They didn’t have seat belts either. So simplest explanation is that people were still figuring out what safety features were necessary for a new invention that started gaining traction. Lot of safety regulations that came into play happened after disasters like building codes or work place regulations or food expiration. People learn from tragedy.

I walk a lot. Even in that much lower speed, much lower stakes situation, I can tell you that eating/drinking is generally completely fine but give somebody a phone and they turn into a blind moron with no concept of other people. Even I’m guilty of it, if I’m trying to skip ads on a podcast or something and I absent-mindedly look down at my phone without getting out of the way and stopping first, by the time I look up I’ll have travelled much further than I thought and have been surprised by people popping out of alleyways or crossing roads etc who are now in front of me.

The number of times I’ve seen people physically walk into lampposts, other people, or just slowly sway side to side on the pavement, taking the whole thing up, while they dick around on their phones… People get out of elevators or up stairs and immediately stop and pull out their phones, blocking the exit for everyone else.

You can’t use a phone and do anything else at the same time unfortunately.

1. People died. A lot. Ralph Nader, who is today probably better known for being a former presidential candidate for the Green Party in the US, first got famous with his 1965 book “Unsafe at Any Speed” that brought just how dangerous cars were to the public attention. Which led to a ton of laws that regulated the manufacture and operation of motor vehicles. It was similar to how Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” was with the food industry.

2. Density has increased. It was easier to get away with driving when there were fewer cars on the road, fewer intersections, fewer buildings and other property nearby. Our signs and signals have grown more complicated. I live in a major US city, where there is a main thoroughfare that cuts through the southern suburbs with a 5 lane stroad (2 lanes each way with a central turning lane). There are traffic lights every couple hundred feet to allow interesections with feeder roads. My grandfather still tells the stories about how when he was a teenager, that was a 3-lane DIRT road, where the center was still a turn lane. He could drive for miles before getting to the densest part of the city where there was 1 traffic light.

He also tells the story of how the police radios used to only be one-way, so officers in cars could receive messages from the station but not send anything back. On top of that, their big heavy cruisers were slower and less maneuverable than his motorcycle, so he used to commonly blow by and ignore cops trying to pull him over. It was a completely different world.

States are likely to have laws against “distracted driving” or “reckless driving”. Those likely encompass much of the driving while texting or fiddling with controls. Unless a cop directly saw the action this are usually charges levied after an accident happens and do nothing to prevent it. Once enough crashes are attributed to a narrower set of actions, public opinion can be swayed to support action against that narrower set. Now with a specific “no texting while driving” law, cops can pull you over simply for holding a phone. They don’t need to see you do something that would constitute “distracted” or “reckless” driving to ticket you.

Lol my friend, people regularly drank (alcohol) while driving in the 70s and 80s.

People just did not give a fuck.

Better question, why is every moron free to legally text and drive if they glue the phone to the dash first? Those mounts are driving me up a fuckin wall, I literally saw one dead center on a steering wheel hump.

Because for the most part, you can do all those things with only removing your eyes from the road for a few seconds, if at all. You’re still focused mostly on driving.

When using your phone, you’re not paying attention at all to the road, and looking away for far longer. That’s the danger.

Most of the software on smartphones is built from the ground up to grab every bit of user attention it can and this makes phone use more dangerous than eating or fiddling with the radio. So much so that law makers and law enforcers notice and treat phone use differently from other drive-time activities.

In some countries there’s definitely a catch-all law for this. It’s called Driving without due care and attention where I live.

I can imagine that in jurisdictions where the police are more likely to be predatory, retaliatory or have quotas to meet that such a law might be considered too powerful by a judiciary that isn’t quite as corrupt, so that could be why such a thing doesn’t exist. Assuming that it’s true that no such law exists, anyway.

There way have been a law against eating while driving where you were, many areas had them.

But it was probably only enforced if there was an accident.