https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rClJW9gnchc

I wish there was something one could do every time we see someone staring at their phone while driving. I've seen it so many times. I wonder how many accidents those people have caused.

Frankly, the problem does have a technological solution. Is there no interest on the part of companies like Apple to fix the problem? I wonder how many people have been killed by iPhones and other "smart" phones?

One of the first things I noticed about smart phones was just how much more of your attention and focus they require for normal use. I've owned cellphones dating back to when they were the size of a shoe-box, including many Blackberry's. The last Blackberry I owned could be used with one hand. In fact, most everything I needed to do could be done with my thumb by using the rotary encoder on the side.

The minute we went to touch screens things changed radically. Usability, from a certain perspective, suffered greatly. A touch interface is inherently fragile. With physical buttons you know what you are touching without looking. You can learn shape and location based cues that do not require looking at the phone. A touch interface cannot be explored. If you touch the screen a mm this way or that way you can make an absolute mess out of things. A touch interface requires that you look at he phone and focus on it intently enough that your brain task switches during that time.

My own test is what I call the "Mom and Dad Test". I can deal with my kids in the back seat and retain far more attention on the road and my surroundings than when I have to look at and interact with a smart phone. The act of operating a smart phone, reading small type, locating buttons, menu's, understating state and then precisely touching small controls, seems to require far more CPU cycles than most other distractions.

Of course, I haven't conducted any studies. This isn't my field. This is just conjecture and one data point. Having one teenage kid now driving we had to make sure we pounded the "don't use the phone while driving" message into his head. It's scary, actually. And, it is also scary to realize that you could be perfectly responsible while someone in another car might plow into you because they were focusing on a small little button on their iPhone to be able to click it.

I hate government over-regulation and the insertion into our lives. However, this might just be a case where a law or mandate is required. It needs to be simple. We don't need a new government agency with 100,000 employees and 50,000 pages of rules. It can be stated very clearly: By the year 2020 car drivers should not be able to use their phones while the vehicle is in motion. Let car and phone manufacturers figure out how to accomplish this feat. If it means nobody in the car can use their phone.

One of the arguments being made is that for navigation. Frankly, I hate using navigation on my iPhone. It goes back to the fragility of the interface. I have a dedicated GPS unit on the dashboard. It's pretty hard to screw up and it is pretty much immune to fumbling. The using Apple/Google for navigation on the iPhone can fall pray to the issues and fragility of a touch screen system with a pile of unrelated apps.

How many of you are willing to lose your kids or your own life to the issues introduced by smart phones while driving? Right.

Apple has enough money to figure out how to solve this problem. They need to solve this problem.