And until states make texting while driving a DUI-level offense, with the same penalties, it's not going to get better.
There's no excuse for it. And this superficial, useless article doesn't discuss it at all. Instead, it regurgitates pablum about the same regressive do-nothing "solution" known as "traffic calming." That's just ruining our streets instead of attacking the real problem.
Traffic calming is just an admission that state and local police are utterly useless to enforce laws against distracted driving and texting.
On almost every drive I see people speeding >15 mph over the limit, recklessly weaving in and out of traffic and making dangerous passes to get slightly ahead. The police are doing nothing against this dangerous and illegal behavior and won’t do anything about texting either regardless of the offense level.
In my area it’s because the police are also breaking the same laws. I’ve seen cops drive with defaced license plates on their personal vehicles, park on sidewalks, and recklessly speed.
Traffic calming measures would be by some entity the cops can’t control, so they hate them too.
Recently, while waiting for a bus, I took a picture of a car with "sheriff" emblazoned on the side stopped in the crosswalk, blocking pedestrian traffic. The police officer just wanted to turn right and didn't bother to stop at the line.
Yes, creating congestion on purpose, along with dangerous physical obstacles, makes people "calm."
And even more calming is the delay it introduces to emergency responses. Because when your dad's having a heart attack, I want the the paramedics to drive languidly up a lane and over picturesque mounds of asphalt and around "bump-outs" and wait for an immobilized column of traffic that can't pull out of the way because a lane has been deleted and replaced by a concrete berm or a field of plastic bollards.
the thing is, traffic calming works, it is applied in a lot of places with 'vision zero'. Is it a bit more uncomfortable because of bumps, turns, narrowings? yes. Is it a deal breaker? nope. Drivers are still in comfortable cars, with AC, overall speed is not affected because of less accidents, they mind their own business and 'calming infra' is enforcing more attention and reduces nr of decisions a driver must take to go from point A to B
"But signing on to Vision Zero proved to be far less difficult than adjusting policy and infrastructure to reflect the approach."
Vision Zero failed in US failed because it stayed on paper, Vizion Zero worked in Europe because those countries actually did infrastructure changes...
I did, and it did not "stay on paper." That's why the results are viewed as "perplexing." Saying it was difficult and saying it wasn't done at all are different things.
We have all kinds of "Vision Zero" bullshit in L.A., and fatalities remain high. Why? TEXTING.
Care to show regions where it was implemented in l.a. and fatalities in that regions? I just really doubt that speed bumps, artificial turns, increasing the turn angle, adapting semaphores to be before intersections and raised crosswalks have no effect. If there are no such regions that adapted these changes than vision zero stayed on paper. If such regions exist, I would be glad to research how fatalities changed after them
I do not understand this aversion toward creating environment in which people have to or are motivated to drive the good way and preferring ranking up punishments as the only supposed solution for everything.
And making everything punishable as much as possible does not work all that much either. It just make people feel good that someone was punished.
I would feel great if someone who deliberately puts other people in danger by not paying attention while driving got punished.
Making streets endlessly more impassable results in driving "the good way," whatever that is?
No. I am happy to drive within the speed limit in most cases (the exceptions being glaring rip-offs with no possible safety excuse, such as 40 MPH on Lake Shore Drive in Chicago). All I ask is that we the taxpayers are afforded properly-timed lights and anything else we can do to make traffic as efficient as we can.
While I agree, I think we need to widen the net to "distracted driving" so phone calls, eating while driving, yelling at kids in the backseat, etc all fall into the same consequence. Drivers in the US, in my experience, tend to believe their vehicles have some some of magical autopilot mode, and I'd argue that some safety features come dangerously close to advertising themselves as such. What drivers fail to recognize is just how splintered their attention becomes when they focus on other tasks while driving, even something as seemingly simple as changing the radio station. No amount of data seems to be able to convince them that their brains are no more capable of juggling operating a vehicle while doing other things than anyone else's is, but we all want to believe we are capable.
Yes, I do not mean it should actually be specific to texting. It's just harder to catch people doing the other things. And they don't tend to be as habitual (minus the eating, perhaps).
But texting? If you actually look at the drivers around you on a given day on a single errand, you can't NOT see it happening. And it's so easy to spot from a block away: the random braking, veering, creeping along, not moving their ass when the light changes... at the very least these people are stealing from everyone else on the road by blocking traffic.
There's no excuse for it. And this superficial, useless article doesn't discuss it at all. Instead, it regurgitates pablum about the same regressive do-nothing "solution" known as "traffic calming." That's just ruining our streets instead of attacking the real problem.