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I got hit by a car a few months ago and painfully walked away. The car was turning and not even at a fast speed. My friend passed away a few weeks ago when she

• kolinko 13y ago
  What if computers can help us drive? Imho it's less distracting to use GPS on Glass, than have to look down and off the road to find it.
  • gareim 13y ago
    Set up a route beforehand. If for some reason you have to fiddle with GPS and it's distracting, then do what people did before GPS was around: pull over and figure out your bearings. EDIT: I don't want to come off as anti-tech in cars. I definitely believe that tech can enhance road safety, although I'm more looking forward to driverless cars. I do think that Glass is more distracting than normal GPS devices because Glass has the capability to do so much more than GPS. I don't totally trust people to only use the GPS function in Glass.
    • NoPiece 13y ago
      The same people who fiddle with gps while driving would be fumbling to unfold a map while driving. The technology isn't the issue.
      • marincounty 13y ago
        Good point! I am guilty of driving while looking at a map, and it definitely dangerous.
      • __david__ 13y ago
        Yes, I remember rifling through a Thomas Guide on a trip up the California coast back in the day and suddenly realizing I had changed lanes. Luckily there was no one next to me at the time…
  • kcbanner 13y ago
    Why not just concentrate on the road.
  • lambda 13y ago
    Sure, and you are allowed to have GPSes in your field of view. http://www.dmv.ca.gov/pubs/vctop/d12/vc27602.htm http://www.dmv.ca.gov/pubs/vctop/d12/vc27602.htm But the Glass is more than a GPS. It lets you read texts and emails. Reading texts and emails while you're driving will necessarily be more distracting than not doing so. And that's what's not allowed. The law is written such that it's only allowed to be able to offer both an approved function as well as an entertainment/business function if there's an interlock that prevents anything but the approved functions from being used while the vehicle is in motion.
    • stcredzero 13y ago
      > The law is written such that it's only allowed to be able to offer both an approved function as well as an entertainment/business function if there's an interlock that prevents anything but the approved functions from being used while the vehicle is in motion. Should be easy enough to arrange. Also, implement a time readout for "current GPS Nav session" so the officer can verify there was no funny business going on.
    • avalaunch 13y ago
      So if a driver uses his cell phone as his GPS he's breaking the law? If so, that sounds like a law that needs to be revisited anyway.
• codereflection 13y ago
  I cannot up vote this enough.
  • frogpelt 13y ago
    You can up vote once. That's enough.
• grecy 13y ago
  I am a firm believer that everyone should have to do the following things before getting a drivers license: 1. Spend a month in an accident recovery unit, seeing first hand victims of MVAs. 2. Be in a crash. Somehow this would have to be simulated, at a speed that won't cause injury, but will shock. (I was in a simulated 15mph crash at a fair - it HURT!)
  • deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  • adrr 13y ago
    It doesn't hurt the first day, it hurts the next day after the adrenaline wears off. I got TBoned by who ran a red light because he was texting, he hit me at 35. He never hit the brakes. Funny thing if you believe in karma, is that his air bag shoved the cell phone into his face and knocked him out.
  • michaelgrafl 13y ago
    I think this should be mandatory every couple of years or so in order to renew your driver's license. On the day I applied for my license, I visited my dad at the hospital and the guy next to him had a smashed face from a car accident. He had been in a car with a friend, who was driving, and his teenage girlfriend, who was pregnant. The girlfriend's baby died and it was considered unlikely that the girl would survive. The driver went mostly unharmed and was understandably very upset. I swore that day to always remind myself of this before I get into a car. I used to, but now I don't. The impression fades.
  • madaxe 13y ago
    2) Is very true. I crashed my first car aged about 7 on a friend's farm - old volvo estate, slammed it diagonally into a tree doing about 30, and rolled it down a bank. Terrifying, but a very, very valuable lesson in terms of just how much energy a few tonnes of metal at 30mph carries. I walked out of it unscathed, but was a kid made of rubber. Dare say these days I'd have smashed ribs and so-forth from the same - at the least.
