[bhunter]

Originally Posted by d-ray657

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

Milbank said this in WaPo:

Incredibly, the NTSB has no data to support its radical proposal – only some laboratory-based studies, and those are inconclusive. The “Brain Research” study speculates that cellphone conversations are more distracting that “listening to a radio, eating and drinking, monitoring children or pets, or even conversing with a passenger,” but the authors admit: “It is not known exactly how much each of these distractions affects driving.”

The other study concludes that, while cellphone conversations can be more dangerous than those with a passenger, a passenger who is “constantly commenting and directing attention in an overcontrolling fashion has a potentially negative impact on performance.”

So, to be evenhanded, the NTSB should also propose a ban on back-seat driving, a ban on transporting children, a ban on radios and cup holders, and a ban on GPS devices, so that we can go back to those safer times when we blocked the windshield with gas-station maps. The agency should also ban cellphone use by pedestrians, to keep them from wandering into intersections.

I concur with his position. The absurdity of the NTSB proposal ought get all involved fired. It is almost like they couldn't decide what to do, thus they went for "Big Gulp" nanny approach, rather than a more nuanced proposal. The only thing that Hersman and the board did was show their idiocy. Come to think of it, is the NTSB, formed in 1967, even needed or could other agencies fulfill their role?