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To: Stoat

Where do you do most of your driving, if I may ask. My animus toward cell phone use while driving stems from my daily experience in traffic. I have no ability to foresee an accident that might be caused by driver inattention so my dismay is the effect it has on traffic flow. It is not possible for an alert motorist not to observe the disruption—and concomitant hazards—caused by irregular speeds and slow starts typical of the phone impaired driver. Not to mention dangerous maneuvers like sudden lane changes (when they discover they have gone a little too far) and/or the quick u-turns as the remedy. If you live where traffic is lighter than the Los Angeles Westside area, then you’re lucky.


48 posted on 06/30/2008 8:24:01 PM PDT by Misterioso
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To: Misterioso
Where do you do most of your driving, if I may ask. My animus toward cell phone use while driving stems from my daily experience in traffic. I have no ability to foresee an accident that might be caused by driver inattention so my dismay is the effect it has on traffic flow. It is not possible for an alert motorist not to observe the disruption—and concomitant hazards—caused by irregular speeds and slow starts typical of the phone impaired driver. Not to mention dangerous maneuvers like sudden lane changes (when they discover they have gone a little too far) and/or the quick u-turns as the remedy. If you live where traffic is lighter than the Los Angeles Westside area, then you’re lucky.

If a person is driving in the conditions you describe, then I would prefer that an individual's good judgment guide them into not using a cell phone at that time, and for their judgment to be aggressively enforced by the preexisting legal framework, which is extensive..

Again, laws such as this presuppose that

Given that billions of safe mobile cellphone calls are made every day, should all of this end because an extremely small number of people use poor judgment?

Or, should we instead aggressively enforce the multitude of laws already on the books which address the results of such improper judgments, such as but not limited to:

I share your visceral animus toward lousy drivers and inattentive drivers who make the wrong choices...I also see them every day and I would like very much for it all to stop.  I work in prehospital emergency medical services and I see the results of their poor choices every darned day, in the form of broken or dismembered bodies and destroyed lives and families.

I tend to stop short, however, when it comes to using the sledgehammer of The State to deprive ALL people of a freedom that only a few are abusing.  Such laws frequently have a cascade effect of sorts, in that they embolden legislators to make similar laws....and soon we look back and wonder where all of our freedoms have gone.

Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got till it's gone?
 

52 posted on 06/30/2008 9:09:18 PM PDT by Stoat (Rice / Coulter 2012: Smart Ladies for a Strong America)
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