Phone Addicts Are the New Drunk Drivers

As others have said, as a motorcyclist, my number one concern on the road is a person using their mobile device while driving. I am less worried about road rage (which is still a top concern for me) than distracted drivers.

I see it literally hundreds of times a day. People are driving their cars at over 70mph while texting. They use instagram and facebook at stoplights. They text or call while driving too fast down residential roads. They cause traffic delays because they don't accelerate at a green light for many seconds after the car in front of them has.

I have seen them hit other cars and narrowly miss pedestrians in crosswalks, completely oblivious half the time that they nearly murdered someone.

If I pull up next to them and tell them to put their phone down by pantomime, half the time they flip me off, laugh, or lay on their horn. They do not think they are doing anything wrong and that I am the asshole for telling them to put the phone down.

Distracted drivers are murderers. Distracted drivers are guilty of reckless endangerment. Distracted drivers need to be punished with prejudice. It is statistically more dangerous than driving intoxicated.

I'm a cyclist. Over the past 5 years or so I've learned to check inside of people's cars to see if they have a phone in their hands. If they do, I try to keep as much distance between myself and them as possible.

Until we change the incentives, distracted driving is very likely to remain a problem. Right now there's a lot of talk but very little action. I live in Austin, and I've spoken with the police about distracted driving after nearly being hit by a driver who ran a red light because they were distracted by their phone. (I spoke with them afterward.) The police tell me that they periodically do distracted driving enforcement operations, but only in school zones so that they get double fines. I've never seen a single distracted driving enforcement operation in Austin, but I've gone through cyclist stop sign enforcement twice. It would be interesting to see the statistics here. How many people are ticketed for distracted driving every year?

DUI and driving while using your phone should have equal punishment.

I’m not advocating drinking and driving, but phone use is “no harm, no foul” right now. On the other hand you can drive without crashing into anyone but if you’ve had two glasses of wine with dinner, you can get charged with a crime.

I was hit on the highway by a phone user who almost killed me and my parents. Speed differential was 55mph. That is, we were completely stopped on the highway and she drove for something like a quarter mile and hit us, leaving me with nerve damage and severe lower back pain. Luckily rehab went stellar and although I have some residual burning/stinging nerve damage, I can walk, run, play sports, go to the gym - you wouldn't even have known that I spent some time in a neck brace, cast, and back pain so back I could hardly leave my bed (but it also hurt just as bad to lay in bed) after almost being killed by the distracted driver.

Oh yeah, the concussion too. That was pretty rough as well.

Here's my test for phone addiction (for men): If you are pissing into a urinal and need to look at your phone during those 15 seconds, you have a problem. And I see this a lot.

A scary game: when in stop and go traffic, have a look at the person behind you. Are their eyes on the road, or their lap? In my experience, 7 out of 10 are looking at their lap, with a quick glance up every 5 seconds or so.

I spend plenty of time on my phone, but geez, have some phone free moments every now and then.

This is extremely bad. In Portugal I don't cross the road if the person is using a phone, unless they fully stop of course. Yet this is a problem so big that even people walking cross roads with their faces glued to their phones.

It happened to me more than once almost getting into an accident, both while walking or driving because the other party is distracted by a smartphone instead of paying attention to driving or walking. People cross road like complete maniacs while using smartphones, luckily I have quick response time to brake the car, but there are other people that might not have such luck. I am afraid that in the future when my response time increases this might become a problem, even if I lower the velocity.

I never use my phone while driving, not even in stop signs or red lights. Yet it is so socially acceptable to do it these days it's disgusting. I hate this so much I make an simple website to try to raise awareness[1]. I haven't dedicated much time promoting it because it was just a small side project to experiment with TailwindCSS, but I might as this problem affects even my family...

[1] https://github.com/mig4ng/2min.pink

As a motorcyclist, this has become my primary concern on the roads in the past few years. I constantly and actively check for drivers using their phones. If I can see their eyes or heads glancing up and down, I get far away. If they're having trouble staying in their lane, I get far away. At night, if their faces are illuminated in a blue glow, they're holding their phones and I get far away. I use those techniques in addition to all the other safety measures you get taught by the MSF. If I didn't love riding so much, I'd quit. Seriously. It's more dangerous than it's ever been. You have to be so diligent. But on two wheels, an open road without distracted drivers is still as glorious as it has ever been.

This is "old man yells at cloud" area, but seriously - why can we not just leave our phones in our pocket until we get to our destination? What's that important?

My neighbor was killed walking on sidewalk in a parking lot. Driver was staring at phone in his lap and missed turn, plowed directly into him. Put your goddamn phone away... and trying to "hide it" in your lap is worse than just holding it up in windshield.

