Little hard to respond to the snark but I’m just glad I was paying attention and not on the phone or else I might be dead.

Cheers.

No snark, and every avoided accident is a good thing. Policy makers at the national level just have to weigh all the cases over individual anecdotal ones.

This often means one person’s risk goes up while thousands of others’ goes down. Sometimes that’s hard to balance, but if the 38% reduction in crashes cited in the article is true, this particular decision seems fairly simple.

I suspect the real issue is people using phones while driving, I know of at least one person who is dead from this. I rear ended a car when I was in my early 20s while on the phone, I se people driving trucks in narrow streets while on the phone in my area.

I don't like enforcing things like this as a band aid, it's fine to try improve a situation, but let's be honest, many people who are involved in these accidents are doing something with their phone.

Sure. What we know, though, is "stop doing that" doesn't work. That's why aviation, highway safety, healthcare, tech postmortems, etc. have discovered that "please ask the human to stop doing human things" isn't the approach to take. Instead, we try to engineer away the opportunities for human error to kill people. (Quite successfully, in a lot of cases; as an example, aviation safety in the developed world is overall an incredible success story for regulators.)

People will continue to use their phones in their cars. That's a fact we have to accept.

> That's a fact we have to accept.

You can go ahead and do that but I think people are justifiably pissed that we require invasive technology to coddle the idiots who can't be bothered.

I don't like the whole, "we'll protect you from yourself attitude".