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Are cellcos complicit in our nation's 42,000 traffic deaths and 2,500,000 injuries every year? Let's talk about the Last Mile . . .

This morning's "News" story on the local Disney-GE-Time-Warner-Fox-TV channel said there was New Evidence on Cell Phones and Cancer. Yeah, right. The cancer scare is a distraction, another cover-up for the real problem, talking -- and, even more dangerously, texting -- while driving.

This old, resuscitated TV story might have clued me to predict the contents of today's New York Times, to wit, the editorial entitled Texting to Death citing . . .

. . . growing evidence that texting creates a greater risk of crashing than even drunken driving.

In 2002 I wrote,

. . . along with more short text messages I'm expecting more car crashes. Message retrieval; a REAL killer app.

In 2004 I wrote,

drv n txt = crsh!

Today's New York Times editorial calls for stricter laws and steeper penalties. Ineffective. Unimaginative. Boring. Do they write these editorials in their sleep?

Glenn Fleischman, in his Wi-Fi Networking News in 2004, had a deeper thought. He reasoned that as long as cellcos are selling minutes, they're not motivated to join any campaign to stop use of their services while driving. He wrote:

When cell operators finally switch to unlimited monthly plans, they'll want people to talk less . . . you can bet we’ll see a 100-percent full-court press on restricting talking at all while driving.

Cellcos are even more motivated to allow their customers to text -- didja see how much they're raking in? Texting is the cellcos' newest money machine!

Unlimited monthly packages -- there's an idea. Of course the cellcos will resist because they won't be able to get away with selling many of the little 100%-profit extras they now sell.

There are three other approaches -- in addition to safer pricing plans -- we (as a nation) could explore:

1) Speech-to-text is fairly good these days. It's an open research question whether texters could dictate text messages with less distraction than they type them. Research, I repeat, research. Since lives are on the line, such research should be generously and rapidly funded. Any remediation would depend on the data . . . but let's get going. (Same for studying retrieving messages using text-to-speech.)

2) Today's cell phones have location mechanisms built in. The first derivative of location is speed. If a cell phone were traveling over ten miles per hour, the cellco could brick it! Of course, this approach has problems. First, it would tar passengers with the same brush as drivers. Passengers in private automobiles are rare enough, but it would also punish train and bus passengers. (Also, location information should have strong privacy protections.) Aggressive, active study, please.

3) The overriding problem is the automobile itself. In 2007 there were some 42,000 US traffic deaths and some 2,500,000 injuries. We don't even need to count hours wasted in eight lane parking lots. Or pollution. Or the petro-distortion of foreign policy. We should begin a major, long-term, systematic, persistent national push to get people out of cars and onto public transportation. No research needed; this would absolutely reduce the numbers of dead and injured due to travel.

There's no surprises here. We've seen this coming for a decade. Why are we still sleepwalking in search of solutions?

Technorati Tags: Cellco, CognitivePsychology, GlennFleishman, Travel