Don’t try this — any of this — at home. (Or in your car.) — Dan

The Problem With Not Dialing and Driving

In 2022, according to the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration, more than 3,000 American lives were claimed by “distracted driving” — that is, “any activity [ . . . ] that takes your attention away from the task of safe driving.” The most typical form of distracted driving is when you’re talking or texting on your phone, paying too much attention to that conversation and not enough to the cars, cyclists, and pedestrians around you. It’s dangerous, and you shouldn’t do it.

But if you see another driver doing this, you still shouldn’t take matters into your own hands. It could get you in trouble. Just ask Jason Humphreys.

Cell phone service, as we’ve all experienced, can be spotty — you may enter a region where there aren’t enough cell phone towers, or maybe the call volume in the area is so high that you can’t get through, or perhaps there’s a weather-related issue. But in almost all of those cases, while the lack of service may be a mystery to us, the consumer, the phone companies have a pretty good idea of what’s not working and why. But for about an 18-month period ending in early 2014, cell phone service on Interstate 4 (a major highway) outside of Tampa, Florida would, seemingly randomly, stop working for a few minutes during the weekday morning and evening commutes. The larger service providers didn’t seem to notice or care, but a smaller one, MetroPCS, investigated — and couldn’t find a reason for the rolling outages.

MetroPCS reported the issue to the Federal Communications Commission, and the FCC sent investigators to the scene. They ultimately found the issue: the aforementioned Jason Humphreys.

As of 2014, texting and driving wasn’t illegal in Florida. (It is illegal today, but the statute that covers distracted driving doesn’t restrict you from picking up the phone to receive a phone call.) Humphreys, who lived in a suburb of Tampa, Florida, often commuted on Interstate 4. He was aware of the dangers of distracted driving and didn’t do it himself, but many of his fellow commuters did. And it bothered him — a lot — so he decided to do something about it: he bought himself a cellphone jammer.

Unfortunately, that’s illegal in the United States — and it’s also pretty easy to detect if you have the right equipment. The FCC was able to figure out what was happening quite quickly and then partnered with local law enforcement to narrow down the source of the signal jamming. It took a few days, but they noticed that a blue Toyota Highlander was not-so-coincidentally always in the dead zone. Ultimately, police pulled Humphreys over, and when they did, the evidence became even more clear, as the Tampa Bay Times reports: “Sheriff's deputies stopped Humphreys and found that their communication with police dispatch was interrupted as they approached his car” — their radios stopped working.

The police found the phone jammer hidden in the seat cover on the passenger side of the car. Humphreys, per Engadget, “told authorities he was ‘fed up with watching cell phone usage while people were driving’” — it’s dangerous, after all — but unfortunately for him, this is one of those cases where two wrongs don’t make a right. The FCC fined him $48,000, but Humphreys avoided jail time. Ironically, had he been sent to prison, he would have gotten what he wanted — no one there uses their phone while driving.

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More About Technology and Driving

Today’s Bonus fact: Early car radios were cumbersome and, as a result, created concerns around distracted driving. As Mental Floss notes, “in 1930, laws were proposed in Massachusetts and St. Louis to ban radios while driving” as a result. Those laws proved unpopular, as the radio was one of the few (if not only) ways to alert drivers to inclement weather or other issues that could imperil driving, and no other similar laws were passed. The same principle still applies, though, to other cumbersome car controls today. For example, in 2020, a German man was fined and had his license suspended for causing a car crash while he was fiddling with the touchscreen windshield wiper controls on his Tesla. As the BBC reported, “The driver was punished under the same rules as using a phone while driving.”

From the Archives: A Ghastly Version of a Common Rideshare Scam: A scammy way for Uber drivers to make a buck without actually having to take on a passenger. Involves zombies.

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And thanks! — Dan