> No States ban complete non-usage of cell phones while driving
And even if they did an increasing number of cars have small-TV-sized "cell phones" built into the dash.
And as a bonus prize, when you crash due to the distraction and the power is gone you get to solve a 3 part puzzle to open any of the doors to get away from the fast moving fire that probably broke out when the battery cells ruptured.
> Illinois law prohibits the use of electronic communication devices to write, send, or read text messages, emails, or other electronic communications while driving.
> In 2024, legislation went into effect that also made it illegal to use teleconferencing apps, watch videos, or access social media sites while driving.
> Drivers who are in a crash resulting from distracted driving may face criminal penalties and incarceration.
What's the difference between "other electronic communications" and "teleconferencing apps", compared to a phone call? Or is there a specific carve out for that?
The law is basically written to say that doing anything at all with your phone is illegal while driving. Then it carves out exceptions to say it's allowed if you're calling 911, you're doing it hands-free, etc. But then they separately say those exceptions do not apply apply to video calls or watching videos or accessing social media on your phone. Even if you mount your phone, you can't watch YouTube or livestream yourself or attend Zoom court or browse Reddit hands-free while driving.
The reading of the first law sounds like it's oriented towards textual communication; the second law expands it to include video as well. AIUI neither one bans a voice-only phone call so long as you are looking at the road and not your phone.
>Lucas’s son-in-law, Chris King, told the Lake and McHenry County Scanner that news of the video made his family “hold our loss tighter to our hearts”.
>“We … will continue to pray for what the driver must be going through,” King reportedly said. “We are trying to find our ways to live, without someone we cherished so much.”
Damn, I wouldn't be saying anything like praying for the driver after something like that.
or, just being empathetic to the guilt the driver must be feeling, as well as the lifelong ptsd they get to look forward to carrying the memories of taking someone's life
or, just, generally being a good human, esp when it matters, in times like these, instead of only when things are going well, then dropping that whenever something bad happens when it's more impactful and important to stay a good human.
I'd wager that the driver isn't feeling much guilt or PTSD. A lot of these kinds of blatant bad actors seem wholly disconnected from the concept of self accountability. Otherwise, they tend to get knocked down a few pegs before such a serious incident.
We don't know the full circumstances of the accident. She may have been distracted, but it's also possible the pedestrian crossed unexpectedly right in front of the car. Hopefully the facts come out and justice is served fairly.
100ms can make a difference between life and death
If you're at the wheel of a moving car and do anything other than driving you're a piece of shit who deserves whatever comes your way (which preferably should be your sorry ass hitting a chunky tree and becoming tetraplegic)
There are 0 situation in which using a phone while driving improves your odds or the odds of other people are you.
It doesn't even matter if it's the victims fault, these people are dangerous and should not drive
if there is proof that she wasn’t looking at the road at the time of the accident, do you think she has any chance to defend herself in court even if say victim was jaywalking? with great representation - probably? this will be an interesting trial…
On the video you can see her look down briefly before the sound of impact, but right before and at the time of the impact she appears to be looking forwards.
> do you think she has any chance to defend herself in court even if say victim was jaywalking
Presumably entirely depends on how egregious the hypothetical jaywalking was and whether or not she can prove it. i.e. if it would’ve been impossible to avoid the accident regardless of her phone use, the phone use is probably irrelevant.
I read the article and watched the video. We can't tell whether the pedestrian suddenly stepped into the street or if things would've gone differently had she been fully focused. I prefer to reserve judgment.
Forgiveness only counts when you believe the crime to be unforgivable, yet forgive the criminal anyway. "Forgiveable crimes" are just crimes you merely tolerate.
“There is a limit to human charity," said Lady Outram, trembling all over.
"There is," said Father Brown dryly, "and that is the real difference between human charity and Christian charity. You must forgive me if I was not altogether crushed by your contempt for my uncharitableness today; or by the lectures you read me about pardon for every sinner. For it seems to me that you only pardon the sins that you don't really think sinful. You only forgive criminals when they commit what you don't regard as crimes, but rather as conventions. So you tolerate a conventional duel, just as you tolerate a conventional divorce. You forgive because there isn't anything to be forgiven.”
