I-Like-To-Bike

IF alcohol, or drugs, or even a recumbent was in use at the time of the sad event it might upon investigation be considered a "contributing factor" or be relevant in court. None of those factors or any other potential contributing factor has been revealed on this thread, nobody on this thread is "the court", and your personal experience with cell phone use while driving is irrelevant.

mr_bill

Next time you want to point out there are zero details, stop.

-mr. bill

rydabent

Oh yes lets be sure to give the killer all his rights. The person killed had ALL his rights removed. Im sure that a phone call to see what Aunt Martha is cooking for supper is FAR more important than a persons life!!!!!!!!!!!!

livedarklions

The driver is a state? Who knew?

livedarklions

I don't think any of these points are debatable:

It's very sad that he got killed.

Distracted driving is bad.

We don't know whether or not the driver was distracted or anything else about the cause of this crash.

Everything else in this thread is just pointless noise.

Iride01 

Yeah, we need an obituary sub-forum.

Milton Keynes

Now, don't assume that just because a driver is looking at their phone while driving that means they're reading text messages.








They could be watching cat videos.

tomato coupe

Driver was arrested 7 days ago.

vespasianus

I don't believe it is the same case. It is another cyclist that was killed on a different road but in that same section of town. Also, that case was at night and was a hit and run.

tomato coupe

Yep.

I think I'd avoid riding somewhere where they can't keep track of which driver killed which cyclist.

Riveting

The problem with that theory is that there's no way to know if the user of the phone is driving or not. There's far too many people riding along as passengers in cars, buses, trains, Ubers, planes, walking, etc... to enforce a law that disables phones when moving. It's just not feasible.

IMHO What really needs to happen is that phone screens need to become more integrated with cars to the point where a received text message is displayed in a heads up display on the windshield, and steering wheels will have big Yes/No buttons right on them to allow a driver to respond to a text easily without taking their eyes and hands off the road to search for a tiny button on a phone's screen. And possibly even have a keyboard built into the backside of the steering wheel where your finger tips are to allow for easier typing. Instead of fighting this senseless war on text messaging, we needs to facilitate a fix for the the actual problem, which is drivers taking their eyes off the road.

tomato coupe

Sure, good solution. I think they should also put joysticks on the steering wheel to make it easier to play video games while driving.

vespasianus

That is all of South Carolina. I think this little area has had roughly 5-6 cycling deaths this year. The roads are terrible and the drivers are even worse.

Riveting

The longer people like you make light of the fixes needed to make texting and driving easier and safer for the driver, the more the deaths will continue to pile up. The war on drugs didn't work, and the war on texting while driving will fail also. It took 30-40 years to make pot legal, hopefully we don't take as long to legalize texting and driving, which should bring some innovations in safety features.

livedarklions

And a beer dispenser.

mr_bill

Aren’t there more appropriate places for this “enlightening discussion?”


Ava has returned home along with Kristopher Cotton’s ashes.

Say their names.

-mr. bill

livedarklions

Sorry, but this is one of the lamest false equivalencies I have ever seen. There's plenty of examples of people changing their driving behavior due to prohibitive laws--when I was a kid, essentially no one wore seat belts, and the car seat for all practical purposes didn't exist. Once mass-marketed car seats were introduced, their use didn't really ramp up until holding the child in your lap was made illegal.

And sorry, your technical "innovation" is a laughingly bad solution. People don't just get into accidents typing on their phone, reading texts is enormously distracting, reading requires both mental and optical focus. If you were right that putting that distraction on the windshield didn't detract from driving, then the placement of video games or movies or whatever in the same place is a perfectly reasonable suggestion. You're not right, and you as much as admitted it when you realized that the video game suggestion is absurd.

badger1

Please, explain to me why it matters whether or not technical innovations will "make texting and driving easier and safer for the driver".

I, for one, could give a rat's behind whether "texting and driving" could be made safer and/or easier for a driver. I don't particularly care whether irresponsible idiots who divide their attention, whilst driving a car, between texting and driving a) find one or the other more 'difficult' using currently-available technology and/or b) severely injure or kill themselves (preferrably the latter; gets 'em off the roads) while trying to do so.

The only relevant question is whether or not a driver can simultaneously drive a car and text without endangering other road users. Absent the development of genuinely safe autonomously self-driving cars, or absent some sort of miraculous feat of bio-engineering that enables the human brain to simultaneously 'text and drive' whilst maintaining full attention on both tasks -- something neurologically not currently possible for any human being -- I fail to see what technological developments would achieve this end.

Riveting

I understand my brainstormed innovations are somewhat absurd, but I just don't think that outlawing texting and driving will work. Some innovation has to happen that makes the process of sending and receiving texts safer while driving. Requiring "hands-free" just makes those people who don't use hands free hide their phone really low and out of view, making it even more unsafe. Simply outlawing texting while driving is the easy "zero-tolerance" answer, but it isn't THE answer. Look how long drunk driving has been outlawed, and yet here we are (in the US) with ~111 million drunk driving incidents annually (of which 11,000 are deaths), for the past 30 years (or more) https://www.cdc.gov/motorvehiclesafe...factsheet.html

I-Like-To-Bike

This thread went off the rails at post 3 and never came back, it only got worse and less relevant to the sad event mentioned in the OP. The only appropriate place for the thread after post 2 is the trash can.

livedarklions

Honestly, I really think it's a shame that you are using this thread in this way, and I wish that I didn't feel I need to answer this lame-brained assertion. No, drunk driving hasn't been eradicated, but are you arguing it isn't less than it would be if it was legal? Are you arguing for a technology that would make drunk driving safer? What makes you think that anything is going to be THE solution for a problem?

Anyway, you're just cherry picking, and really missed the point about car seats and seat belts. Regulation matters and can save lives, it just can't save all lives.

Leisesturm

Self-driving cars. I get that Covid and Civil Unrest have captured the news cycle but how could y'all's completely forget the coming irrelevance of human drivers in traffic safety? If you can stay off the roads for ... say 10 more years, you're golden.

Notso_fastLane

So your argument is we shouldn't outlaw drinking and driving either?

Notso_fastLane

I really hope you're right

Riveting

Oh, is that what I said? Must've missed that. If anything you should have said that I wanted to make drinking and driving easier.

My main argument is that I want to reduce the texting and driving accidents by making it easier and less distracting for the driver to do so. And I believe that can be done via innovations that link the phone to the car better, and I gave brainstormed examples of some possible innovations. And I believe a discussion forum about safety is a prime place to discuss such things. And a sub-argument of mine is that simply outlawing that activity isn't all that can be done to reduce number the deaths.