Texters beware - cops are now driving big rigs to catch you

You do know that not everyone drives for a mega fleet and has a dispatcher telling them where to go, right?

 

being deaf doesn't disqualify you , when I was younger I knew a deaf guy and he had a full license to drive a car

 

it's the camels ya gotta watch out for! they're high enough to come over the top of the roo bar and thru the windscreen. think i'll stick with my talking books

 

Although very true, most of the problems with our fellow drivers isn't with cell phones but a lack of proper overall training and brining bad habits from their 4 wheeling training.

 

I completely agree! Man the inside of some of these new vehicles is like mission control at NASA. Computer screens and more knobs and buttons than you know what to do with. We aren't making the drivers any better on the road, we're just giving them more toys to play with while they are on the road. Why in the world do you have to be able to surf the internet, check your facebook, use your car to make a phone call, choose from 3 millioin song titles to play on your in-dash mp3 player, and watch Netflix while your driving to pick your kids up from school?

 

I don't think that having the phone in the truck is the issue, and I don't think another company policy or federal law is going to help the situation. Its all really about common sense and having the right attitude when driving. Having that phone with you in the truck is essential if you happen to be the first vehicle on the scene of a serious accident and you need to notify EMS. Also if you need to contact a shipper, receiver, or your dispatch about a load. Just need to make the calls when the truck is safely stopped, not while driving 60mph down the road.

I am not a driver yet, just getting ready to start school. I plan on having my phone with me in the truck so that I can make personal phone calls, check email, etc. when stopped for fuel, restroom break, food, etc. I see the phone as nothing more than a tool to connect me with my family and others when I am out on the road, it is not something to play with while moving a 60' 80,000lb vehicle down the road that will take about the length of a football field to stop and will destroy just about anything in its way until does stop.

We don't need more laws or regulations, we just need smarter drivers, but as comedian Ron White says, "You can't fix stupid". Good luck out there guys (and ladies) be safe and I really hope you aren't reading this while your driving!

 

I know this has been mentioned before but why not just disable all functions of a phone while the vehicle is in motion? My company has an app that we can use to send and recieve messages plus get our pre-plans and dispatches on. It's tied into the GPS function on the phone and will not work if it detects movement. Even if you try to use it while walking it will sometimes pop up that safety regulations forbid use while in motion. If you disable the GPS function on the phone, the app wont even open up. Our teams complain about this all the time. Now if a trucking company can come up with this, why can't the manufacturers build this right into the phone?

 

A possible answer is, most phones maybe 95% of them already can 'not work except 911while moving over a certain speed' or anything else. It's only software.

As to why they don't build that in, load that software at the factory, why would a manufacturer risk a market hit by offering only "crippled" phones? As soon as it was discovered, all the tech blogs would complain that its fascist.. and up would pop a hundred download-and-run-once solutions to patch the phone around the unwanted feature.

Unless they have no choice, the vast buying public who spends a billion on phones every years will not choose a phone with more restrictions on it. Why would they ever do that?

The only way to force it on people is to require the industry to comply, such as how they require the legitimate CB radio industry not to sell big radios in the USA.

Like the illegal CB radio black market there will be a cellphone black market they can't stamp out by enforcement.

One way would be to use encryption and a key exchange method on the legitimate software load, plus an encryption IC chip, in the phone to where the network checks with the IC chip to see if the software has been hacked or not, and only if it is clean are encryption keys for a mobile connection exchanged and only then is it then "trusted" on a mobile network. Jailbreak your phone, and it won't work any more, it's a brick. That's the trade off.

Un-trusting all jailbroken or hacked phones is necessary because otherwise people will read saved text and compose text while in motion. Then do a send/receive while stopped.
If they break the software so they can read or compose text while moving, then the 'safety function' is effectively bypassed. That is why a jailbroken or hacked phone can't be allowed on the system.

So to all of the readers of this topic who on one hand complain about texting and on the other hand have naughtily jailbroken their phones and ipads and other junk in order to avoid the service provider's restrictions.. what will you do?

Think up another method.

Whatever it is, it has to be acceptable to the mobile industry and has to be a law or they will never do it. It also has to have zero software work-arounds to be effective. The idea is to give all mobile customers no alternatives to this safety function.

There are some people; hardware and software hackers, that can workaround anything one way or another, and an advanced person can decap a chip and hack its hardware, but their number is small. And such people usually do not care to share their hard earned 'secrets' with idiots. And they are not the stupid people who are texting while driving, and would not even bother with this except on principle.

I see one big hole in this proposal already. I have a 30 minute workaround in hardware in mind. All you need is a decent workshop and an engieering tech. But unless the phone is going to kill itself when opened for service, there's no way to plug it. And who is going to stand for that? Unless forced to. -- So, just add that. If you open the phone's case it turns into a paperweight. But watch sales of high end phones decrease too as people are scrood by the manufacturer for the slightest repair on the $400 handset instead of a $50 local repair..

I hope that answers why, explains why a patch or covert app, on the handset only, is not the solution, and also proposes an idea towards a viable solution. Now give me $10M.

 

They had it on TV one day, guess it was a news report about the system. He is a spotter and radio's info to a patrol car who then pulls the car over. He can see things like no seatbelts, texting, etc. Not sure if you ever saw any flasher's or not yet.

 

They can't have cell phones that don't work over a certain speed because passengers in vehicles would suffer to. There has to be software in the car to check for drivers eyes being on the road or looking at something else. If the drivers eyes aren't looking on the road for more than a fraction of a second then it will record and report you to driving offence office. Then the driver would loose his/her license for a while and or face monetary penalties.
Distracted drivers are a bigger issue now than drinking & driving ever was. Cheers