Controversial I know, but I feel a little sympathy for Tomasz Kroker, the lorry driver jailed for ten years for causing death by dangerous driving; distracted by his mobile phone, he killed four members of the same family on the A34 by failing to notice that the traffic ahead had stopped.
I don’t mean to say that he was not grievously at fault. First of all, he was using the phone in his hand. This is a doubly dangerous thing to do. Since you cannot brake fully until you have both hands braced on the wheel, the act of unhanding your phone adds around a second to your reaction time; add to this the additional delay caused by divided attention and you are outside the margin of error for driving at speed.
If you ever find yourself in a car without a mobile phone holder, I recommend you pass your phone to a passenger or put it on the back seat out of reach. Better still, lock it in the boot.
But not all the blame lies with Kroker. Because these deaths might have been avoided if mobile phone interface designers had put a little thought into user safety.
Personally I don’t like the use of touchscreens in cars at all. The advantage of physical knobs, stalks, pedals and switches is that you can use them using touch alone, without the need to take your eyes off the road. But the design of the mobile phone interface is particularly unsuited to being used in cars. It is far too fiddly. So it is shameful that interface designers have not applied more thought to this question.
When you are driving, there are only a few of your phone’s functions you might legitimately need.
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