Pet Peeve

As I live in LA, I spend a lot of time in traffic -- thankfully less than many others.  It's pretty much par for the course for all of us.  When stopped in a parking lot of a boulevard during rush hour, I get a chance to look over and see what other people are doing.  I got to do the same thing when I rode a bus to work every day.  And almost every day, I see someone with their head pointed down towards their lap, texting away while driving.  Presumably they could be surfing the internet or navigating a map or something but you can often recognize the thumb moving to the predetermined keyboard locations at the bottom of the screen.

This drives me absolutely bat shit crazy.  This kills people, and even at best, you're holding up the people behind you and causing worse traffic because the light is green and you're not moving.  I get that checking your messages while all of traffic is stopped for minutes at a time is appealing -- I've certainly felt the draw.  But I'm not talking about quickly checking the messages while stopped.  I've seen people doing 70 and texting with both hands.   Seriously?

(Number 2 on the crazy list is people who hold their phones out away from their heads, talking into it like talking into an ice cream sandwich.)

What I want is an app, device, whatever, that blocks people from texting or using their phones while driving.  Maybe it detects if it's moving quickly and being held in one hand, maybe it's a radar gun thing that I can point at other cars and it shuts down their phone communication or something.  Whatever it is, it's got to save lives.

A simple start might be an app that runs in the background of the phone that disables / slows down SMS or phone calls when it detects its going faster than some speed.  (Parents could force their teenagers to have it installed on their phones.)  But it would not be able to detect if you were a passenger in a car or on a train, and you could still text at low speeds, so it's not perfect.  Maybe if it were able to detect if the phone is held by one hand (not sure if there is a way to detect that)

Perhaps another approach is that the app could detect sound, and if the sound ahead and to the immediate left were louder than the sound to the right and behind, it would sense that you were in the driver's seat and stop texts.  However, you could fool it with loud music, or it would get false-positives even if you weren't driving.  But maybe that would be detectable by very small vibrations you normally get in a car.

Anyways, maybe this is something I'm going to hack on in more detail, because it drives me crazy.