Study on Distracted Driving

[jemoryl]

Aside from the dangers posed to us as cyclists, people's relationship with their phones is approaching pathological. There is a guy where I work who I have never seen not staring at his phone. He walks the corridors staring at it and at lunch time he circles the parking lot staring and screwing around with the thing. I joked with someone who works in his area to secretly hide his phone for awhile to see what he does.

[fuzzalow]

Originally Posted by jemoryl

Aside from the dangers posed to us as cyclists, people's relationship with their phones is approaching pathological.

Yes agree. And the pathology is both expansive and self validating and self sustaining across all other users that fall prey to its addiction. An entire society of nimrods talking or texting senseless s--t to an equal number of nimrods talking or texting senseless s--t in response. Who among us has not walked behind someone on the street overhearing 1/2 of a mindless conversation. Sure, it is mindlessly senseless stupid s--t until the guy walking down the street talking into his smartphone is YOU!

It it ALL senseless, mindless, stupid s--t. I once gave a guy a side-eye glance at some guy's smartphone conversation on a commuter train and had the guy retort "I'm working on a very important deal". I replied that "Any deal you can talk about in public and at the top of your lungs isn't important".

That smartphone dumbs down society by making people their own epicenter of their own pointless, banal and mundane lives. I want nothing to do with that kinda crowd.

[redir]

What we need is a to change the name to Mothers Against Distracted Driving (MADD) or it aint gonna happen.

[rugbysecondrow]

Some of this is real danger, some of this is out-dated common courtesy, and some of it is just old man complaining.

Everybody on the road or sidewalk is in real danger when folks use their phone and drive. It does distract drivers and it does cause accidents, injury and death.

The pathology of the phone use these days seems to be an outgrowth of prior generations mindless television watching. If you are mindlessly staring at a screen, does the size and placement of the screen matter? I have been in homes where the TV is on every waking moment...hand held use is an outgrowth of that, IMO. I know that I have tried to cut down on computer, TV and phone screen time in favor of the radio (I love my Sonos!). It is hard to tell kids not to be on their screen of choice while you, as the parent, is on your screen of choice. Maybe the pathology is not device specific.

How people define relationships and how they relate to one another has changed over the years. How people entertain themselves is different as well. I know a kids who says his best friends are people he plays Halo with, but has never met in person. My son sometimes watches other people play Mindcraft on YouTube. I never understood why a kids would want to watch other people play a game until Baseball season started and I sat down to watch other grown men play a game.

This is a rambling way of saying, take the distraction seriously and lets work to resolve that, but parse it from the judgmental "kids these days" or old-person sanctimony that often comes from one generation not understanding the next. There isn't that great of a difference, just an adaption of learned behavior.

[Black Dog]

The behaviour needs to be criminalized like DUI. For that matter we really should actually criminalize DUI in a real way that matches the severity of the consequences of the behaviour.

[pncguy]

Originally Posted by rugbysecondrow

... My son sometimes watches other people play Mindcraft on YouTube. I never understood why a kids would want to watch other people play a game until Baseball season started and I sat down to watch other grown men play a game...

Holy cow. I just had an Aha! moment. This makes me rethink my desire to watch sports! (As opposed to being more tolerant of my son watching other people play Minecraft.)

[cachagua]

...For that matter we really should actually criminalize DUI in a real way that matches the severity of the consequences of the behaviour.

Yes! DUI isn't frowned-upon or discouraged, it's straight-up ILLEGAL, and still our response is completely toothless. Story in my paper this morning about a guy on his 11th, that's eleventh, DUI... I'm like, at what point do we put someone's eyes out? At what point do we simply helicopter them 50 miles out to sea, and... drop them off.

"Match the severity of the consequences of the behaviour", very nicely put. Half-measures aren't going to do the job. As the 14th Earl of Gurney used to say: the ax must be laid to the root.

[saf-t]

Originally Posted by marciero

That's already happening. Driverless cars would eliminate the problem. If people insist on driving then driverless technology (that would, for example, override the driver and take measures to avoid an impending accident) would at least greatly mitigate this problem.

Presuming that the software defaults to protecting the pedestrian/cyclist in the event of an emergency/potential collision situation, rather than protecting the "driver"..........

[redir]

Originally Posted by rugbysecondrow

My son sometimes watches other people play Mindcraft on YouTube. I never understood why a kids would want to watch other people play a game until Baseball season started and I sat down to watch other grown men play a game.