Surely there must be some conception of forgiveness outside those of sin and charity. I'm not even sure what it really means for forgiveness to "count".
I think you’re reading too literally into the words sin and charity. Sin in this case just means a transgression or wrong to you or your community. Charity here is used in the philosophical sense, meaning an openness to tolerating transgressions.
For forgiveness to mean anything at all you need to forgive an actual injury. “Forgiving” someone for doing what you don’t mind them doing anyway is not forgiveness, it’s tolerance.
All US states have distracted driving laws. Some people get away with it for too long. Doesn't have to involve a phone. Could involve sex toys, receiving fellatio, arguing with a passenger, reading a map, putting on make-up, etc... People get tickets every day for such things.
In most cases, distracted driving is a secondary cause for a stop. Police need some other reason to pull the driver over.
That's what the hands free laws in most states addressed- using a cellphone while driving became a primary offense, something you could be pulled over for or ticketed for even if you hadn't done anything else wrong.
The ultimate goal is to stop people from distracted driving before they cause an accident, but it's not always easy to see who should be stopped and who shouldn't, so a lot of people get away with it anyway.
Police need some other reason to pull the driver over.
That is false. People get pulled over all the time for obvious distractions. Someone addicted to watching the hundreds of bodycam video channels.
Perhaps the cops in your area were told to focus on other things. The Sheriff in my area are somewhat like that whereas the state troopers will happily pull someone over that looks suspicious or has out of state plates distractions aside. Enforcement and abuse vary by location.
Of course, although I think pulling people over for such infraction makes things much more unsafe. What is learned is if you put your phone lower than the dash, it becomes a lot harder to prove. Of course, much harder to see the road while you're staring under your dash, but the optimization society has suggested is that if you use your phone you should do it in a more dangerous way so you aren't caught.
A few hours ago I saw (on Twitch) some guy live stream his helicopter piloting over a rural picturesque village in Sweden while shouting loud cheers to "chat".
We now need an ignition interlock device for these people -- that will shut down the car if there's a phone inside that's not in airplane mode. Like they have for DUI doofuses.
Crimes committed on or for social media (whether for likes or just by negligence, ie, distracted by your app while driving) should automatically get an additional sentence. Same idea as hate crimes, just for social media.
>Crimes committed on or for social media (whether for likes or just by negligence, ie, distracted by your app while driving) should automatically get an additional sentence.
Sounds like something that could be easily abused for cracking down on filming police or similar. Filming ICE agents arresting someone and posting on tiktok? "obstruction of justice", plus they're obviously doing it "for social media". Same for whistleblowers or security researchers.
That doesn't actually work. The problem is people think they're not going to hit anyone and then it doesn't matter what the penalty is because they're discounting the risk of it happening to begin with. Nobody would be doing it who expected to receive the existing penalty for negligent homicide.
You don't need to convince them that the penalty is high, you need to convince them that the risk is high.
Which is why you have to “excessively” punish the behavior you want to stop - not killing people while filming while driving, but simply filming while driving.
That's still the same thing. What matters here is if people expect an actual penalty of any kind. Draconian penalties never help.
On top of that, people are less likely to know whether there is even a law against those things since it's much less intuitively obvious.
What you need to do is make them understand that it's dangerous, not to make them understand that it's illegal. People don't care about penalties unless they expect to be caught and this is one of the things where it's hard to consistently catch people in the act.
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.
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:
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.
—
° 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.
Some cars actually have this, and will track where your eyes are to determine if you're distracted and flash a big warning on the dashboard and make a loud noise.
Mostly the ones I drove were able to tell if I was distracted by checking my instruments or mirrors, or over my shoulder before changing lanes.
I came very close to just abandoning the fucking thing in a car park, and getting a train instead.
We've been able to track eye movement across a computer screen for a good 5 years to be able to see what their gaze is set to, providing heatmaps and dwell metrics.
Someone just needs to put that in a car. We've also got lidar based cruise control systems to maintain distance as well as panic brake systems that can react to something in front of the vehicle faster than a human, which is partially there to account for people texting and driving while flying up on a red light with stopped traffic.
We have all the tech needed to make it damn near impossible for a 2 ton mass of steal to just unflinchingly mow someone down, yet we live in a world where it's cheaper to not make those things standard, even knowing without it, more people will die than with it.