I ride a bike in London traffic and you can tell which drivers are on phones from quite some distance. I think when police stop them they are mystified as to how they got caught - they genuinely don’t realise just how all-over-the-place they are.

I worked at T-Mobile and did some work on this very subject our studies showed that people are so addicted that unless there is a threat of jail time or drivers license suspension people will not put down their phones.

In this day and age of really great machine learning I find that most people refuse to use voice services unless they are forced to do so (usually because of injury). Trying to tap out a message at 80km/h on a 5" screen is pretty fucking futile. But most distracted drivers will attempt to do it anyway.

Here's a neat trick, just say, "Hey Siri* Send a message to $firstname $lastname's $phone. Tell them I'm [on my way, 5 minutes away, picking up milk, buying pizza]"

* Or whatever platform you use. I'm an iOS user.

This is taken as an obvious truth, but when you look at actual collision data, there seems to be no effect whatsoever.

In fact, our roads have continued to become safer in the 10 or so years since the release of the iPhone.

Human drivers are becoming less road worthy. Full autonomous drive can't come soon enough.

I was driving about 3mph in traffic texting my wife and did 3500 dollars damage to my car. I'm glad I learned my lesson the easy way instead of killing someone.

Don't text and drive no matter what, it's easy to pull over if it's necessary!

Matthew Walker's book Why We Sleep makes a clear case that drowsy driving is worse than drink driving, too.

So that would mean drunk driving is actually the third leading cause of impaired driving damage.

Why is the third cause villified, but not the first two?

Peculiar to blame the phone for killing people and not the several ton object that crashes into them.

Of course people should stay off their phones, but there are plenty of ways that people can make mistakes driving, and the best way to make pedestrians safe is to limit their interactions with cars.

We need to fundamentally back away from the automobile oriented design of our cities. This is the real solution, not doubling down on car infrastructure and hoping that some vaporware self driving software will save us.

I had just started actually reading TFA because this topic interests me, I was skimming past some infographic of "phone addicts spend x% not looking at the road" when - pop! - a little distraction popped up in the bottom right corner offering "hey <domainname> wanna chat". A distraction, a creepy "personalized" one no less, on an article about distractions. Too meta for me, I ctrl-w'd outta there.

Texting while driving and drunk driving should be treated as the SAME offense.

Its disappointing to see that so many voices in this discussion are focused on self-driving cars and the like as the savoir solutions - I always wish there would be some discussion of ways to help people be less reliant on cars, so they spend less time driving, are less likely to get distracted while doing it, and everybody is both safer _and_ living in a less car-centric world.

We are - realistically - decades away from outright bans on human-operated vehicles at any real scale... so why not try to reign in the ever-expanding sprawl and car-centric planning that encourages/requires such widespread use of vehicles by distracted people, drunk people, etc in the first place? If its not alcohol, its phones. If its not phones, its makeup, or breakfast, or a fight with a passenger... more people who can walk, take transit, bike, etc means fewer deadly distractions or impairments.

this new world of connectedness really has some major downsides.

distracted driving.

instagram killing natural spaces from lack of crowd control.

decreased mental wellbeing and increased suicide rates.

facebook privacy concerns.

somebody needs to tackle these social crises, since the incentive is not there for the companies to address it themselves.

During the T9 days, was texting while driving statistically safer, or merely not a problem due to general low adoption/addiction? It feels like touchscreens in general are horrible input devices, which we compensate for by devoting an awful lot of attention to using them.

I'm not asking because I'm personally interested in "safe" ways to text and drive or whatever, just really to contextualize. It also seems highly relevant to the crop of cars being released with touchscreens and soft controls for what have traditionally been tactile interfaces.

I am seeing users on their mobiles very frequently when I see through the back mirror while driving in the city where I live. I assume this is mostly WhatsApp use.

Phone and software makers have an unique opportunity to save lives on the road by taking measures to prevent this terrible behaviour. They'll be rewarded by getting some of the public trust back, and seeing they are optimizing around public good as opposed to eyeballs.

A good example is Android Auto, which prevents the driver from typing on the car's screen while driving.

1) front and rear-facing dash cams to defend against damage claims

2) configure cars to track phone usage, time-stamped, and downloadable thru the OBD port. If driver is sole occupant, some use of phone would be provable. No good for off-line activity, like games. Obvious privacy issues like other OBD data.

3) Pedestrians need an app for the “self-walking phone” with sub-1-meter location accuracy that flashes green man, or yellow or red hand when phone-obsessed user is about to step off curb into cross-walk or traffic.

