National cell phone ban

[Baba Ganoush]

I think enforcement is the biggest concern of this legislation. I think the best we can hope for is more accountability and assessment of negligence in the event of an accident. It's a real sticky situation, no doubt, and it will take much more diligence on the actions of individuals and automakers to find a solution to a growing problem that the majority of people can live with.

[Broncojohnny]

Meanwhile one of the kids in my office got stopped this week for eating a donut in a school zone. The Highland Park cop "thought he was on his cell phone".

[Shorty]

Meanwhile one of the kids in my office got stopped this week for eating a donut in a school zone. The Highland Park cop "thought he was on his cell phone".

Did they confiscate the donut just to be safe?

[SS Junk]

Land of the free? Whoever told you that is your enemy. Congrats. You give up more freedoms to make you feel all warm and fuzzy. That's how we got the Patriot Act, the National Defense Authorization Act, etc.

Regardless if you think so or not, a drivers license is a privilege to have therefore anything done while exercising that privilege is not a right. Oh, and:

Meanwhile, traffic fatalities fall to their lowest levels since 1949.

http://wheels.blogs.nytimes.com/2011...el-since-1949/

And that would have everything to do with how courteous and skilled drivers are becoming instead of safety regulations placed on vehicles these days?

[Strychnine]

but if they do, they're going to have to ban car stereos, navigation units, driver is going to have to be in sealed cockpit away from other passengers so that they can't converse with each other, babies have to ride in the trunk, etc... police officers won't be allowed radios, phones, or laptops...

fucking ridiculous

FWIW, there are "experts" who do agree.


Study: Texting bans don't reduce crashes; effects are slight crash increases

Texting-While-Driving Bans Increase Crashes, Study Says; Rumpus Erupts

States enact laws against texting while driving, hoping to reduce accidents. In the time after those laws go into effect, the number of accidents in those states doesn’t decline. So are the laws a bad idea?

The question arises from a report out this week by the Highway Loss Data Institute (HLDI), a division of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS). The study looked at accident rates in Minnesota, California, Washington, and Louisiana before and after those states enacted their texting-while-driving bans. The authors found no reduction in the number of crashes, and actually saw increases in three states. (They also compared those states to others in their regions without bans to ensure that the numbers they’d found weren’t part of a larger trend.)

So what gives? For the IIHS, this is proof that texting laws aren’t doing any good, and might even be doing harm.

It might be that texting laws are making matters worse, causing people to look down into their laps to read messages rather than bringing their devices to eye level where they’re more easily spotted by law enforcement. Given this, enforcement is tricky, too, given that the best hint that someone is texting is that they’re looking at their lap. [Wall Street Journal]

That assertion got Ray LaHood, the Secretary of Transportation, hopping mad. He disputes the IIHS findings by saying that the government has found the opposite.

In April of this year, DOT launched pilot enforcement campaigns in Hartford, Conn., and Syracuse, N.Y., to test whether increased law enforcement efforts combined with public service announcements could get distracted drivers to put down their cell phones behind the wheel. The campaign, called “Phone in One Hand, Ticket in the Other,” found that police enforcement can drastically reduce distracted driving behavior.

“Tough laws are the first step and enforcement must be next,” said DOT’s LaHood in a statement released Tuesday. “We know that anti-distracted driving laws can be enforced effectively because two DOT pilot enforcement programs in Hartford and Syracuse prove it. In the last six months alone, hand-held cell phone use has dropped 56 percent in Hartford and 38 percent in Syracuse, and texting while driving has declined 68 percent in Hartford and 42 percent in Syracuse.” [MSNBC]

The problem is that we’re talking about apples and oranges. The Department of Transportation’s experiment is a small case study of how effective texting laws could be when combined with advertising and enforcement. That IIHS study, on the other hand, is a broad look across the country trying to figure out how things truly panned out when laws went into effect.

