Should mobile device use while driving be illegal?
July 7, 2008 – 12:42 pmI was catching up on my stack of magazines recently and ran across the April issue of Wired, and one of the articles was titled: A State-By-State Look at Where Cell Phones and Driving Don’t Mix.
The article was about the different government regulations that are being put in place for mobile phone use while driving:
Gabbing while crossing state lines can get you busted. By July, six states will ban the use of mobile handsets while driving, two will have explicit no-texting laws, and six will all but forbid drivers younger than 18 from touching their phones. Although research shows that hands-free devices do little to reduce crashes caused by distracted cell users, a Bluetooth headset can at least save you from hefty fines and free up a hand for still-legal munching and manicuring (not yet strictly prohibited).
So here is why I think this is ridiculous.
You can’t tell me that texting is any more dangerous than fooling with an iPod, changing the radio station, changing the temperature, etc. Every day on my way to work, I see plenty of people putting on makeup, searching their glove box, eating or carrying on a myriad of other random tasks.
Is texting while driving or messing around with email on your BlackBerry, iPhone or any other mobile device a bad idea? Yes, of course.
Should it be illegal? I think that’s a different question.
I think smoking in a car, especially with kids in the back, is a really bad idea, but I don’t see any laws on the docket for that.
According to one article, over a million people have been ticketed in New York since they passed a total ban on using hand-held devices in 2001.
Experts estimate that as many as 80 percent of motor vehicle crashes and 65 percent of near crashes have driver inattention as a contributing cause.
I talked to an attorney friend of mine about the subject and he mentioned that several states already have distracted driving laws in place, so I did a bit of research.
AAA put together a Microsoft Word document that outlines which states have Distracted Driving laws.
The problem with distracted driving laws, as I see them, is that they are open to interpretation. I don’t think that a distracted driving ticket would stand up in court, because I think it would be pretty tough for a police officer to prove unless it was video taped.
I did find this commentary about New Hampshire’s laws humorous, but it is a bit dated, with the article from 2005. Updates may have been made since then.
New Hampshire is the only state that doesn’t require adult motorists to wear seat belts, but it does ticket drivers for eating, drinking, talking on a cell phone or fussing with their makeup while behind the wheel.
The state whose motto is “Live Free or Die” passed the nation’s first law against distracted driving in 2001. Since then, every state has looked at ways to keep drivers’ minds on the road, but lawmakers in most states are choosing to focus more narrowly on restricting cell phone use while driving.
I agree with Jonathan Adkins of the Governors Highway Safety Association, “If you’re going to have a law, it should cover all distractions.”
So, in summary, I’m not so much against distracted driving laws, although I think that they would be difficult to uphold, but I’m not in favor of singling out texting and mobile phone use as the only activity to be prohibited.
I’d like to see an updated version of the 2003 study by the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety that listed the top distractions. I listed the chart from the document below. Although I’m sure that mobile use has increased and new items will be added (like watching TV), it still hits home that other distractions are equally as important.
The existing data suggest that cell phones are a factor in a tiny fraction of crashes. A 2003 report by NCSL said that crash data from seven states showed that cell phones were a factor in less than 1 percent of accidents.
What about the other 99%? Did lawmakers miss the boat?
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