Driving and Cell Phones

And on the subject of driving while carrying on cell phone conversations, let me just say this. If you cannot do two things at once, then don't. Be a responsible adult and recognize your limitations. Also, recognize the destructive capacity of a high-speed motor vehicle being operated by someone not payng attention to the road ahead.

I am not in favor of blanket laws that treat everyone like the most selfish and irresponsible among us. It simply does not make sense. But the loopholes in those laws make even less sense. Take, for instance, the hands-free exception. It is unacceptable to drive while talking on a cell phone but not if you have a Bluetooth hands-free device. Well, NEWSFLASH FOR THE SIMPLE-MINDED: The danger is not driving with only one hand, it is driving while not paying attention to the road.

The Bluetooth device does work its mojo, though. Seeing someone driving with a cell phone held up to his or her ear drives a lot of people into an unaccountable rage. Where all this free-flowing hatred comes from, I don't know. But it is there.

It is not necessary that the driver is poking along, not paying any attention to the trafic flow, or taking forever to pull off the right of way into a parking lot because carrying on a conversation and visually searching for a parking place overwhelms the cognitive abilities of many folks, or sitting at a traffic light that has long since turned green and will all-too-soon turn red again because a cell phone conversation has taken the focus away from the status of the traffic light.

No, just the sight of a driver holding up a cell phone is enough to infuriate other drivers. However, if the driver is doing any of those things while on a Bluetooth device, so that others cannot see that a cell phone conversation is going on, well in that case there is just the standard low-level annoyance at an inattentive driver. Or, depending on the observer, the standard low-level annoyance might be replaced with anger at a woman driver, or an old driver, or a young driver, or an ethnic driver, or any of the other handy prejudicial cubbyholes in which we just love to poke people and then hate on them.

So that handy hands-free device serves to reduce a small measure of the overt fury many drivers direct at others, which in itself might be some justification for using it, which also unfortunately says nothing good about drivers in general, but it does nothing to reduce the actual problem of people driving while not paying attention.

I'm not sure why it is acceptable to drive inattentively with a hands-free Bluetooth headset but not with just a handset. Maybe it is a marketing ploy to sell expensive Bluetooth devices. Maybe it is a class warfare maneuver to allow people with money enough to purchase expensive Bluetooth devices to drive inattentively while giving the police a reason to ticket those with less money who cannot afford a hands-free device. Plus, there is the added benefit of allowing class, sex, or ethnicity motivated anger to be exercised with impunity.

Now you may be saying to yourself that it is not, in fact, acceptable to drive inattentively with a Bluetooth headset, just because I said so. However, it is next to impossible to tell the difference between someone carrying on a cell phone conversation using a Bluetooth headset and someone simply wearing one and, saying, talking to himself. And for those with enough money to afford cars with Bluetooth capability built into the radio/sound system, an observer might be excused for not being able to tell whether the driver is talking to someone or singing along with the radio.

So I recommend abolishing the unfair laws against carrying on cell phone conversations in motor vehicles because it is impossible to fairly and effective enforce them. This is one of my themes: Any law that cannot be (or is not, in instances of selective enforcement) fairly and effectively enforced for everyone should not be enforced against anyone. (I will return to this theme in future blogs.)

I should mention that I get really pissed off when I am driving along behind someone who is paying more attention to a cell phone conversation than driving. But that just does not rise to the level of needing a law. That is a matter of common courtesy (or the lack thereof), and if it were socially unacceptable to do it, and we applied the same sort of peer pressure that we do when someone does something rude or thoughtless in public, then maybe people would do it less. They would never stop, of course, but we will always have rude people. Or people rich enough that rules don't, oddly enough, apply to them. Which, unsurprisingly enough, is another blog.