Just how would they enforce a “no texting” law?

The weak link in a car is the nut holding the wheel and that the nut has a screw loose makes it worse!

I guess the cops would actually have to pay attention to what people are doing on the roads. Wow. What a concept.

[...] speaks up about a possible law prohibiting texting while driving. Down with micro-management. Up with common [...]

This maybe isn’t so clear-cut as it might seem. One can glance at a screen w/o being distracted (if you disagree, work on a ban on the ever-more-common GPS units first!). You can key in a word or part of a word very quickly with one hand without ever really looking at the phone.

Now even if we suppose everyone has gone bluetooth in their cars (and most haven’t), how long are they paying attention to to their conversational partner (even longer for handhel users, holding it to their head waiting for it to connect)? Chances are it’s more than a minute (look at your avg call time in your mobile), and studies have shown the human brain is completely distracted by that conversation– more dangerous than drunk driving.

Versus the 15-20 seconds it took for me to glance at the screen to see what I received, and reply with a “there in 5″. Hmmm.

So common sense would say the priority should be to ban yakking on cell phones while driving… notice that DC banned this practice, but not TXTing.

More broadly I think you’ll get a very different attitude towards TXTing while driving and yakking on the phone while driving depending on whether your audience is over 35 or under 30 (grey area in the middle). The younger part of that group grew up in the tech era and considers TXTing more the norm than talking on phones. I think a Washington Post writer put it best int his article:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/14/AR2007091401972.html

When she wrote:
“According to Barb Iverson, a professor of new
media at Columbia College Chicago, the latest technology revolution means that there are now two kinds of people in the world: “digital immigrants” and “digital natives.” The digital immigrants came of age before the technology revolution and they struggle to adapt to the new language, rituals and protocol. The digital natives instinctively emote through their thumbs and don’t consider a relationship “official” until their Facebook or MySpace profile says it is.

Then there are the Gen-Xers like me who are somewhere in between.”

When I’m driving, usually the problem drivers, the ones that make me nervous, are the older ones talking on their cell phones, or coming back in a bad mood from work in their over-powered “I crush you now!” SUVs, you know, the ones who use that engine power to close up the space where you obviously had signalled you’d like to merge in…

How about banning jerkishness on the road? or requiring real road driving tests with periodic retesting? A good driver who’s distracted is a lot less dangerous than a bad driver who is a hazard in any condition!

Sometimes obvious is wrong, folks.

Omar: At 60mph, in 15 seconds, you travel 1/4 mile. 20 seconds is 1/3 mile. In the 15-20 seconds you took your eyes off the road, you could conceivably blow throw an entire highway interchange without seeing someone fail to yield or try a “lane dive.”

At 30mph, that’s looking down for 15 seconds is more than long enough to kill a child who’s darted out from behind a parked car in a residential neighborhood.

As I have said repeatedly (and in this post as well), I think there’s a bigger, more pervasive problem. I have watched people hurtle down the highway at 75mph reading a book!

As far as a GPS is concerned, I’d rather have someone glancing at or listening to one of those. The alternative is some fool driving while trying to find themselves on a paper map unfolded all over the dashboard.