I don’t think self driving cars will have the expected immediate safety improvement because I think there will be a period of time where people will think their cars are good enough to drive while they sleep/text/chat/surf the net etc, but they aren’t. Once the self-driving cars have fully matured, things will be much better but I think there is an intermediate step that won’t be good.
Octopus, except when taking off and landing, flying is very tolerant of momentary distractions. You aren’t going to plow into a cyclist if you aren’t paying attention. Also, talking to your instructor about what you are doing is not the same as having an unrelated conversation with someone who is not there. Having ATC, flight attendants, or company trying to talk to you at a critical time is distracting and can cause problems. For this reason there are designated sterile periods and even brief “no contact” periods (times when the cabin crew must not contact the flight crew even if they see naked flames coming out of the toilet door.)
Following on from the above, talking to a passenger is most likely safer because the passenger is “in the loop” and can recognise when pauses in the conversation are necessary. It may be that not every passenger is this aware, but some are and that’s all it takes. No one on the other end of a phone conversation has any idea of what is going on around you while you drive. Having a hands-free phone conversation certainly feels more distracting to me anyway.
I’m not some law abiding poster boy but I don’t think I’ve ever sent a text while driving. The main reason being that I drive a manual and most of the time it is not possible to text because I need both hands to drive. I wonder if a population that almost entirely drives automatics has a higher proportion of texting drivers as a consequence?
Where I live, doing anything with a phone using your hands is illegal. A friend of mine was ticketed for looking at his phone while stopped at lights. It was dark and the police officer next to him saw the light of the phone screen as he picked it up and glanced at it.
Drink driving attitudes have certainly changed. It used to be a way of life. Go to the pub after work and drive home. No one would raise an eyebrow. Different times now, which is mostly a good thing.
I don’t think witnessing someone using cell phone while driving constitutes an emergency. If you genuinely thought it was, I’m sure you would have made the call, even if you felt the need to pull over first.
Reporting someone driving dangerously in violation of the law is not an emergency? The other driver in the OP observed this guy swerving all over the road; is that reason to call?
In my case, the guy was driving OK and we don’t have a very populated roadway.
^ gigi, talking on cell phones while driving is very common. Read the posts in this thread. It is something so common to witness, if people called every time they witnessed it, calls to police and 911 would overwhelm the ability to take all calls. It would be more hazardous to the public than not calling.
The reason one is allowed to use a cell phone in case of an emergency is because doing so poses less of a risk than the emergency not being called in. You would have been engaging in the same known level of risk as the person you are reporting. I wonder what the reaction of an officer would have been had he pulled you over for using your phone.
YOU: Officer, I know I was on my cell phone, but i was calling in an emergency.
COP: What’s the emergency?
YOU: Someone was on their cell phone.
COP: Yeah, we know about him. He was calling us because he saw someone texting.
Car pulls over: “Officer, I was just calling in that lady for talking on her cell phone.”
Forget about asking me what constitutes an emergency. I quickly Googled for you. I’ll bold for you too:
OK, good. So the other driver in the OP was OK calling in the texter swerving all over the road.
“He kept going off the road and into oncoming traffic and he just kept doing that,” said Kuchler, who first shared the account of what happened with the San Antonio Express-News.
Kuchler, who followed the truck for at least 15 minutes, said he called the sheriff’s offices for both Uvalde and Real counties and told them “they needed to get him off the road before he hit somebody.”
I do recognize that the driver I saw was not a reason to call but there could be cases where a texter/talker is acting badly enough to call it in.
Surprise, it’s Czarcasm dropping a douche bag comment with no purpose. You want an example of what would happen if people reacted differently? You’re a fucking idiot.
I was wondering if this was a problem even worth considering, compared to all the very real incidents that have been reported so far in this thread and elsewhere.
WTF are you talking about? I was responding to someone that thought (apparently not anymore) calling the police while driving was “allowed” because witnessing someone driving “OK” but using a cell phone constitutes an emergency situation. You asked for me to post an example of something I never claimed actually happens. It was a sarcastic hypothetical given to possibly help someone realize that what they think is a good idea actually isn’t. Now you were “just wondering” if I should have bothered responding. Whatever.