Here’s the video, you can clearly see just how distracted she was https://www.tiktok.com/@live.catch.up/video/7569917602479246...
(Re USA) Over 30 States ban holding your phone while driving
All States except for Montana ban texting while driving
No States ban complete non-usage of cell phones while driving
> No States ban complete non-usage of cell phones while driving
And even if they did an increasing number of cars have small-TV-sized "cell phones" built into the dash.
And as a bonus prize, when you crash due to the distraction and the power is gone you get to solve a 3 part puzzle to open any of the doors to get away from the fast moving fire that probably broke out when the battery cells ruptured.
https://www.ilsos.gov/departments/drivers/traffic-safety/dis...
> Illinois law prohibits the use of electronic communication devices to write, send, or read text messages, emails, or other electronic communications while driving.
> In 2024, legislation went into effect that also made it illegal to use teleconferencing apps, watch videos, or access social media sites while driving.
> Drivers who are in a crash resulting from distracted driving may face criminal penalties and incarceration.
What's the difference between "other electronic communications" and "teleconferencing apps", compared to a phone call? Or is there a specific carve out for that?
The law is basically written to say that doing anything at all with your phone is illegal while driving. Then it carves out exceptions to say it's allowed if you're calling 911, you're doing it hands-free, etc. But then they separately say those exceptions do not apply apply to video calls or watching videos or accessing social media on your phone. Even if you mount your phone, you can't watch YouTube or livestream yourself or attend Zoom court or browse Reddit hands-free while driving.
The reading of the first law sounds like it's oriented towards textual communication; the second law expands it to include video as well. AIUI neither one bans a voice-only phone call so long as you are looking at the road and not your phone.
> complete non-usage of cell phones while driving
Well, this would also ban things like GPS, or hooking up Spotify to your steering wheel media buttons.
I think targeting texting + social media is the right approach.
>Lucas’s son-in-law, Chris King, told the Lake and McHenry County Scanner that news of the video made his family “hold our loss tighter to our hearts”.
>“We … will continue to pray for what the driver must be going through,” King reportedly said. “We are trying to find our ways to live, without someone we cherished so much.”
Damn, I wouldn't be saying anything like praying for the driver after something like that.
Thats the christian ethos
As a Christian turn Buddhist, agree +
Hatred is never appeased by hatred in this world. By non-hatred alone is hatred appeased. This is a law eternal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhammapada
or, just being empathetic to the guilt the driver must be feeling, as well as the lifelong ptsd they get to look forward to carrying the memories of taking someone's life
or, sometimes, you just don’t want to make harsh public statements after a loss of a loved one.
or, just, generally being a good human, esp when it matters, in times like these, instead of only when things are going well, then dropping that whenever something bad happens when it's more impactful and important to stay a good human.
There is nothing "good" about wishing positive vibes upon your loved one's killer. It's arguably evil. It's unconscionable.
I'd wager that the driver isn't feeling much guilt or PTSD. A lot of these kinds of blatant bad actors seem wholly disconnected from the concept of self accountability. Otherwise, they tend to get knocked down a few pegs before such a serious incident.
Truth, but we need to consider road safety. Lock the lady up, and lock all other texters up. Motorcyclists all over the nation would agree.
[dead]
In this case quite literally suicidal empathy.
Literally suicidal? Does that mean that other reckless drivers will find out about the empathy and will thus start hitting them on purpose?
Praying for somebody doesn't mean you have to let them continue their action? You can throw them in jail.
We don't know the full circumstances of the accident. She may have been distracted, but it's also possible the pedestrian crossed unexpectedly right in front of the car. Hopefully the facts come out and justice is served fairly.
Have you opened the article?
> the person driving while on TikTok “wasn’t paying attention to the road because she was reading comments and grinning at her phone”.
One doesn't exclude the other. The fact that she was distracted doesn't necessarily mean the accident happened because she was distracted.
100ms can make a difference between life and death
If you're at the wheel of a moving car and do anything other than driving you're a piece of shit who deserves whatever comes your way (which preferably should be your sorry ass hitting a chunky tree and becoming tetraplegic)
There are 0 situation in which using a phone while driving improves your odds or the odds of other people are you.
