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Why on Earth would you remain on the phone once you realized you were getting pulled over? You simply hang up the call with a voice command or a press of a button on the steering wheel. By the time the officer walks up to your car, you are no longer on the phone.

The reality is that nearly every person in the country now carries and uses a mobile phone. Banning talking on a handheld phone makes sense and is enforceable. Banning talking on a hands free phone is totally unenforceable and will do nothing to improve driver or pedestrian safety.

By the way, if want to talk about safety, what do the safety experts say about pulling over on a highway? They say it should only be done in an emergency, certainly not simply to make a phone call. What if the road you are on doesn't have a full shoulder (like the GW Parkway as a local example)? That is why the police use all sorts of colored warning lights when they pull over and why states are now cracking down on trucks that park for the night on the sides of the road. A car hitting a stopped car in the rear at 70mph will almost always be a fatal accident for at least one of the drivers.

Look, there is no way to make driving 100% safe. Again, driving at night or in bright sunlight is a cause of many accidents, but we aren't mandating driving only in certain hours. Real world risk reduction strategies are worth talking about. Pie in the sky ideas like banning what is essentially an invisible device are not.

by dcdriver on Jul 5, 2012 5:41 pm • link • report