[tomder55]

It is a state issue . In NY it may make perfect sense. But I've driven swaths of roads elsewhere where one can drive many miles and not see another car .

Smokers fiddling with lighters and flicking ashes are more of a threat . If that hot cup of coffee I drink spills I am much more distracted . There are more accidents caused by fatigued and tired drivers that nod off . Where does it end ?

[TUT317]

It is a state issue . In NY it may make perfect sense. But I've driven swaths of roads elsewhere where one can drive many miles and not see another car .

Smokers fiddling with lighters and flicking ashes are more of a threat . If that hot cup of coffee I drink spills I am much more distracted . There are more accidents caused by fatigued and tired drivers that nod off . Where does it end ?

Hi Tom,

"Where does it end?" I would say that it ends when it becomes a significant statistic. If drinking coffee and driving were to becomes as statistically dangerous as mobile phone usage then it too would be banned ( in Australia anyway). It may or may not be a distraction , but if it were a distraction then looking at the number of driving coffee drinkers compared to the number of mobile phone users who have accidents; doesn't really rate a mention. Significant statistics require significant solutions.

Tut


Tut

[tomder55]

I disagree because you don't know the relationship. I think that smoking and drinking coffee and driving is imbedded in the culture and the people would do it regardless of the law prohibitting it.

I am all in favor of the restrictions of texting... That takes too much away from the physical mechanics of driving . But fiddling with a cell phone and using devices like a blue tooth is no more a risk than changing stations on the radio or those GPS devices people stick on their windshields .

The problem with the recommendation is that they are taking national stats and applying them where they don't belong. Applying them regionally makes much more sense .

[speechlesstx]

I'm OK with a texting ban, it takes way too much focus off the road. A total cell phone ban? When they ban car stereos, billboards, traffic signs, GPS, CBs, passengers and the cops' radios.

[excon]

I'm ok with a texting ban,

Hello Steve:

I KNEW you was a lib...

excon

[speechlesstx]

Hello Steve:

I KNEW you was a lib...

excon

Nah, I just want idiot drivers off the same roads I'm on.

[speechlesstx]

And by the way, football tonight and Saturday.

[paraclete]

The problem with the recommendation is that they are taking national stats and applying them where they don't belong. Applying them regionally makes much more sense .

So you are saying that people where you come from are immune to the problems observed elsewhere. So how about some facts; like giving us the road accident stats for NY v The rest

Taking a look at it I would say by our standards your accident statistics are appalling and 20% of your national road accidents are the result of distracted drivers. So something must be working over here because it sure isn't the standard of our roads.

[tomder55]

What I said was that in my area local politicians have had these restrictions already because it makes lots of sense given the density of population. I don't have to dig up stats that say there is less traffic in rural areas .
In Kansas I routinely drove 15-20 miles without seeing any other car on the road. Obviously if I'm talking on a cell in those situations all I'm putting at risk is myself and perhaps a stray road side cow.

[paraclete]

Trouble is Tom when you are allowed to do something in one place and not another it is easy to forget

[TUT317]

I disagree because you don't know the relationship. I think that smoking and drinking coffee and driving is imbedded in the culture and the people would do it regardless of the law prohibitting it.

Hi Tom,

We know the relationship and it exists as a correlation between mobile phone usage while driving. In other words it is a significant statistical relationship between two variables.


If scratching the back of your head while driving was made illegal then people would still do it but the important point is that LESS people would do it.


Tut

[TUT317]

I'm ok with a texting ban, it takes way too much focus off the road. A total cell phone ban? When they ban car stereos, billboards, traffic signs, GPS, CBs, passengers and the cops' radios.

Hi Speech,

The answer wold be a bit like the answer I gave Tom.

(a) If there is a significant correlation.

(b) A ban would be practical.


Tut

[tomder55]

Traffic fatalities in 2010 were the lowest in in the US in 62 years.
List of motor vehicle deaths in U.S. by year - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
One would think that the use of cell phones would've caused a spike. This is the NTSA looking for some relevance to keep their budget. If they really want to do something significant they would examine how bs Café standards have caused auto makers to make lighter and less safe autos.
http://www.nationalcenter.org/NPA546CAFEStandards.html

As I recall there is a spike in accidents causing injury and death when it snows . Maybe they should ban driving in bad weather .