It doesn't even matter if it's the victims fault, these people are dangerous and should not drive
if there is proof that she wasn’t looking at the road at the time of the accident, do you think she has any chance to defend herself in court even if say victim was jaywalking? with great representation - probably? this will be an interesting trial…
On the video you can see her look down briefly before the sound of impact, but right before and at the time of the impact she appears to be looking forwards.
She probably would not have had enough time to stop, given how recently she’d been looking at her phone. https://www.tiktok.com/@live.catch.up/video/7569917602479246...
> do you think she has any chance to defend herself in court even if say victim was jaywalking
Presumably entirely depends on how egregious the hypothetical jaywalking was and whether or not she can prove it. i.e. if it would’ve been impossible to avoid the accident regardless of her phone use, the phone use is probably irrelevant.
>topic is literal video of a person looking at camera phone and loud thud
>HN commenter who only read the headline squabbles over correlation vs causation
its all so wearisome
I read the article and watched the video. We can't tell whether the pedestrian suddenly stepped into the street or if things would've gone differently had she been fully focused. I prefer to reserve judgment.
source: reddit comment
> She may have been distracted
It seems clear that one fact we know is that she was paying attention to her phone at the time. Frankly unforgivable in my opinion.
Forgiveness only counts when you believe the crime to be unforgivable, yet forgive the criminal anyway. "Forgiveable crimes" are just crimes you merely tolerate.
“There is a limit to human charity," said Lady Outram, trembling all over.
"There is," said Father Brown dryly, "and that is the real difference between human charity and Christian charity. You must forgive me if I was not altogether crushed by your contempt for my uncharitableness today; or by the lectures you read me about pardon for every sinner. For it seems to me that you only pardon the sins that you don't really think sinful. You only forgive criminals when they commit what you don't regard as crimes, but rather as conventions. So you tolerate a conventional duel, just as you tolerate a conventional divorce. You forgive because there isn't anything to be forgiven.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Complete Father Brown
Surely there must be some conception of forgiveness outside those of sin and charity. I'm not even sure what it really means for forgiveness to "count".
I think you’re reading too literally into the words sin and charity. Sin in this case just means a transgression or wrong to you or your community. Charity here is used in the philosophical sense, meaning an openness to tolerating transgressions.
For forgiveness to mean anything at all you need to forgive an actual injury. “Forgiving” someone for doing what you don’t mind them doing anyway is not forgiveness, it’s tolerance.
So what, then, is an unforgivable crime? You have no choice; you must tolerate everything or go insane.
[dead]
[flagged]
I believe this is the video (the camera is facing the driver so not very graphic): https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTMst5SPG/
Recording social media while driving should be totally unacceptable.
Jon Caramanica records pop music reviews for the New York Times while driving. It's completely asinine.
All US states have distracted driving laws. Some people get away with it for too long. Doesn't have to involve a phone. Could involve sex toys, receiving fellatio, arguing with a passenger, reading a map, putting on make-up, etc... People get tickets every day for such things.
In most cases, distracted driving is a secondary cause for a stop. Police need some other reason to pull the driver over.
That's what the hands free laws in most states addressed- using a cellphone while driving became a primary offense, something you could be pulled over for or ticketed for even if you hadn't done anything else wrong.
The ultimate goal is to stop people from distracted driving before they cause an accident, but it's not always easy to see who should be stopped and who shouldn't, so a lot of people get away with it anyway.
Police need some other reason to pull the driver over.
That is false. People get pulled over all the time for obvious distractions. Someone addicted to watching the hundreds of bodycam video channels.
Perhaps the cops in your area were told to focus on other things. The Sheriff in my area are somewhat like that whereas the state troopers will happily pull someone over that looks suspicious or has out of state plates distractions aside. Enforcement and abuse vary by location.
Of course, although I think pulling people over for such infraction makes things much more unsafe. What is learned is if you put your phone lower than the dash, it becomes a lot harder to prove. Of course, much harder to see the road while you're staring under your dash, but the optimization society has suggested is that if you use your phone you should do it in a more dangerous way so you aren't caught.
I don’t really disagree, but is it meaningfully different than having a conversation while drivng?
