Comment by montroser
3 days ago
Listen to the radio and use a map? Driving is a privilege, not a right. Or just don't run people over while livestreaming and you can keep your Apple Maps and Spotify.
3 days ago
Listen to the radio and use a map? Driving is a privilege, not a right. Or just don't run people over while livestreaming and you can keep your Apple Maps and Spotify.
Using a paper map while driving can be way more distracting than a GPS. We really don't want to push people back to doing that.
Your last two sentences point in the correct direction: we can't micro-target every behavior that might possibly become a dangerous distraction, because that's just about everything. Driving safely depends on self-regulation, and people incapable of self-regulating (to a minimum standard) shouldn't be granted the privilege of a license.
Yeah, not while driving. Before we had GPS, people would look at the map before setting off if need be. But fair point that maybe the people who are addicted to their phone are not the people who are going to diligently study the map and remember directions before they start moving. Either way, there was a whole century of people driving just fine before satnav.
> people would look at the map before setting off
Yeah, I drove back then. That's not, in practice, what people did, or only what people did. People did map out a route ahead of time, of course, but when they (we) got confused, or missed a turn, out came the map - while driving. Not saying it's good, but that's what happened.
> people driving just fine before satnav
You can check the data. DOT's website is terrible, so I can't link to individual tables, but the relevant one is under Trends > General > Table 1:
https://cdan.dot.gov/tsftables/tsfar.htm#
Fatalities and Injuries are obviously dependent on (very welcome!) advances in automobile safety design and medical care, but if accident rates have been increasing over time we'd expect to see many more "property damage only"° accidents. In fact, the raw number of those have been remarkably stable since 1988, despite a huge increase in miles traveled!
There's even an absolute-number decrease between 2007 and 2013, which corresponds with the years during which mobile phones became ubiquitous, and a relative (to miles-traveled) decrease which continues to this day. None of this (of course!) excuses allowing oneself to use a phone in a distracting manner, but my conclusion is that mobile phones have, on net, made driving safer, rather than the reverse.
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° Or, alternatively "all-type"? I think "property damage" might be cleaner - and, in fact, it's strongly biased against my case, because it's risen from 67% of accidents at the beginning of the dataset to 71% more recently, due to exogenous safety and life-saving improvements.
In ye olde days, drivers wrestling with maps were also criticized as being distracted and dangerous. Having been a driver in ye olde days in situations where a map was needed, I can confidently say that GPS initiated while stopped and used throughout a trip is far safer than the driver using a paper map while driving.
The world won't collectively decide to ban phone gps and bluetooth music, hence "it's not realistic".