New GA law - hands free

jplante4 wrote:
The trouble is that driving does not lend itself to multitasking. Tasks need to be interruptible or timed sliced. Just look at the compute power needed for an autonomous vehicle.

Driving can be time sliced. For example you don't always look at the road when you take a second to check the mirrors or gauges. In theory you could spend these same split seconds glancing at text or pressing a digit to dial but the problem is in the reality. Many do not or will not give the proper priority to the immediate driving tasks. From my experience this is where a good police officer can safely drive, listen to two different 2-way radios and observe others outside the car "simultaneously". A good officer has trained him/herself to always take in little bits of each in a round robin fashion so the highest priority can be addressed.

It's also why I personally believe most of those studies that compare cell phone usage to drunk driving aren't fair. The ones I've read about are contrived by requiring the participant to compute tasks or remember specific conversation content while driving. In reality a conversation could be "paused" or have stuff repeated if the driving demanded more immediate attention. Like I said before, sitting stopped in traffic isn't a safety concern and most could carry on a conversation fine while doing so. Similarly parts of my rural drive home have sections without so much as a driveway and fields on both sides. That part of my driving doesn't demand full attention either.

As for all of the complaints like "every time I see someone driving like X, they have a cell phone". That in itself is a biased sample because you do not see all of those who are driving just fine while using their phone. I've been sure someone was using their phone based upon their bad driving but it turns out they weren't. When you're sure that cell phones are the cause of all traffic evil, every time you see someone with one driving poorly it reinforces that thought. I'll repeat what I said earlier: Poor drivers with phones are already poor drivers without.

The problem I have with these kinds of laws is they are one size fits all and while they seem to correlate to safety improvements, they cast a wide net to do so.