So the two are not mutually exclusive. It’s not hard to imagine a small pilot program, in which officers make finding distracted drivers one of their top priorities, achieving those reductions in texting while driving. Neither is it hard to imagine that across the country, where officers have many other simultaneous priorities and deal with the enforcement problems noted above, the effect would be mixed or negligible.

Lon Anderson, mid-Atlantic spokesman for AAA, said the institute findings indicated the failure of state legislatures to provide law enforcement with effective laws. “We have, unfortunately, set the police up for failure,” he said. “Would good laws strictly enforced do the job? In our opinion, yes.” [Washington Post]

Both insurers and government transportation gurus want to see fewer accidents, but this scuffle is a telling divergence of opinions about how to get those crash numbers down. Secretary LaHood has made anti-texting laws one of his top priorities: He strongly believes that drivers need to get their eyes off the phone and on the road, and thinks highway patrol officers should have the authority to ticket people who don’t get the message. But for spokespeople of the IIHS, phones are just a symptom, not the disease.

IIHS President Adrian Lund says state lawmakers are “focusing on a single manifestation of distracted driving and banning it. This ignores the endless sources of distraction and relies on banning one source or another to solve the whole problem.” [NPR]

Here’s another sound bite, from HLDI vice president Kim Hazelbaker:

"We’d like to see more focus by the government on things that work,” he said, such as technologies like lane departure and blind spot warning systems, and autonomous braking, rather than “continuing to pass laws that don’t make a difference.” [MSNBC]

For the insurance industry, then, it’s not about the phone. We’re the problem: we distracted humans and our pets loose in the car, our eating behind the wheel, our family spats that happen when we should be paying attention to the road. Since humans aren’t robots and you can’t legislate against “distraction,” IIHS would like for cars to either do more of the driving for us or include more automatic reminders to pay attention to what we’re doing.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2010/09/30/texting-while-driving-bans-increase-crashes-study-says-rumpus-erupts/

[Baba Ganoush]

Lol! He was just wondering if the kid had any to spare.

[Baba Ganoush]

Regardless if you think so or not, a drivers license is a privilege to have therefore anything done while exercising that privilege is not a right.

And that would have everything to do with how courteous and skilled drivers are becoming instead of safety regulations placed on vehicles these days?

Truth, and definately the vehicles' safety, not the drivers'.

[exlude]

Regardless if you think so or not, a drivers license is a privilege to have therefore anything done while exercising that privilege is not a right.

Court cases have come down defining driving as both a right and a privilege.

[stevo]

I think prolonged driving should be outlawed next, since we all know it causes boredom, and boredom causes inattention which is another distraction. Lets limit all trips to 30 minutes, just to be safe. If you have to commute farther, or drive a truck for a living, you are fucked in the name of safety for the lowest common denominator.

Stevo

[mikec]

FWIW, there are "experts" who do agree...

And we could no doubt find "experts" to agree with the other side of the coin...

[SS Junk]

Court cases have come down defining driving as both a right and a privilege.

... it may feel like a right until license suspension and/or insurance is astronomically expensive due to a bad driving record...

[exlude]

... it may feel like a right until license suspension and/or insurance is astronomically expensive due to a bad driving record...

I used to be a huge proponent that it was a privilege until I learned that the courts didn't always agree with me. The biggest reason I see legislation/courts moving to treating it as a privilege is because as so, it's much easier to regulate.

The fact that the government cannot simply take away your license without due process does point to the idea that it is a right. Insurance expense is a whole 'nother factor, but I don't think the debate hinges around it.

[SS Junk]

It doesn't. It's just an example as to one of several things required to operate a motor vehicle on public roads. Same with firearms. We have a right to own them, however at least in some states (not sure about TX anymore) we cannot conceal carry them unless we have a license. Once the CHL law is abolished only then will it be a right.

[Broncojohnny]

The right to regulate driving or guns or anything else is the privilege, it is granted to the government by the people. Once the people have had enough of the bullshit, they'll change that.

[Forever_frost]

Were this done on a state level, I'd have no problem. The federal government simply has no power over this issue. And yes, I belong to the VFW, DAV, MOH and so forth.