With a cell phone, YOU can unilaterally end all conversation ANY time you feel it necessary; with a passenger, you’re effectively at their mercy.
You can also choose to accept and/or initiate calls during the lowest anticipated workload environment.
As for being rude, any sensible person will understand why you had to prioritize your driving ahead of your conversation: those few who still object have revealed valuable info about thier suitability as friends.
Frankly, if YOU wreck because you choose not to discontinue the discussion of “hair styles”…that’s on YOU.
Frankly, during the frequent nighttime trips between Pittsburgh and State College I had as a returning student, not only was I happy to talk during the interstate portion of that trip, I suspect it probably was a safety boon, ensuring that I didn’t ever drift off to sleep!
For sure hand held should be banned but what is the real differenced between talking to someone in the car and a hands-free conversation? PERHAPS your in car companion will be paying attention to
the road-but no promises there.
There will always be exceptions for emergency personnel so that is a paper tiger
So I’m following this car that is varying speed and using a lane and a half. Sure enough, the driver is on the phone. We come to an intersection, the light is green, the car stops. I’m curious. I don’t beep the horn. The light turns red and away she goes.
As a motorcyclist, cell phone users have scared me one to many times. As an X-ray Tech I have seen first hand what horrors that have come from DUI and Driving on the Cell Phone. Get them out of the car!
It looks like I might be in the minority, but I disagree with banning cell phone usage while driving. I think certain people should be banned from using their cell phone while driving.
Seriously, though. I really don’t see the difference between using your cell phone, and screaming at your kids, eating, fussing with the radio, etc.
“It doesn’t matter to me what the distraction is, they are all bad.”
As an experiment, try driving a straight interstate, during a very low-traffic time, without ANY distractions: no conversations, no phone conversations, no radio, no eating or drinking, etc. I’ve found this to be very hard to do for an extended period of time.
Considering that effects such as “highway hypnosis” generally happen on the LEAST challenging stretches of roads, isn’t it likely that there is an OPTIMUM level of brain activity associated with safest driving, and deviations away from this (in both directions) tend to reduce safety?
I think this discussion wildly oversimplifies the question. Driving consists of long periods of boredom punctuated by moments of shear terror; all sorts of things can slow the driver’s response time in those critical moments. I’ve never heard of a study that showed that a 35-year-old with a cell phone has a worse reaction time than a 75-year-old without one. I’ve never seen a study that said that a hands-free cell phone is more distracting than two kids having a fight in the back seat. One of the scariest drives of my life was with a mother who was maneuvering a car at 65 miles an hour while doling out food to three excited, hungry kids in the back seat. Unlike a drunk driver or an elderly driver, a driver on a cell phone can get back to ‘normal’ in one second if necessary. Cell phones are hugely useful; they can save your life, or get you un-lost, or keep you awake on a boring night-time drive. Plus, a cell phone ban would be utterly unenforcable, far worse in that respect than seatbelt laws. This whole issue strikes me as a fad, based on wild extrapolation from some very limited scientific results.
I agree with your curiosity about the “study”. MADD has been fulminating since the early 80s and got the legal drinking age raised to 21 nationally using trumped up statistics. They show a decline in “alcohol-related” deaths among drivers in the 16-20 year old cohort since the law went into effect in 1984. The term “alcohol related” is guessed at from the type of accident, and more importantly it includes 16 and 17 year olds who have never been able to drink legally in the U.S., and most of all there are no comparisons of the 18-20 group with the 21 year old group. One would THINK that there’d be some kind of spike in deaths overall as the 21-year olds can finally obtain Demon Rum without fear of prosecution, but instead deaths continue to decline as drivers get older.
If I sound like a statistician, you have good ears. And I’m a tee-totaller to boot, so I have no axe to grind, and I drive with nothing on but my clothing and my cell-phone (hands free and voice-activated dialing). Not the radio.
I believe it’s an issue of State’s rights, just like all the other traffic laws in this nation. States or municipalities need to make this decision. It’s way too much for our congress to be woking on right now. Maybe they should concentrate on health care or fixing our slumped economy.
While we’re at it, let’s not forget the folks poking and prodding at their GPS systems who are also risking our lives. What can possibly be legislated that will help people understand that several tons of metal hurtling at speed require all of their attention?
No Ban!!! I do all sorts of distractive things while driving and never have a wreck or run over things or people. Maybe there is something about YOU that causes YOUR problems with other drivers.
It’s good for their business to make exemptions to this sort of law. Let’s help out the medical profession by not enforcing speed limits too - oh sorry, we already do that!
We kill 41,000 people per year with automobiles in this country. What could possibly be more important than reducing that number by making people pay attention to what they are doing when they are supposed to be in control of thousands of pounds of steel moving at high speed.
It would seem that people in general are in favor of banning cell phone use in motor vehicles while driving period. I would like to point out some flaws in this extreme view. First and formost I see that law enforcement agents spend a lot of time on cell phones while driving. This seens to have supplanted the old 2-way radio as the prefered means of communication. Would this ban extend to them as well, or is it ment for just us civies. Second, how about those of us who rely on a radio dispatcher. How is talking on a 2-way radio different than talking on a cell phone. I can tell you from experience that it is infact more difficult. Third, whats next? No talking to any passengers while driving? No listining to the radio? It’s about time that people realize that driving is risky period. The only ways that it can be made truly safe are to either not drive at all, or invent smart cars that can drive themselves and take individual drivers making individual decissions out of the equation.
The mobile phone is a necessary evil for many. For instance, my wife is bedridden, and needs to contact me when I am out. In the car I use hands-free and make no outgoing calls. I answer the phone to tell my wife how long it will take me to get home. Talk time is almost always less than a minute.
Exactly! Those of us who are intelligent enough to not talk on the phone in traffic and who know that the other cars are more important than whatever conversation is going on shouldn’t be punished for the idiots who can’t truly multi-task.
The best we’re going to do, while being practical, is hands-off phone usage. If all usage is banned, the laws will be ignored leading to subjective arrests … the ugliest type. It allows people to be targeted because of their looks and nationality rather than because they are using a phone.
My wife’s car just got hit by a 19yo idiot trying to pull into a parking place next to my wife’s car using only her free hand and single brain cell. I was almost hit by a similar idiot trying to make a blind right turn entrance into a development. I have been driven off the road 4 times by similar idiots. It is scary when it happens to you. I keep a big wrench next to me at all times to bash in the head of cell phone user who finally hits me. I am too old to care about the consequences.