If your son has been driving a truck today, license plate ending in 1212, you need to talk to him about the danger of texting and driving. I watched him do this as he turned left from Cornwallis onto Cleveland this afternoon. Perhaps a "dumb phone" for emergencies should replace his I-phone or whatever it is he has now. Your son with a smartphone is a danger to all of the rest of us if he is going to text on it while driving.
And to the 18 or 19 year old brown-haired girl in the small white pickup at the 4-way stop at Cornwallis and Josephine/Shiloh: STOP TEXTING AND DRIVING! YOU BARELY STOPPED (NICE ROLLING STOP) AND THEN TEXTED YOUR WAY THROUGH THE INTERSECTION AND DOWN THE ROAD. I really don't appreciate having the lives of friends/families/neighbors/etc. put in danger because you are too stupid to drive without using both hands on your phone.
The phone companies have the technology to do this and there is no down side. Make texting not available when the phone is moving. GPS already knows when you are moving and does a pretty good job with it. You can write the OS code to include texting and when the phone see's the phone moving (so to speak), then it disables the texting function. The rest of the phone can work as normal. Now you naysayers say..but what about the passengers? Why do they have to suffer and not be able to text? Its called....for the greater good. We didnt text 15 years ago and got along fine. It would be a simple OS update on everyone phone. Phone in motion, no text. But what about my kids in the back seat screaming because they cant text? Grow a pair. Tell them to shut up or play Candy Crush or something. This is for the greater good. No one HAS to have texting available while a vehicle is in motion.
So if you are on a bus for hours or on a train, you can't text either? I can only imagine how much louder trains would get if everyone had to talk instead of text. Think about riding a train from NC to NYC or NYC to San Fran.
Oh well. As i said, what did you to 15 years ago when there was no texting? It will take a mind change, an attitude shift but how many more deaths and crashes will be caused by texting while driving before someone says enough? You can still twitter, you can still facebook, you can still surf the web. Your phone is more than a texter, believe it or not. Imagine, people having to talk to each other. Terrible aint it?
Well I don't think anyone under 30 "texts" any more anyway, at least nobody I know. Everyone uses Messenger, Kik, Skype, WhatsApp, Snapchat, Twitter, Instagram, etc nowadays. So blocking texting wouldn't do very much. You would need to block all messenger apps. That would be a big challenge and would pretty much take away from what a smartphone is.
A "hack"? You mean like, turn off the gps/location on your phone? lol. You would have to disable all apps on the phone except a white list of apps that are allowed when the phone is in motion. Such as Navigation or Phone, etc. It would never last, well for that matter, it would never happen in the first place.
Not that I disagree with the need to do something about distracted drivers but this idea has about as much chance of happening as doing away with guns or at least finding a full proof way of keeping them out of the hands of lunatics! Look at all the senseless shootings that happen every day it seems lately!
Maybe if we convinced the lunatic shooter to target drivers who are texting we could make lemonade out of lemons so to speak.
