I hope they do and I hope they do something about it. Distracted driving is a really bad idea, and you should not be touching your phone while you are driving.
While that might be nice, the insurance companies spying on me is very distasteful. Alas we've traded the governement's unreasonable search and seizure for private search and seizure as time as gone on.
I disagree. I think every single car should be tracked at all times. They are killing machines, responsible for 40,000 deaths a year in the US directly, more than gun deaths.
Yeah, as someone who sees people drive past, staring at their phones, as I ride my bike around... I don't have a ton of sympathy. It's a privilege, not a right.
No, the roads belong to everyone not just motorists, building a cyclist ghetto and kicking cyclists off the roads so that motorists can have them all for themselves is just wrong. Motorists should be responsible for their actions.
They do, but we still build sidewalks for pedestrians. If you want more biking, you need to make people feel safe to do so, and many do not feel safe being next to cars driven by angry people inches away from them.
You can make a road with a protected bike lane after all.
I’ve been a bike commuter too and if it’s any consolation whatsoever, I just want to let you know that if you see me with my cell phone on my steering while driving, it’s because I have my navigation app open and I want it in my peripheral vision so I can be attentive to the road.
I was thinking about that today when a android update prompt took my screen view in hostage. I am using the phone as a GPS. Hopefully I knew the road very well but I would have been forced to stop the car in any other situation.
Aside from highly localized municipal efforts, the only way anything is going to be done about this is a top-down approach from the federal government. PR campaigns need to be conducted, funds for LEO training/equipment to conduct stings need to be allocated, all that. This needs to make going after drunk driving look like a drop in the barrel. As much as I hate wanting to expand the influence of our law enforcement bodies, I don't see any other way out of this epidemic.
You don't need to be touching your phone _while driving_ to do those things. Set them up before you leave your parking spot and use a robust mount so you can safely glance at the GPS without fiddling.
Turn your phone off (or at least on silent/do not disturb) and put it either in the back seat or the seatback pocket before getting behind wheel. Get a Garmin offline GPS for navigation.
If you want entertainment like music, audiobooks, or podcasts you can get a cheap, basic MP3 player and load it up before car trips and plug it into the aux input. Though, honestly, this might not be necessary as long as the phone is out of reach and alerts are off/on silent; so a phone with notifications disabled bluetooth streaming podcasts from the back seat should be fine.
The important thing is its entirely out of your reach and you don't hear the notifications.
This recent trend of calling everything addictive and normalizing this misuse is not only stupid but also dangerous to society at large. Addiction is a serious thing with a well defined meaning. By applying it to things that are just actually rewarding, as opposed to things that hijack the reward system via direct manipulation to skew responses to predicted reward, it creates a perception of danger.
This perception of danger then allows for the conversation about real issues that need solutions (usually education) to bottom out and begin calls for the use of government violence to prevent people from doing what they want. Encouraging the use of force against people who haven't done any violence or fraud themselves is a very bad thing.
The circumstances have to justify it. Misuse of the word addiction helps that false justification.
> Addiction is a serious thing with a well defined meaning.
Yes, and that meaning applies fully to smartphone apps for many people.
> By applying it to things that are just actually rewarding, as opposed to things that hijack the reward system via direct manipulation to skew responses to predicted reward
Again, this applies to apps as much as it does to cigarettes. In both cases, you do get a short-term sensation of reward followed by regret and negative long-term consequences.
There is a big difference between something that gives you pleasure and then create a bad habit and an actual addiction.
What you are doing is the equivalent of saying that it's fine to play video games late because "people are addicted to it". Most people aren't. They simply have deep rooted bad habits. Playing Flappy Bird every time you commute isn't an addiction. Wanting to finish your level before logging off isn't either.
An addiction is when your mind is always focused on the addictive behavior. You have an urge than can never be fulfilled. It's a shifting goalpost because your tolerance increases as you spent more and more time attempting to satisfy the urges. It gets so bad it takes over your life, become more important than your career and family.
Actual gambling, gaming & internet addictions are life breaking. People die from it [1][2][3]. Entire families get broken from addiction. People lose careers over it.
Recall that the article that spawned this discussion is talking about people using their phone while driving and the subsequent 15% rise in car fatalities in the past year.