Do you look the person you're talking to in the eyes and press your fingers on their face while talking to them?
This is who you're sharing the road with, you probably pass by dozens of them every day:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=_w8Fll6a0hM
Thousands of people get maimed or killed every ear by fucktards who can't wait 10 minutes for their fucking dopamine rush.
It's useful that the person in the passenger seat also has a stake in not crashing
And is observing the same environment as the driver, likely knowing when to shut up and let the driver concentrate.
This is paid very well via Twitch/Amazon.
A few hours ago I saw (on Twitch) some guy live stream his helicopter piloting over a rural picturesque village in Sweden while shouting loud cheers to "chat".
This is arguably safer (to others) than doing the same while driving.
See also Carpool Karaoke, but at least that pretends to be in stop and go traffic.
I believe there's another car in front of and behind them.
Social media was a bad idea monetized.
We now need an ignition interlock device for these people -- that will shut down the car if there's a phone inside that's not in airplane mode. Like they have for DUI doofuses.
Crimes committed on or for social media (whether for likes or just by negligence, ie, distracted by your app while driving) should automatically get an additional sentence. Same idea as hate crimes, just for social media.
>Crimes committed on or for social media (whether for likes or just by negligence, ie, distracted by your app while driving) should automatically get an additional sentence.
Sounds like something that could be easily abused for cracking down on filming police or similar. Filming ICE agents arresting someone and posting on tiktok? "obstruction of justice", plus they're obviously doing it "for social media". Same for whistleblowers or security researchers.
That doesn't actually work. The problem is people think they're not going to hit anyone and then it doesn't matter what the penalty is because they're discounting the risk of it happening to begin with. Nobody would be doing it who expected to receive the existing penalty for negligent homicide.
You don't need to convince them that the penalty is high, you need to convince them that the risk is high.
Which is why you have to “excessively” punish the behavior you want to stop - not killing people while filming while driving, but simply filming while driving.
That's still the same thing. What matters here is if people expect an actual penalty of any kind. Draconian penalties never help.
On top of that, people are less likely to know whether there is even a law against those things since it's much less intuitively obvious.
What you need to do is make them understand that it's dangerous, not to make them understand that it's illegal. People don't care about penalties unless they expect to be caught and this is one of the things where it's hard to consistently catch people in the act.
Yeah, because it's just extra stupid and tragic. If kids are involved then the extra sentence should quadruple.
Clout enhancement clause
There are also other passengers who could use it without problem.
So no. We simply need to take away the driving licence of such people.
Car still starts without a license is the problem, and these people do not care.
Put them in prison then. Don't make cars worse for everyone else
This would never be implemented I realize but here is a possible solution:
New law: driver's phone must be in semi-disabled mode
The phone can already infer it is inside moving vehicle. The bigger challenge is, how to determine the phone belongs to the driver?
Say N passengers in car (including driver), each with cell phone.
When phone infers moving vehicle, it attempts to mesh with other phones in the vehicle.
If N=1, driver is solo, phone semi-disables
If N>1, phones ask users to vote on who is the driver.
Result: 1 phone disabled (Voting tie disables both/all)
The only inconvenience here is to a passenger with a phone-less driver.
That's not realistic due to GPS and music.
Maybe a warning with a eye tracker or something...
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.
—
° 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.
Some cars actually have this, and will track where your eyes are to determine if you're distracted and flash a big warning on the dashboard and make a loud noise.
Mostly the ones I drove were able to tell if I was distracted by checking my instruments or mirrors, or over my shoulder before changing lanes.
I came very close to just abandoning the fucking thing in a car park, and getting a train instead.
We've been able to track eye movement across a computer screen for a good 5 years to be able to see what their gaze is set to, providing heatmaps and dwell metrics.
Someone just needs to put that in a car. We've also got lidar based cruise control systems to maintain distance as well as panic brake systems that can react to something in front of the vehicle faster than a human, which is partially there to account for people texting and driving while flying up on a red light with stopped traffic.
We have all the tech needed to make it damn near impossible for a 2 ton mass of steal to just unflinchingly mow someone down, yet we live in a world where it's cheaper to not make those things standard, even knowing without it, more people will die than with it.