Texting on the road
The Iowa House followed the lead of 19 other states yesterday in voting to ban the act of cell phone texting while driving. The bill is a good legislative compromise as nobody seems happy with the results. Safety advocates say that it doesn't go far enough-- only limiting the sending of texts, not the reading of texts received, and they argue that the bill was written so weak that the state's federal highway monies may be jeopardized if a nationwide anti-texting measure is adopted by Congress. Others expressed opposition to the bill based on the infringement of individual liberties.Label me opposed for a separate reason. The law is unenforceable, and as a result, does nothing more than arm dirty cops with another outlet for malfeasance. The safety argument is moot. We already have laws in place against reckless driving. There aren't individual statutes against eating, drinking, shaping one's hair, applying makeup, fiddling with the GPS, reading billboards, churning butter, or any of the other myriad of things people can do that have been tested or are presumably unsafe while driving. If you're in a culturally-targeted minority, however, here's now another reason you can be pulled over for virtually no cause while on the road. Let's not pretend that these targeted groups don't exist-- African-Americans, for sure, but also young people. The particular act of texting is most-specific to young people, and the simple fact that the Minority Leader in the House introduced a (defeated) amendment to limit the texting prohibition to drivers 18 and under reveals that the population was considered in segments with this legislation.
The law is a burden for good police, a license for misconduct for the bad, and because it's impossible to enforce, it will create new disrespect and disregard for our laws in general.
posted by CM @ 2:37 PM
5 Comments:
What is your opinion on drunk driving laws? Are they necessary since we already have laws against reckless driving? Do you think it is weird that reckless and wreck less sound the same but have opposite meanings?
Drunk driving laws are obviously valid, but you'll have to explain to me how texting has more in common with drinking and driving than it does with applying makeup, eating, and other activities that are better categorized as distractions than impairments. Also, it's enforceable.
Yes.
I agree with your points and I too fail to see how it can be enforced. What is the difference between dialing someone's phone number (even speed dialing) than typing a text message?
However, I feel that any time a driver has something in their hand it is not only a distraction but also an impairment. Especially when that hand is "glued" to an ear.
Not entirely unenforceable. If you crash into (and perhaps kill) someone, and your cell phone records show that you were involved in a text message exchange at that time, there is hard and legitimate evidence to add the text massaging as an aggravating fault factor. The record of the sent/received/composed text messages would disprove a false excuse, such as "the sun reflected off that sign over there and blinded me." There are more and less egregious distractions. Adding text messaging to the list of most egregious ones would also function as a deterrent to those who at least claim to be law-abiding.
Wouldn't the phone records disprove the false excuses for an accident regardless of whether there's a specific law in place?
I'm all for phone companies keeping such records, and for courts having access to such records-- after first proving cause, of course. If the law, as written, was limited only to helping to determine liability AFTER an accident, that's one thing.
In a victimless situation, however-- meaning no accident-- doesn't fair enforcement of the law still require an officer on the scene of a traffic stop to confiscate the phone, and needlessly so? That's the inevitable intrusion on personal privacy rights I find most disconcerting.
My government is a long way from earning my trust on matters of privacy. Just this week, we learned that the FBI and the Pentagon, under John Ashcroft, were spying on members of Planned Parenthood during the run-up to the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City in 2002.
http://gawker.com/5481361/how-the-fbi-saved-the-mormon-olympics-from-feminist-terrorists
That's a level of security threat that should have been deemed preposterous at best, but was made possible thanks to a post-9/11 environment in which defense of our civil liberties were-- and are still-- lax.
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