You see ;this is the game they play. They know that certain laws like speed limits,drinking age ,and evidently cell phone use ;are the perusal of the states . So they confiscate money in the form of taxes ;and then reward the states that are compliant with their dictates ;and penalize the ones that don't . The states easily succumb to this black mail /bribe because the people are told that "revenue sharing " (ie a return of some of the confiscated tax dollars taken from the people) is dependent on complying with the artificial national standards ,and the people will of course demand that their states comply so they can get some of their money back.

[paraclete]

Traffic fatalities in 2010 were the lowest in in the US in 62 years.
List of motor vehicle deaths in U.S. by year - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
One would think that the use of cell phones would've caused a spike. This is the NTSA looking for some relevence to keep their budget. If they really want to do something significant they would examine how bs CAFE standards have caused auto makers to make lighter and less safe autos.
CAFE Standards Kill: Congress' Regulatory Solution to Foreign Oil Dependence Comes at a Steep Price

As I recall there is a spike in accidents causing injury and death when it snows . Maybe they should ban driving in bad weather .

You see ;this is the game they play. They know that certain laws like speed limits,drinking age ,and evidently cell phone use ;are the perusal of the states . So they confiscate money in the form of taxes ;and then reward the states that are compliant with their dictates ;and penalize the ones that don't . The states easily succumb to this black mail /bribe because the people are told that "revenue sharing " (ie a return of some of the confiscated tax dollars taken from the people) is dependent on complying with the artificial national standards ,and the people will of course demand that their states comply so they can get some of their money back.

Tom please lift you head out of the sand. 20% of american road accident casualties come from distracted driving. Now I don't know whether that is cell use, pouring hot coffee in the drivers lap or general inattention. Many were probably not alive to ask, but someone was around long enough to identify the cause. So why not shoot for another 20% reduction by removing the causes of distracted driving, whether that be beverage, smoking, cells, annoying passengers or whatever. The statistics you quoted are a very selective set of statistics try these
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...ted_death_rate


You think this is a game, a funding game. It seems that they only way sensible laws can be enacted is if someone is given an incentive. I would have thought lower casualities would be incentive enough. I say the right to life supercedes all other rights

[tomder55]

Thankfully the NTSB only has the authority to make recommendations. It is absolutely a funding game because only through that reward/punishment does the Federal Gvt have the power to impose it's will on the states .

I say the states have a better sense of what the local traffic laws should be. In NY such restrictions are in place.. in Moose Breath Montana it probably is not such a concern and it would be a waste of police time to put a lot of effort in enforcement .

[paraclete]

Thankfully the NTSB only has the authority to make recommendations. It is absolutely a funding game because only through that reward/punishment does the Federal Gvt have the power to impose it's will on the states .

I say the states have a better sense of what the local traffic laws should be. In NY such restrictions are in place .. in Moose Breath Montana it probably is not such a concern and it would be a waste of police time to put alot of effort in enforcement .

I don't think it matters where you are, if you are putting others at risk then a certain amout of reeducation is necessary
Poll: Most U.S. drivers distracted - USATODAY.com

[tomder55]

If we ban cars there will be no accidents. Insurance incentives for taking continued drivers education go a long way towards making the roads safer and drivers aware of the dangers. I takes the AAA course every 3 years and get a significant rate reduction .
Not everything in life requires laws.

[TUT317]

if we ban cars there will be no accidents. Insurance incentives for taking continued drivers education go a long way towards making the roads safer and drivers aware of the dangers. I takes the AAA course every 3 years and get a significant rate reduction .
Not everything in life requires laws.

Hi Tom,

Well, you are responsible person when it comes to being part of the driving community. Unfortunately it only requires people who don't exercise responsibility to create carnage.

If you exercise responsibility on the roads then there shouldn't be a problem for you if these responsibilities become codified.

No conflict here? Or is there an ideological conflict?

Tut

[tomder55]

I do not see the constitutional authority for Federal Government directives . As I've pointed out already they use a system of back door funding mechanisms to get their will on issues like speed limits and drinking age etc. You can be assured that if they did they would make such a directive even though it would be a stupid law for much of the geographic territory of the nation.

Now I have done some digging into the specific case that prompted the NTSB to make it's recommendation . It involved a kid texting (already illegal in Missouri where the pileup occurred ) and this little tid bit of detail they failed to emphasis .

