As someone who has spent the last 8+ years attending to situations like this, and texting while driving scenes, and the like, I cannot stress enough how quickly everything can change when you don’t have your eyes on the road.
Please pay attention to your surroundings while driving. The phone can wait.
My most recent experience with this was about a week and a half ago. A teenage girl ran a stop sign because she was reading a text message (I assume…her phone was in her hand). She drove in front of another vehicle.
All I’m going to say is that her Kia lost the battle with a garbage truck. He hit her passenger side door, and the impact drove the passenger seat OVER the center console.
Since two objects can’t occupy the same space at the same time, and her body was squishier than the vehicle, guess what gave out? Her body.
Th person who hit me while backing up in the grocery’s parking while texting about the price of oranges had a great excuse: Yeah, but I wasn’t going that fast!
I have asked previously before what it is that people are texting. I have tried to process the answers and it still seems to me that the only thing that makes sense is that many more people make money by interest-rate futures trading, and that the young really do have that much more sex than I. I is evidently not daily fellatio that needs to be scheduled, but hourly.
So I get that the behavior is addictive. What staggers me is how there is no shame in it. Someone brings it to your attention that you should not text while driving? HOW DARE YOU. Emergency power to the amygdala! Engage road rage!
You think that jumping back and forth between things at a sub-millisecond period has anything to do with this sort of decision making?
“Studies”* have shown that hands off phone talking isn’t any safer than hands on phone talking. By the same token I could see some cars’ nav systems being distracting. But many nav systems allow voice use, and some don’t allow putting in a destination while moving (my last car’s didn’t, though current one does). But with a nav system you’re typically looking at a screen at dash level, you don’t typically look down like you do at a phone, if using it right. And people aren’t going to be constantly putting in destinations on a nav system the way they might constantly text if they get in the habit.
I find it more harrowing nowadays to be a pedestrian in the dense urban area where I live. Some of it is probably texting, some of it’s talking; fewer people put on turn signals now because there’s one hand for the wheel, one for the phone and none left for the turn signal. Some of it is Uber; larger % of cars around here are taxi’s in a hurry, and young people walk less and Uber more.
When I and my dog were hit by a turning car a couple of years ago I’m pretty sure he was doing something with a phone or otherwise distracted. How else do you come around a corner in broad daylight, unobstructed vision, and run right into a pedestrian in the crosswalk? He wasn’t drunk, had to have not been looking. Fortunately he threw us back a ways then slammed on the brakes in reaction to hitting us so didn’t go over us, and we’re both still around.
*social science studies don’t necessarily prove anything, they can give indications.
Oh, they stopped using turn signals long before smartphones. Frankly most drivers were never using them correctly; they should be called (and thought of) as “intention” signals. Most people who used them, however, used them as “I am now in the middle of turning” signals.
Could you expand on why this makes the shoot difficult? I’d asssume no signals make no difference to the photographer, and the ceremony itself is performed orally not by texting.
This morning I am crossing the street in the crosswalk in front of the library. I look at the coming car and see the driver is looking down at her device and not watching the road.
I step back, and she rolls right through the crosswalk, looking like this :eek:
Safer than trying to read a map while driving. Anyone else remember holding a folding map over the steering wheel, and trying to figure out where the hell you were?