Well, texting falls into the same broad category. The real cause is driver inattention. Banning right turn on red is a good way to ensure that distracted drivers endanger pedestrians less.
By this argument there is nothing wrong with texting while driving. Or drinking. Why did we make it illegal for all people to drive under influence instead of just punishing those who become inattentive?
You are talking about attention as if we can detect inattentive drivers by measuring their chakra energy from a mile away. No. There are inherently more dangerous situations on the road, right turn on red being one of those. We have the data to prove it, no need to sacrifice pedestrians in order to make the road—eventually—safer. Why do we need traffic lights at all? Let’s just all pay attention and punish drivers who are inattentive.
The suggestion to punish drivers who hit pedestrians is great. Oh wait, we are already doing that.
The issue with drunk driving and texting is not that they can’t focus but can they when they have to. Unless someone’s slam dunk, they can. It’s the time to react when something happens that’s the problem.
With texting and driving there are other major daily hassles. A common scenario for me as I walk my dog is that I no longer assume a car will yield on a crosswalk - even the ones with a stop sign or a signal. May be the impact is that few people bike or walk? Or walk elsewhere like a trail or a park instead of sidewalk and neighborhoods? End of the day, it’s about what we want as a society. If we decide that people should be allowed to focus on their phone, we have to start redesigning the streets now.
Not just as a pedestrian, even as a driver I don’t assume I can go in green light anymore. People seem to miss red lights on the regular now
My suspicion is that it could be curtailed much more effectively by placing (and enforcing) bans on two other habits that make the roads less safe: Passing people on the right, and just hanging out in the left lane.
That said, yeah, screens while driving is a menace. Not just when you have a phone mount. Texting while driving is built into CarPlay as an in-dash infotainment feature that drivers are actively encouraged to use.
Maybe texting isn't the cause of most accidents. Maybe people simply replace the outlawed bad behavior with an equally bad but legal behavior. Maybe we should stop wasting everyone's time with see useless laws; I'm pretty sure we already have a law based on reckless driving.
Drive a stick shift in america and you'll very quickly see how many people are zombies behind the wheel. Red light means head down phone time. People run red lights way more often because they either didn't make the green because someone was on their phone at the start of the line and people are too scared to use their horn and risk road rage, or they themselves were head down. The police do not enforce the laws on the books about distracted driving or driving while texting, hell the police don't respond to much any more in our city unless you say active shooter. It's just so frustrating to try to drive any more in the past 10 years because of phones.
There's only so far you can go to try to protect people from being idiots.
There are plenty of data points now that show that texting related accidents and deaths went up when the bans were enacted because instead of doing the sensible thing and NOT texting while driving, these people simply moved the phone into their lap instead of in a place where they could still kind of see the road ahead.
It's an unfortunate fact that people have tendencies to be extremely stupid under the guise of "I can do it, it won't cause me to crash", and no law will fix this.
The problem is not texting itself, it's not paying attention to your surroundings, while moving or standing still.
If you're sitting at a red light fiddling with the stereo, the light turns green but you missed it, so the person behind you honks, chances are you'll start moving forward without actually being fully aware of the scene in front of you. And if there is someone in front of you, you could hit them. So why take the chance? Always pay attention to your surroundings.
It is really sad that texting while driving is enough of a problematic to require such sensibilisation. If you don't understand the implications of diverting your attention to this point while driving, you shouldn't have the right to drive. And texting seems to divert enought attention that some people died walking in between the subway`s wagons.
Yup texting isn't helping. I don't think that's the whole story. I would guess that the automation of cars, even automatic transmission is making drivers less engaged in driving and less alert because they don't have to be. The extreme version of this is Tesla drivers sleeping in there cars while it drives. One thing I noticed about 5 years ago also was pedestrians not defensively walking across the roads, it's probably nothing new but I noticed there's a lot of people that see the green walk light and then just start walking.
Changes probably need to be made the to whole traffic system.
Cyclists do the same thing. I’m primarily a pedestrian, and lately I’ve seen too many cyclists texting while cycling and blowing through red lights and zebra (pedestrian) crossings as well as riding on the pavement/sidewalks. This is in London.
And for that matter, pedestrians also check their phones while walking and put themselves in danger or just obstruct the pedestrian flow around them. Luckily that is less likely to harm somebody than a car or cyclist.
But let’s not restrict this issue to just drivers. There’s a universal obsession with phones, and people who are unable to stop themselves (whether driving, cycling, walking) if they do need to send a text or email.
There are people driving on the road that are periodically looking down at their phone to text. For x seconds at a time. It boggles my mind whenever I see it. Kind of makes me want to chuck something at them.
I'm sure everyone has been in a situation where they are not paying attention. But I think the danger with texting is that it happens more often. It is unlikely to be just one message. Which makes it more likely to result in an accident.
His justification is somewhat questionable. Is stopping people talking on cell phones by standing in traffic when the light is green actually making the world a better place, i.e. reducing traffic accidents? It seems at the very least to be an open question whether any decrease in accidents from reducing cell-phone usage would be matched by an increase in accidents from cars unexpectedly stopped in the middle of a road.
I don’t think you can simply educate people not to text and drive.
Governments are ramping up signs and laws against texting and driving and it doesn’t appear to be doing anything to stop the problem. People know it’s bad but they don’t care because they haven’t personally killed someone yet. Just like they’ve treated speeding laws for decades.
Surveillance apparatus that directly hits people in the pocketbook on a frequent basis with fines is the only way to solve this problem that keeps humans behind the wheel IMO (we had a thread recently about such cameras that are being tried in Australia). Or autonomous cars or a massive and incredibly expensive redesign of our cities and transportation network to get people out of cars.
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