General

Adding barriers

It’s nearly impossible to text-and-drive in a manual car. Both hands are needed for gear shifts during accelerations.

We typically try to solve problems by removing barriers. For example, we introduce hands-free texting in cars.

But in addition to the subtraction approach, we can’t overlook the simplicity of making it harder to do bad things.

Sure, iPhones supposedly already take a step in this direction with the addition of the requirement to click saying we “aren’t driving'” before the phone is unlocked, but this minor inconvenience isn’t enough of a deterence.

Physically requiring both hands to operate the vehicle? That’s a different story.

-Brandon