• mikeash 13y ago
  Let's not pretend that this has anything to do with preferring gadgets over safety. People are making this argument over and over and over in this comment thread and it's just dumb. It's pretty clear that people who justify this are doing so because they don't think it's unsafe. You may disagree, and that's fine, but realize that they disagree with you, and do not see it as a safety issue. If you don't think it's unsafe, how would awareness of car accidents or respect for human life affect anything? You're aiming at the wrong idea.
  • jonmrodriguez 13y ago
    Lot's of people who text while driving think it's safe too. You can't take reckless drivers' own word for what's safe or not.
    • edgarallenbro 13y ago
      There is a difference between people who 'think' texting while driving is safe because they are ignorant and people who think that it's safe because it doesn't actually lead to any accidents. The people in the latter group can be proven wrong objectively by data that shows accidents that occur as a result of texting while driving, whereas the former group is irrelevant because they are simply ignorant. There is currently no data or at least not enough data to support the conclusion that simply wearing a Google glass (which does not imply use in the same way that holding up a cell phone while driving does) causes accidents.
      • mysterysnax 13y ago
        Let's not pretend we need a study to determine whether using your google glass while driving is safe or not. Anything that takes your attention away from the task at hand - navigating a one-to-two-ton piece of machinery at high speeds - is going to cause accidents.
        • ivanca 13y ago
          That's a ridiculous oversimplification: How do you know Glass will not allow people to be better drivers? like hearing: "You may want to reduce your speed, you are going over the 70 mph limit" or "You are going the wrong way, please turn you car around" or "There is a jam in this street a few miles ahead, you may want to take take Loremipsum road". If the device eventually can improve the "task at hand" when driving then _the police_ is the one increasing risks by punishing people with wearable technology.
• marquis 13y ago
  This short film on txting-while-driving by Werner Herzog changed my driving patterns. I'm sorry for your loss. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xk1vCqfYpos‎ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xk1vCqfYpos‎
  • codereflection 13y ago
    As someone who has lost a close family member to texting while driving, this is very painful to watch.
• Dylan16807 13y ago
  It was turned off. You're in the wrong thread.
• baddox 13y ago
  That emotional appeal only has value is you can also show that wearing Google Glass causes an increase in accident rate.
  • saalweachter 13y ago
    There's a catch-22 in deciding safe driving behavior. I think I'd prefer everyone being technologically conservative with respect to driver distraction. Until something can be shown to not be a dangerous distractions, drivers can't have it. When we ban things after they prove to be a distraction, that usually means we proved them a distraction via a body count. Waiting for a hundred or a thousand people to die so that you have statistical certainty is the shittiest kind of science. This is a bit of a catch-22, because we're pretty piss-poor at proving the negative, that things aren't a distraction. We're still way more paranoid about electronics on an airplane than most people think we need to be. What should happen -- in my opinion, and for all I know what does happen in some situations -- is a series of trials. First, laboratory, simulation-based trials. If drivers in a simulation are distracted by a new gizmo -- GPS, dash-mounted phone, Glass, car console, whatever -- we can eliminate it there, with zero people dying. Then and only then, if we have reason to believe no one will die because of it, we can have real-world trials, followed by approval for the general population. Obviously, this would suck for early Glass adopters, since it would likely take a year plus to complete good trials, but you could approve broad classes of devices and fast-track similar devices in the future.
    • baddox 13y ago
      > When we ban things after they prove to be a distraction, that usually means we proved them a distraction via a body count. Waiting for a hundred or a thousand people to die so that you have statistical certainty is the shittiest kind of science. I don't know. You make this sound really bad, but isn't this how a lot of science works? How do we know if a medical treatment doesn't have disasterous side effects? Sure, we start by assuming it's safe, and maybe we test on animals to gain some confidence, but at the end of the day you can't really be sure until people have tried the treatment. Obviously, there are other safer ways to study whether things distract drivers. Perhaps we could use driving simulators to test reaction time. I probably should have worded my comment differently, and asked for proof that Google Glass makes drivers quantifiably more distracted or less reactive rather than asking directly for proof of a higher accident rate.