One of the greatest features of a modern smartphone is its ability to completely replace your GPS. There are tons of navigation apps, from Google Maps for your location searching and turn-by-turn directions, to Waze for crowd-sourced road data, to apps like Foursquare that help you find interesting places in your area. The apps are fantastic, but there’s always a risk of distracted driving (and accidents) if a user plays with the app instead of paying attention to the road. Because of those accidents, the US Transportation Department may be looking into ways to impose stricter rules on the use of those apps.
Rumors say that the USTD wants to institute rules for in-car navigation that will only allow them to be accessed for a brief period of time. That “brief period” may be something like two-seconds per interaction, and twelve seconds for each total action. While that would certainly remove most distracted driving, it would also make it pretty difficult to use any device at all on the road.
It’s tough to say if this would have much of a substantial effect on distracted driving, if any of this turned into a law. Many apps explicitly prohibit the use of their services while driving, but that’s a tough rule to enforce. There’s grey area to deal with, like stop lights, dealing with situations where a passenger is handling the app instead of the driver, and things like that. It may not ever make it past the speculation stage, but expect to hear more about regulations like these in the future as smartphones get more and more popular.
source: New York Times
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