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Comment by floren | Hacker News Reader

The number of times I look over and see the driver of the next car watching a goddamn video on their goddamn phone... Mind blowing.

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I can kind of understand being temporarily distracted when a message comes in and your phone chirps, but wow... watching a video while you operate a 3000 pound machine is next-level idiocy.

I haven't been driving as much in recent years wasn't aware of this trend. (Except for Tesla drivers: 5 years ago, I remember looking over to see a Tesla on autopilot next to me, doing 60 on Seattle's 520 bridge with the driver totally checked out and watching a video.)

Yeah, I saw a Tesla driver watching a video on his dashboard TV while running stop signs here. Good thing the other drivers were paying attention.

I think the root of it is.. the driving part is irrelevant. So many people have lost the ability to NOT be staring at a screen at any given time. If they are not maximally stimulated... phone is out. Driving just so HAPPENS to be a boring activity for many.

Screen stimulation is a legit real thing across modern society.

I am guilty. It’s easier for me to fast for a day, but a digital fast feels very very unconfortable.

I tried not using my phone or a screen for an entire day. By evening I got proper anxiety.

Before cell phones existed, I commonly saw equally mind-blowing things including people putting on makeup, eating bowls of soup, and such while driving.

I'm not sure that things have really changed all that much, big picture.

Most people aren't carrying bowls of soup with them everywhere. Bowls of soup also don't send you unprompted notifications.

Things have changed a lot. The biggest thing that changed is how common this kind of driving is.

You mostly beat me to comment the same — you could even doomscroll a newspaper 20 years ago just the same, it just wasn't convenient and common to doomscroll while driving — but…

> Bowls of soup also don't send you unprompted notifications.

Oh, if you carry a full bowl of soup in a moving car, I bet it does! If the soup is hot, the notifications can be even harder to ignore than a ringing phone.

This misses the reason that distracted driving happens though, which is because people are bored. They know ahead of time they’re going to be bored, so they plan other things to escape their boredom. Phones give you more options but many people would just find another equivalently dangerous way to fill the time.

I recall a taxi ride in the Chicago area where the driver had a portable black-and-white TV in the car.

I think you either care about driving safely or you don't. The phones are just the latest distraction.

But the phone can easily tell when it's in a moving car. It could be programmed to not be useable during those times, or maybe allow passively displaying a navigation map but no interactive use.

Sometimes I interact with my phone on the car when I'm a passenger though. It'll be hard to tell when the user is a driver.

(I obviously don't do that when driving… I even avoid podcasts because that uses too much attention.)

I don’t want to defend that too much but usually I see those people looking at the road a lot more than the phone users. It’s still a risk they shouldn’t take but at least they have a chance to step on the brakes.

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