see who is calling by glancing at the radio screen. (Or, I could until Chris stole the Mini). But, with a manual car, I also only kept one hand on the wheel most of the time.

My phone is probably the LEAST distracting thing in my vehicle. Dogs, radio/satelite/cd/ipod controls, maps, passengers - all are MUCH more of a distraction.

I admit, I am on my cell phone a LOT throughout the day. It is the nature of my job to be doing other things while talking on the phone. The MOST difficult thing to do is walk dogs while holding the phone up to my ear. That is something I simply cannot do.

It used to be against the law to drive barefoot. It might still be for all I know, but if cops can't hang out on street corners with stop signs that are regularly run and issue tickets, when are they going to police me and my cell phone?

Oh, and we're also supposed to only have 4 pets and license our cats. We have 3 AC officers and one truck to police Long Beach, Seal Beach, Signal Hill, Cypress and Los Alamitos. I wonder why I haven't gotten in trouble yet?

I sound almost libertarian!

I doubt you're right in your assessment of the cognitive impacts of those distractions. But even if you are you're the exception. After all, 90% of people think they're above average drivers.

But again, just because you have other things that you feel distract you more, does not mean that it is a good idea to be distracted by this. Especially since I'm guessing most of the time you are adding the phone to those other distractions rather than replacing them.

Obviously I haven't seen you drive, but if you really are that distracted I wouldn't be surprised if you're one of the two-or-three cars a week I kick for being crap drivers who almost run into me on my various walks.

I have no expectation that any laws on this would be rigidly or consistently enforced. But I still have no problem with the idea of such rules.

I don't disagree that there are all sorts of distracting things in a car that don't involve the safest possible driving, but are we going to outlaw CD players? It's just dumb to choose one thing over another just because it is the newest thing (and especially since it has gotten MUCH safe as of late).

I don't know if I would be considered a "good" driver. I've had 2 tickets in 34 years of driving (both speeding). I certainly am a "bold" driver, but I also can assess situations VERY quickly which has worked in my favor. And, despite being "surprised" by pedestrians and bike riders who seem to think they can walk or ride anywhere on (and off) the road in my lovely city, I haven't hit anyone yet. Yet.

I addressed that above. Studies show that the nature of being distracted talking on the phone is different (at the cognitive level as well as at the interaction level) than the nature of other distractions in the car.

This doesn't mean that those distractions are ok, but all evidence currently available is that, in aggregate, talking on the phone is much worse than those other things.

So, even if I grant that you are an outlier, superbly designed for driving in the face of extreme distraction, setting the rules based on outliers generally isn't good practice.

(And if it is possible to prove that someone got into an accident or committed an infraction while digging through CDs to change the one in the player then I'd be fine with a regulation that allowed doubling the penalties, just as I'm fine with it if you're on the phone.)

My concern then is what will constitute proof that you were using a device at the time of an accident.

Apparently activity records "close to" the time or location of the incident is considered sufficient. So you could safely use your phone, put it away (let's say for the sake of argument whatever text you entered was still sending), then have some jackass come out of nowhere and hit you, but you could still be nailed. At least, that's how I'm reading that report.

Don't see why it would be necessary to prove you were using it at the time of an accident. Just that you were using it while driving. Now, they aren't likely to get that proof unless you have been involved in some negative incident (regardless of whether that incident was directly related).

Out of curiosity, if talking on phones or texting while driving is no big deal. Is there a level of distraction that does cross a line. Are TVs installed in dashboards bad?

I commute about six miles each way every day. In the morning, I like to drape my newspaper over the steering wheel and work on the crossword puzzle. Since the puzzle becomes gradually more difficult as the week progresses, my ability to drive defensively dissipates on Thursday. By Friday, I can hardly pay attention to the selfish drivers distractedly talking on their cell phones, much less school children who believe that crossing the street is a right and not a privilege.

As a centrist, I believe this law is a good thing. But only after Wednesday.

my work interweb nazi's would frag the place for excessive profanity or 'adult subject matter' without a second look for context, so Id prefer the censor-matic stay in place

What a ************ load of *** ** **** geriatric **** **** ********.

Am I the only one who is remembering the post that Alex made back on Mousepad (when he was the head cheese there) listing the censored words on that board? I got a hearty laugh out of that.

I like cheese.

That's why you're so cheesy. :)

Were they sh1t, p1ss, fvck, cvnt, c0cksucker, motherfvcker, and t1ts ?

And t1ts doesn't even belong on the list.

**** piss **** **** ********** mother****er tits

Tater T¡ts

Glad to see we can still say Mother.

My car will broadcast my phone through the audio so I bought a neat car mount that fits in the CD player (it still has used!) and a bluetooth microphone that goes on the visor. Hopefully this isn't all for nothing.

I think the NTSB went big with the complete ban suggestion hoping to get a nation wide hands-free driving / no texting while driving implemented.

I also think it would be good for them to broadcast how much that "$25 first offence ticket" costs. I think after court fees it's over $200.

And piss.

This seems out of place now, doesn't it?