Quote:
Originally Posted by bhunter
I'm not for texting and driving or any other distraction including eating. I do assert that the potential danger of cell phone use is less than what the NTSB and LEOs claim. The problem with the NTSB position is that it argues that even talking on a cell phone is dangerous and thus poses a substantial risk to the public. How many accidents has coffee drinking caused? I have no problem with using hands free devices. Newer higher end vehicles are coming with such devices pre-installed and they have a very low profile. LEOs will not be able to distinguish who is and who is not using a cell phone while driving. Surely, you don't feel that only the wealthy ought be able to make phone calls while driving?
It appears that behind the NTSB position is someone from the MADD group. The data appears to be difficult to collect and I suspect that a lot of accidents get unfairly blamed on cell phones, rather than drivers that are idiots regardless of if or if not they happen to have a cell phone on board.
Given the number of miles traveled and the number of people on SoCal roads, I'm surprised there are not more accidents. When it rains here in San Diego, like it did two days ago, we had around 300-400 accidents. I wonder how many cell phone calls were made and what percentage of those calls caused accidents?
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I think we have some common ground here. I agree that a total ban is unreasonable. I do believe that there should be a requirement for hands free use. All phones come with some sort of hands free device, and most can be programmed to make calls based on name recognition. (In other words, you don't have to be rich, but you do need some tech savvy) It is the fiddling with the phone that is the most dangerous behavior.
The hands-free requirement would essentially take care of the texting issue. As far as I know, there is no way to do hands free texting. Even if a phone came equipped with voice recognition software sophisticated enough to write text (as opposed to dialing a pre-saved number), it would also have to translate text into audio to satisfy the hands-free requirement.
Regards,
D-Ray