Is the increase due to addicted people willingly risking their life an the lives of the people surrounding them or is it simply a bunch of people with bad habits living where the issue is not talked about enough? I look at education and laws around the world for the issue and my jaw often hit the floor. Either it's not talked about or doing won't get you in any trouble.
Where I live (Eastern Canada) they made it so that first offence is $600. Second offence double that. If the person is on a probationary licence then they lose it. Otherwise you lose 5 of your points in the demerits points system[1]. Repeat offenders lose their licence for up to a month.
They are investigating outright making it a criminal offence because the population consider the issue a serious one.
Not only are you not allowed to hold a phone you are also not allowed to have it in a cup holder. You can only use it if attached to the vehicle and for navigation or vehicle performance analytics features. They have cops driving in raised unmarked trucks and bus to spot drivers using phones.
We also saw at the same time an increase on government paid TV and radio ads educating about the issue.
Those measures made it so that according to surveys, "97% of adult Quebecers consider that distracted driving is a very serious or quite serious problem".
[1] Adults with full licenses have 15, young adult 12 and teens only 8. That means tha a teen who loses 5 points for having an active phone in the car will then lose their license for failing to obey a stop sign (-3 pts).
I read the second article and noticed that they have no idea what they are talking about. See,
> It stimulates neurotransmitter receptors in the brain’s reward center with a huge surge of dopamine — an organic feel-good chemical, or neurotransmitter.
They're still repeating the same old wives tales about the dopaminergic systems being related to feeling good. This was known to be false even back in the 1970s. They encode for reward incentive salience, not actual feelings of pleasure. Given this the entire rest of the article can be disregarded.
But, that leaves the actual study cited. This seems to be a 1000 person study of self reports of behavior by college students through text. Self reports are not going to tell you anything but the biases of the people involved.
And at the very most, if we accept this study's conclusions at face value then all they're saying is that people have built up habits relating to phones. Dependence. This is the word you want to use. It is definitely not addiction.
> Addiction is a brain disorder characterized by compulsive engagement in rewarding stimuli despite adverse consequences. [...] The two properties that characterize all addictive stimuli are that they are reinforcing (i.e., they increase the likelihood that a person will seek repeated exposure to them) and intrinsically rewarding (i.e., they are perceived as being inherently positive, desirable, and pleasurable).
It is a psychological definition of addiction. It is all about compulsive behaviour of seeking for some stimuli and nothing about the hijacking of the reward system or use of government violence. What does it mean to hijack the reward system and how to demarcate it from "to be actually rewarding"? Is eating of high-carb food actually rewarding? You can get a lot of cheap calories this way.
Much of what is self-diagnosed as phone "addiction" is really some form of post-partum/separation anxiety-avoidance.
When you learn a behavior and reinforce it long enough, any disruption to that has a nasty tendency to "break" people. Take solitary confinement, or soldiers-- trained to lose their sense of self during boot camp and adopt a career specialty, a team identity and a surrogate "family" over the course of years and then get everything taken away due to RIFs. it's not just PTSD that contributes to veteran suicides.
With phones, we have entire generations who learn to swipe before they even know how to wipe. Kids and teenagers are on-call 24/7, ready to respond to meaningless notifications and updates anytime anybody on Earth does anything. Even in cases where they're being bullied to the point of suicide, they'll check in regularly for another dose of abuse until the bitter end. Go to a restaurant and count how many "couples" are on their respective phones instead of interacting with each other.
Our behavior is being shaped in ways our primitive understanding of psychology has yet to adapt to. Nobody is in a hurry to put down their phones because they're so connected the rest of the time, the isolation that follows is its own form of withdrawal.
Doesn't make it an addiction, but when compulsivity drives your behavior, you're not that far removed from it either.
> You’ll also lose your licence if you passed your driving test in the last 2 years. [Your licence will be cancelled (revoked) if you get 6 or more points within 2 years of passing your test.]
> The law still applies to you if you’re: stopped at traffic lights[,] queuing in traffic[, or] supervising a learner driver
In Oregon the fine is $1000, or $2000 if you're involved in a collision. We have the lowest distracted rates in the country. But really, people still do it a lot.