First, the Missouri crash was largely caused by more mundane safety issues that the NTSB seems to have deliberately downplayed. For all the discussion of the dangers of texting and driving, the NTSB report contains this rather significant finding: “Had the driver of the following school bus maintained the recommended minimum distance from the lead school bus, she would have been able to avoid the accident."

That’s right: Don’t follow too closely, just like they teach you in driver’s ed. And why did the first school bus rear-end the pickup? According to the NTSB, that was “the result of the bus driver’s inattention to the forward roadway, due to excessive focus on a motorcoach parked on the shoulder of the road."

So, despite the focus on texting as a cause of this particular accident, and on this accident as purported evidence that drivers should be banned from using portable devices, NTSB’s own report shows that the drivers involved in this scary wreck were involved because of driver inattention having nothing to do with cellphones, texting, or any other personal electronic devices. It was just the old-fashioned kind of driver inattention that has caused most accidents since the beginning of the automobile age, and that could have been prevented by a little attention to proper following distance and the road ahead.

Yet the No. 1 recommendation of the NTSB to the states is to "ban the nonemergency use of portable electronic devices (other than those designed to support the driving task) for all drivers." This selective focus suggests an agenda, and certainly those of us who have been paying attention to the various pronouncements coming from the NTSB and other highway-safety advocates have noticed a strain of hostility to cellphones and other devices for quite some time, despite a paucity of evidence suggesting that such devices are especially dangerous. (As the Cato Institute’s Radley Balko notes, while the number of cellphones on the road has skyrocketed in recent decades, traffic deaths and traffic accidents have declined.)

My suspicions here are only supported by the NTSB’s leap from the already-banned texting to something completely different: talking. The Missouri accident had nothing to do with hands-free talking, and it’s not at all clear to me that talking on a hands-free cellphone is any more distracting to drivers than talking to passengers in the car—or having screaming kids in the back seat, something that the NTSB has not, as yet, sought to ban.

Furthermore, it hasn’t been proven that eliminating electronic distractions is a path to safer driving, as the Missouri accident shows. The fact is, drivers function despite all sorts of distractions: car radios, passengers, weather, roadside signs, intentionally distracting highway billboards, erratic behavior from other drivers, and so on. Learning to focus on the task at hand despite all that noise is an important part of learning to drive, and if we’re hiring school-bus drivers who have trouble paying attention to the road and maintaining proper following distances, we’ve got bigger problems than those posed by the proliferation of gadgets.

The NTSB’s emphasis on cellphones to the almost-complete exclusion of these other distractions renders its conclusion suspect and not very useful. Perhaps its members, too, need to learn to avoid distractions.

Why the Proposed Car Cellphone Ban Is Wrong - Popular Mechanics

In fact ;where there have been studies on the effect of such bans we have found there is no drop in highway accidents .

We present evidence from observed accidents in California over a period in which the state implemented a law to ban hand-held cell phone use while driving a motor vehicle. In contrast too much of the previous research in this area, we treat the implementation of the policy as a quasi-natural experiment and draw on empirical data to determine whether mean daily accidents fell after California implemented the ban. To control for unobserved time-varying effects that could be correlated with the policy, we employ three regression discontinuity strategies: narrowing the time window of analysis, using a highly exible global polynomial, and using a local linear regression design. The RD approach has advantages over previous empirical work on this topic, namely that we avoid using cross-sectional panel data that are likely susceptible to signicant unobserved heterogeneity and omitted factors. We find no evidence of a state-wide decrease in accidents as a result of the ban. While our results are specific to California, cell phone bans in other jurisdictions that have similar enforcement and penalty parameters could be expected to have similar effects.
While this non-result may seem surprising to people accustomed to seeing drivers using cell phones doing careless or dangerous things on the highway, drivers were doing careless and dangerous things on highways long before the invention of the cell phone.

http://inside.mines.edu/~dkaffine/CELLACCIDENTS.pdf

So while the nanny state makes y'all feel good ;it really doesn't effect much change. But it does give cops a reason to pull you over and give you a ticket... good for local revenues .

[speechlesstx]

Hi Speech,

The answer wold be a bit like the answer I gave Tom.

(a) If there is a significant correlation.

(b) A ban would be practical.

A thorough section on this in drivers ed would be practical as well. I know there's a correlation but I think we are becoming more aware of what a distraction cell phones can be. Focus on the road no matter what you're doing and things will be fine.

As tom's quote said, it's usually the "old-fashioned kind of driver inattention that has caused most accidents since the beginning of the automobile age."