ROFL that's great!

[BobO]

Originally Posted by cachagua

Actually, in this instance, you can.

OK, try it this way, "stupid will find a way."

I watched a woman the other day use the emergency automatic braking feature in her new Subaru to bring her vehicle to a stop in traffic while she read her phone. The point is that it doesn't matter how you engineer things to make it safer, people will always find a way to make things unnecessarily dangerous.

[classtimesailer]

Originally Posted by cachagua

... The core problem is, as those earlier posts indicate, that you can drive as irresponsibly as you want, and nearly always, you'll get clean away with it.

It would take very little engineering to mount the driver's seat on the front bumper. Overnight, traffic safety would be transformed from a wistful dream to reality.

It's not engineering that's in the way of solving the distracted-driving problem. Giving drivers back their accountability is technologically easy. Lack of political will is what's in the way.

I like this idea.

[Peter P.]

Originally Posted by rugbysecondrow

The pathology of the phone use... There isn't that great of a difference, just an adaption of learned behavior.

Phone addiction is more than generational; it's built in to the primal parts of our brain. Again, I suggest reading the book I recommended, "A Deadly Wandering" by Matt Richtel.

I would take fuzzalow's opinion of the book with a grain of salt. He seemed to focus on the Reggie Shaw portion of the book while within it is woven the psychology and neuro-science of phone addiction as well as how phone use conflicts with safe driving.

[cachagua]

I watched a woman the other day use the emergency automatic braking feature in her new Subaru to bring her vehicle to a stop in traffic while she read her phone. The point is that it doesn't matter how you engineer things to make it safer, people will always find a way to make things unnecessarily dangerous...

Ha HAAA!! Yes, it seems like what we hope will be safety features end up creating dangers after all. I didn't think about that one, but I was terrified the first time I saw the ads for the reverse-blind-spot-cam, or whatever they call it, that allows you to pull out of your driveway backwards into traffic without caring whether anybody's coming or not. Sure! Just open the garage door, start the car, and hit the gas! Who thought that would end well? (Incidentally, reversing into traffic, under any circumstances at all, is illegal where I learned to drive, and I believe that's pretty widespread. But, again, "illegal" is just about meaningless.)

But my proposal was actually to go in the opposite direction: I want to make driving more dangerous for the driver -- not safer -- as a means of getting them to take the process a little more seriously. It's the trend toward insulating people from the consequences of their actions which has brought us to this pass, and I think we'd do well to ease back from that and promote individual responsibility.

Regarding that book -- there's also a recent "60 Minutes" segment about a guy who used to work developing mobile apps, who went public with a lot of info about the very conscious, deliberate way the industry has built addictiveness into these things. For those who want to search for it, it might be informative without the distracting storyline.

[fuzzalow]

Originally Posted by Peter P.

Phone addiction is more than generational; it's built in to the primal parts of our brain. Again, I suggest reading the book I recommended, "A Deadly Wandering" by Matt Richtel.

I would take fuzzalow's opinion of the book with a grain of salt. He seemed to focus on the Reggie Shaw portion of the book while within it is woven the psychology and neuro-science of phone addiction as well as how phone use conflicts with safe driving.

No problem. Note that the psycho-addiction parts of the book are very little of the book. And even then, it was vey light. There won't be anything that most don't already know by now about smartphone phenomena.

I don't know of Matt Richtel's credentials, if any, as a behavioral psychologist so IMO he brings no depth of insight on behavior to the book beyond his role as author & journalist. Contrast this with another NYTimes reporter (now ex as she is Editor in Chief for Kaiser Health News) Elisabeth Rosenthal whom I respected based on the quality and depth of expertise she brought to her journalism on the health care industry.

I don't take or advise anyone to take what Peter P writes with a grain of salt. I'm OK with the fact that sometime we may just have differing opinions.

[BobO]

Originally Posted by cachagua

But my proposal was actually to go in the opposite direction: I want to make driving more dangerous for the driver -- not safer -- as a means of getting them to take the process a little more seriously. It's the trend toward insulating people from the consequences of their actions which has brought us to this pass, and I think we'd do well to ease back from that and promote individual responsibility.

That part is easy. Take away power steering. When the driver has to deal with the forces imparted to that wheel by the road, it'll be a different world.