Sound reasonable? It might until you apply any scrutiny to each of these ideas.
Take speed tracking. The easiest way to stop drivers using their phone would be to cut out all communications or functionality once a phone hits a certain speed. But this would render phones useless to passengers and transport users, as well as drivers.
Phone companies could introduce a screen that would allow passengers to use a phone but discourage drivers - such as Pokémon Go's driving warning - but this is hardly going to stop anyone set on using their mobile at the wheel, and the extra step to unlocking it could distract drivers for longer. This is not to mention how Location Services are easily turned off.
The less radical choice, an optional safe driving mode, might seem more practical, but it already exists: Manufacturers like Samsung have modes that can read out texts and messages and allow voice responses; and they can even be automatically activated at a certain speed. Phones also have do not disturb modes that stop alerts coming through.
The problem isn't that the technology isn't there, it's that people ignore it: anyone who wants to check Facebook or text while on the move is going to find a way to do so. Any technical solution will cross one of two lines: either being so irritating as to be unfeasible, or easy enough to ignore so that it is useless.
When technology has created a problem, as in this case, it's tempting to think there should be a technical fix, but that doesn't mean there is. Using a mobile behind the wheel is dangerous and irresponsible behaviour, and there's no technology that can make up for that.
That said, there is a parallel here: music piracy. Of course, illegal downloads didn't kill anyone, but bear with me. For years, the tech industry looked for technical solutions to piracy: digital rights management or taking down websites. It failed spectacularly, often with the added drag of irritating perfectly legal consumers.
In the end, piracy has declined not because of attempts to block it, but because of the rise of legal streaming services, which offer a wealth of on-demand content that is more convenient to access than a dodgy website.
The perfect equivalent when it comes to phones in cars would be self-driving technology, which will let people text to their heart's content. It will be many years until that happens, so in the meantime car dashboards, such as those from Apple and Google, that safely replicate many of the functions of a smartphone are likely to be more effective than trying to disable a phone on the move.