I wonder if this could be solved (or at least made drastically better) with insurance incentives + technology.

Idea would be reward drivers willing to ditch their phones while driving entirely, by having drastically reduced car insurance rates.

I'm not sure how it would work, but there would be a system in the car that would verify there is no active phone. Clearly there are a lot of details to be worked out both on the technological, insurances pricing, and privacy sides, but it feels like this could be a way forward.

Having the self driving features on a car such as Tesla auto pilot has really made this problem worse. People rely on their cars to stop in time, although this is not always the case

I wonder if there is not some technological solution that can be built into smartphones to prevent this from happening. I realize that they are doing double duty as GPS & music, but imagine if your phone could detect that you are in the driver's seat and the car is moving and disable any application but the GPS. I know this would be hard, but it doesn't seem like it would be "self-driving car" hard and would have immediate societal benefit.

Driving my car (phone in pocket, do-not-disturb on):

Yesterday: Passed a college-aged kid on a (edit: motorized) scooter, no helmet, going about 45 mph, reading his phone.

Today: Passed a middle-school-aged kid (edit: on a bicycle), with a helmet, going about 3 mph, reading his phone.

Not sure which earns his Darwin Award first. It's a problem, either way.

Isn't using a phone while driving illegal in most countries now?

Here in Australia you can only touch one if it is in one of those GPS holder things, with ~$400 fines for non-compliance.

The police put a few plain clothed ppl at traffic lights and raise thousands. Sure it's revenue raising, but the message gets out pretty quickly.

In The Netherlands, even texting while riding your bicycle will likely be outlawed in a few months [1]. Personally I think this is overreach, akin to forbidding pedestrians to use their phone while walking the sidewalk: they're risking (mostly) their own life, not endangering the lives of others. (Yes, I got hit by a distracted bicyclist once in my life, and many many more close calls.)

[1] https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/onderwerpen/fiets/vraag-en-antw...

Many here who work for companies like Facebook probably have blood on your hands as a results of your pursuits to "increase engagement".

I’m wondering if these aren’t the same people. The ones that, if not texting, are driving while putting on makeup, ogling every lady in a dress, turning into oncoming traffic, popping ambien, or driving drunk.

It seems like a personality type that’s generally careless and self important. Texting isn’t much more distracting than the thousands of other unsafe things people do.

Additionally, imposing strict consequences (like a ban from driving, loss of license, etc.) for phone addicts kills two birds with one stone: not only does it save lives, it has the potential to remove A LOT of people from their cars and onto public transportation which would drastically alleviate traffic congestion.

tl;dr: I was hit by a driver using his phone, I was found guilty.

Last week I was changing lane in a very slow traffic traffic jam, I turn the left sign, the driver completely stops. I assume this as he giving me space to enter, I slowly enter. He then starts driving forward slowly, he starts approaching, I'm puzzled. I realize he is driving with his phone on his face. Completely unaware that I'm in his lane. He hits. We talk, he starts saying I jumped in front of him, I just tell him he did not see me because he was on the phone. He agrees and he apologizes. We exchange information and go back home. It was only some scratches in our cars.

Later I do the insurance claim (we both had the same insurance company), and I discover that in his report he omits about the phone. I now I have to prove that he was one the phone and I have not jumped with my car in front of him. I could not prove that. I do have a front dashcam but only a very good and specifically placed dashcam would capture such proof. The insurance found me guilty.

I don't know what was the lesson here, maybe always get a police report. Contacting the police at the moment had not crossed my head because it was was not a big deal, the driver sounded reasonable (apart from the fact he was using the phone while driving), and there was something going on that was causing the traffic jam and required the police in the first place.

I have Personalised licence plates that read "AFK".

It used to be a nerdy geek joke... but these days I see it as a bit of a statement on my and (what others) driving habits should be.

In a few years, non-automatically-driven cars will be the New Drunk Drivers.

Cars and phones already have the sensors and comms to be able to curb this behavior, at least some of the time. Your car and phone "know" (potentially) when you're using them at the same time. Is there a technological fix? And if so, do we want to use it?

Good thing we are on the verge of realization of self driving car.

I think there's a legitimate difference between a quick glance at a mobile and actually trying to //compose// something on it. Even speech to text can be poor enough that if it isn't dead simple it should wait until stopped.

Edit: If you disagree maybe you would like to reply with how and thus form an actual discussion? I'm suggesting the split second shift of focus equivalent to changing a radio-station or disc track is equally as distracting as a quick glance at something and indicating that I /agree/ anything past that should be a zero-motion dependent event.