And xenophobe too I might add. A harmonic combination.
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UK to Close Loophole That Allows Phone Users to Take Photos or Play Games While Driving
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And xenophobe too I might add. A harmonic combination.
That must have been many, many years ago if you're talking about London - Gatwick using what was then called the "urban clearway" that bypassed places like Crawley and Croydon.
There's a motorway now.
Given the updated version of the law on mobile phone use whilst driving has not even been drafted yet, nothing anyone can say about its contents can be remotely considered a fact.
But what is a fact is that autonomous vehicles were considered in 2015, and necessary legislation has since been passed.
Regulations for driverless cars
Analyses the existing legal and regulatory situation for testing, producing and marketing highly and fully automated vehicles in the UK.
The driver of a self-driving vehicle must at all times pay the same amount of attention to the road and are not allowed to be distracted by a handheld device. That is not due to oversight in not updating the law, but by believing that it is appropriate for new and unproven technologies. And that all vehicles on a public road need a "driver" as the person responsible for the vehicle, regardless of how it is being driven. One day the confidence in, and proven experience of, autonomous vehicles may see that change. But until then a legal driver must take full responsibility for their vehicle's operation, and be able to take over control of the vehicle at any moment.
You may disagree with that requirement, but it does not make it any less a fact that such things have been thought about, recognized in legislation where required, which forms the basis of all future legislation.
MOD’s, please remove this original post.
And you. Tell this to the three dead people I know through this virus. Before that, in the 38 years of my life, I didn’t know a single flu victim.
I am sure there are timesI have encountered over 50 roundabouts, but only on journeys of around 300 miles or more. Not that I have ever wanted to count them. Traffic lights neither.
Although they never said where they were driving from, neither the A23 or A217 from their starting points have anywhere near that number of roundabouts, and never did. I know because I live just off the former, and started out riding a 125 bike on L-plates so had to avoid motorways and used both of those routes many times heading south.
It is still nice to use the A217 over the motorway, save for having to get through Reigate. The A23 though is a boring and slow road as it is lightly built up the entire way. Besides which, if you want to go from central London, even from the motorway, use the M25, A217, then the A24 instead of staying on to the A23.
It does have more roundabouts, which apparently is an issue for some people, but it has more dual carriageway, is faster, and avoiding Purely and the Croydon retail parks makes a big difference. Other than a single lane section on the Sutton bypass, the worst parts are actually the traffic light junctions which hold you up.
The actual point is that no device is completely idiot-proof, and that people should take responsibility for behaving dangerously. It isn’t dangerous for a passenger to use a smartphone, which it why modern OS’s allow override of motion-activated disabling.
Why on earth would you be holding a video camera or a book while driving a vehicle?
Speed cameras can be a problem, too. Check out this absolutely hilarious BBC report. The fun & games starts at around 01:40. It was pulled from the BBC website fairly quickly - you can probably guess why. I don't know if the reporter ever worked again.
We have automated police now. The new speed cameras where motorways are being widened/converted to "smart" motorways are not just monitoring speeds but also driving behaviour. Plenty of tickets dished out by the thousands so far.
You have pinpointed a severe failing of oure olde towne plannyres of yore. I trust our government is going to widen the UK until it is the size of the US so that we can fit in appropriately sized roads that meet your approval.
You can reliably detect that the phone is moving at say above 15mph. Then the phone could turn its cameras on and detect its environment. The phone could ask the user for evidence they are not the driver. That could be pointing the camera at the steering wheel which is in the wrong position for the driver, or pointing it at either heads in the distance or a largish empty space, in case you're on a bus or train.
A simple solution: The police sells a very very cheap bluetooth transmitter that you are supposed to mount right on your steering wheel. If you don't have that transmitter in your car, using your phone is illegal, driver or not. If you have that transmitter, your phone figures out its location and whether you are the driver. Mount the transmitter in the wrong place, like the passenger side, and you get a £1000 fine.
The speed cameras are not the problem. The problem are truly awful drivers who crash their cars without any outside involvement at the sight of a speed camera. (I did a lot of driving on the A13. Long stretch with 50 mph limit. You can safely (no risk of fines) drive at 52 mph. And then you have the idiots who drive up to your a*** because they think your are going too slow, and if you let them pass, they drive up to the next camera and hit the breaks to go down to 40 - when you could just peacefully go 52 mph completely ignoring all speeding cameras.
Yes indeed. If you're out for a leisurely drive it's much nicer to enjoy the countryside, and changing gears is part of it. Unless of course you're an American used to straight roads and automatic transmission.
How so? Let me direct you to the CDC website which says that currently there are 218,986 deaths out of 331,000,000 million US population. Run those numbers and it's pretty small. And most cases produce mild or no symptoms. But if Covid 19 has you really worried, you can have my poorly tested and rushed to market vaccine.
COVID Data Tracker
CDC’s home for COVID-19 data. Visualizations, graphs, and data in one easy-to-use website.
covid.cdc.gov
Ooops!
"The Swedish COVID-19 experiment of not implementing early and strong measures to safeguard the population has been hotly debated around the world, but at this point we can predict it is almost certain to result in a net failure in terms of death and suffering. As of Oct. 13, Sweden’s per capita death rate is 58.4 per 100,000 people, according to Johns Hopkins University data, 12th highest in the world (not including tiny Andorra and San Marino). But perhaps more striking are the findings of a study published Oct. 12 in the Journal of the American Medical Association, which pointed out that, of the countries the researchers investigated, Sweden and the U.S. essentially make up a category of two: they are the only countries with high overall mortality rates that failed to rapidly reduce those numbers as the pandemic progressed."
The Swedish COVID-19 Response Is a Disaster. It Shouldn’t Be A Model for the Rest of the World
Sweden's unique approach to the pandemic has drawn interest from other countries. But the data are clear: it's largely been a failure.
“A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.”
— Douglas Adams
Well, the video evidence contradicts your statement. If the presence of a mobile camera van induces (multiple) drivers to hit the brakes hard causing them to spin off the road and slew between fast-moving traffic, their presence is clearly a problem. It’s a wonder nobody was killed in that video.
Of course people shouldn’t be speeding. But people often do.
They couldn't do it that way for a number of reasons (power usage, privacy, etc). And what would stop a driver reaching over and taking a picture of the passenger dashboard? It's too easy to defeat, and a horrendous UX.
The only reliable way I could envision is that future cars and phones are required to have a U1-like chip that can reliably determine the position of the phone in the vehicle. It's secure and low power.
If the phone and car determine that the phone user is in the driver seat, and the vehicle is running, then the phone would have its functions limited. Else, the phone should be functioning as normal.
Yes, quite the substantial risk to safety reversing at half a mile an hour. What an absolute danger to society I am, winding up people who use their phone while driving.
