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Phone Addicts Are the New Drunk Drivers

blog.zendrive.com

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Re: Phone Addicts Are the New Drunk Drivers

#51

Post by makerofspoons »

whatshisface wrote: post #26
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its tempting to glance at the text and see if they're expecting you/changed plans. It's urgent because you need to make an exit decision soon depending on the answer. Its pointless to pull over because that takes longer than making a mistake about the exit. Its a drug, the potential to optimize your plans on the fly is so attractive that even folks that swear they'd never text and drive, do it the moment it has utili…

> see if they're expecting you/changed plans Where is this culture where it's acceptable to change plans on a guest that is driving to your house while they are driving?

Welcome to being in your 20s in the USA.

Re: Phone Addicts Are the New Drunk Drivers

#52

Post by ben509 »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #40
itg wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried, but Siri is still really bad at speech recognition whenever I try it.

If your accent doesn't match the country you are in, change Siri's language to your native one. As a British person living in the USA, if I don't set Siri to British, she has a terrible time understanding me, but it works fine on British mode.

Not always; if you set it to Scotland, the phone just complains that it can't understand you either in angrily incomprehensible brogue.

Re: Phone Addicts Are the New Drunk Drivers

#53

Post by butisaidsudo »

devoply wrote: post #44
btrettel wrote: post #34

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 distract…

It's trivial to mandate a phone be designed so that it can't be used in a moving car or for a certain amount of time since it has experienced significant acceleration. In fact you could ban certain apps like txting and calling during these times. I guess you could even mandate tech to help the phone figure out where in the car the person is sitting and only disable their phone.

So even passengers wouldn't be allowed to use their phones?

Re: Phone Addicts Are the New Drunk Drivers

#55

Post by mindslight »

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.

Re: Phone Addicts Are the New Drunk Drivers

#56

Post by zamalek »

FlyingSideKick wrote: post #7

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.

It's weird how humans don't care about the threat of death. I'm not being sarcastic, we clearly don't.

Re: Phone Addicts Are the New Drunk Drivers

#57

Post by ben509 »

0x0000000 wrote: post #15
SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you supply said data? Also, in what way is it safer? Less collisions? Less damage? Less fatalities?

Small nit you may not be aware of: use 'fewer' for nouns which can be counted (collisions, fatalities), and 'less' for nouns which can't (damage).

That's purely the personal preference of one curmudgeon from 1770. "The OED shows that less has been used of countables since the time of King Alfred the Great -- he used it that way in one of his own translations from Latin -- more than a thousand years ago (in about 888). So essentially less has been used of countables in English for just about as long as there has been a written English language."

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003775.h...

Re: Phone Addicts Are the New Drunk Drivers

#58

Post by max76 »

FlyingSideKick wrote: post #7

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.

I don't understand why people see the possibility of a drivers license suspension as being worse than the increased risk of vehicular manslaughter.

One is a few months of decreased mobility. The other is an entire life.

Re: Phone Addicts Are the New Drunk Drivers

#59

Post by booleandilemma »

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #5

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?

I feel the same way about people who stop in front of subway staircases and block people behind them while they check something on their phone.

Why is this a thing?

Re: Phone Addicts Are the New Drunk Drivers

#60

Post by mindslight »

devoply wrote: post #44
btrettel wrote: post #34

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 distract…

It's trivial to mandate a phone be designed so that it can't be used in a moving car or for a certain amount of time since it has experienced significant acceleration. In fact you could ban certain apps like txting and calling during these times. I guess you could even mandate tech to help the phone figure out where in the car the person is sitting and only disable their phone.

> It's trivial to mandate a phone be designed so that it can't be used in a moving car or for a certain amount of time since it has experienced significant acceleration

No, no it is not. Because a phone is a computer. And a computer should be ultimately under its owners control, running software they choose.

The reason why we have a "war on general purpose computing" is because there are many things that would seemingly be fixed if all computers could simply be made to enforce policy, yet actually mandating they be setup to do so requires going down the path of digital totalitarianism.

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