Until they drive off while still looking at it, like the woman who drove through a pedestrian crossing a couple of weeks ago and almost hit me while I was walking across.
I think a little reasoning at global scale easily arrives at a defence of the current traffic law depending on risk tolerance, but perhaps an analogy will help: most societies believe (or at least enforce in a manner that reflects belief) that walking around with a handgun out in your hand should be illegal. In truth no harm is done until one pulls the trigger, and there is certainly benefit: it is much faster to stop a criminal when you're ready at hand.
The reasons we don't do that are manifold, but at least a few are analogous:
* legibility: we don't need just lack of harm, we require common knowledge that harm is unlikely in order for society to work with frictionlessness we desire
* distinguishability: at some percentage of accidental behaviour, we must constrain all people because we don't have a mechanism to determine who will likely cause it and who won't
* reversibility: for sufficient harm, it is better to restrict the error condition than it is to punish
Because we know we cannot bring the dead back to life, and no amount of prison will bring solace to their loved ones, we have decided that doing things that are high-risk to others is not permissible. Given this framework for the moral concern, it's just an optimization problem. The question then becomes what fraction of pedestrians killed in crosswalks is acceptable, or even what fraction of pedestrians following the law killed in crosswalks is acceptable. Some societies believe this should be zero (hence the amusingly named Vision Zero and so on as practised in Northern Europe). Others believe this should be fairly high (like the US) because the utility loss from constraint is too high.
Now the handgun case has a very high number for potential risk, so it's obvious why most societies have that law. The crossing point of risk for almost everyone is below it, consequently most agree. The question then becomes what your crossing point for risk is and whether the number of accidental deaths is above your threshold or below your threshold. But in either case, I don't think the argument "until they hurt someone, no harm is done, and therefore it should be permissible" holds, for if it did, surely we would allow for people walking around with handguns, perhaps even pointed directly in front of them as they walk, so long as they do not pull the trigger. And that seems to be an absurdity.
The specificity of handgun versus firearms in general belies the weakness of the argument. Would it matter in the thought experiment if it were a long gun?
The status of open carry legality in a US state is not correlated with firearms violence rates. Firearm prevalence in general is.
I support Vision Zero. It has a sound logical and statistical basis.
Vision Zero is orthogonal to a law against using a mobile telephone while operating a vehicle that is stopped.
Here are two daily occurrences contradicting that:
1. The driver realizes out of their peripheral vision that the light has changed but wants to finish the urgent TikTok they’re watching so they accelerate, often rapidly, without looking around and fails to notice other road users. I’ve seen people hit other cars because they didn’t notice the car ahead of them had stopped accelerating due to congestion, and countless times where they almost or did hit someone (fortunately never fatally) in the crosswalk because they were in “green means go mode” before they were fully back to looking outside their vehicle.
2. The driver continues to look at their phone and fails to notice when the light changes. Someone behind them gets mad and does something dangerous to pass such as driving in the opposite traffic lane, a bike lane, or in a pedestrian space.
Yes, many people do look at phones without hitting anyone but that’s like saying it’s okay to celebrate by firing a gun in the air because only a few people get hit. It’s a statistical certainty that the more times someone engages in unsafe activity, the more people will be on the unlucky side of those odds. If you have a couple million daily car trips in London, even 99.9999% safety means someone getting hurt every day.
I almost can't beleive adults are having this conversation.
You have never been sitting at a light, and see everone around you with their heads down, while the light has been green for 4 seconds?
Inverse, Have you ever been rear ended because a person staring down at their phone at a red light just decides to roll forward because someones brake lights in the pack deluminate for a moment?
I ask, because point 1 happens to me daily, and point 2 has put my car in the shop for weeks twice in the last 5 years.
A totally separate point to make; what could you possibly be doing on the phone? Like how addicted to social media or work must one be that they wait for the briefest of moments to distract themselves? I ask that not to judge or poke fun, but to say that you MUST be doing something that you find so important, and thus taking your attention, that it is now your priority. Or else, you would choose to wait.
I know you, as a reasonable adult on this forum, know what people are talking about here.
I can stay parked at a green light the entire cycle, and it still will be 100% the fault of the person who rear ends me.
As for what I'm doing, it's probably something like scrolling the map to see what road I'll be turning on in 5 minutes, so that I don't have to look at it (regardless of whether I'd be touching it) later. Or a dozen other similar things, none of which have anything to do with social media.
And I know you, as a reasonable adult on this forum, know this.
With all due respect, I could not imagine one thing, nor a dozen, that would involve me fiddling with my phone while on a commute of any length.
I say this having both a vehicle with wireless carplay, and another where I need to manually configure maps. And yes, I often fiddle with maps as I'm a nervous wreck, but I truly cannot imagine doing it "on the fly".
my company does not pay me enough to hyper scan my phone for teams/outlook, nor does my interest in "task/notification x" trump my desire to not have my car in the shop for weeks.
Different strokes I guess. I'm sure you're a safe driver all things considered.
Perhaps not while you’re not moving, but when you suddenly realise that the traffic light has changed to green and move off in a rush while distracted without having been monitoring the traffic, don’t you think that it’s more likely you’ll be hit by the truck that rolled through the lights as it turned red?
I'm comparing someone getting off on reporting people to the authorities to people who got off on reporting people to the authorities. It's the same self-righteous attitude either way.
Other drivers are doing dangerous actions. For example, the embedded video in the article showed a driver crash into his bicycle as he crossed the street. That driver then departed the scene. Hit and run is culturally and legally offensive in the UK and the rest of the OECD.
