Posted on 12/28/2011 9:51:18 AM PST by smokingfrog
Cellphone talkers and texters, beware. California Highway Patrol officers around Sacramento have special marching orders on Friday and Saturday:
Find you and ticket you.
"If someone is driving distracted, we want officers to issue citations," said CHP spokesman Adrian Quintero.
Also on Friday, plainclothes officers and volunteers with clipboards will be stationed on foot at several major intersections around Sacramento, peering into passing car windows and noting the types of distracted driving they see.
Similar tallies will be taken in the Auburn and Stockton areas. They won't be ticketing. They'll be gathering data to be forwarded to the California Office of Traffic Safety as part of an emerging statewide campaign to understand and combat distracted driving.
Troubled by drivers who continue to talk and text on cellphones despite new laws prohibiting it, safety officials say they hope educational messages and some old-fashioned ticket writing will help change people's driving habits.
(Excerpt) Read more at sacbee.com ...
Will cops be exempt?
Fundraising more like it
Yup just like Congress
Perhaps they’ll ticket the other cops who are typing away on the laptop while driving.
They’re against distracted drivers? Then they should yank all the computers out of the cop cars. Almost every cop I see driving down the street is staring at their computer screen.
You there!
Stop talking AT ALL while driving.
Don’t look at the road signs!
Pull over to change your radio station! Infact, we are going to outlaw your radios too!
No sun glasses!
Eating? WHO said you could do that?
You citizens living really annoy me!
DRIVE! stop sneezing while you drive! STOP IT!
Well I have seen my share of distracted drivers and I am tired of it.
Being both a motorcyclist AND a commercial truck driver I see it from both ends of the spectrum.
The technology needs to adapt again, necessity is the mother of all inventions.
What is the solution I do not know, but we are all in an uncomfortable flux, its dammed if we do and nearly dammed if we don’t. I for one cannot get hyper anxiety if I am removed from a cellphone.
I hate driving behind someone on the phone, particularly in the city. Virtually every one is impaired, or they are an inherently horrible driver.
But there is another culprit out there: the GPS. I fantasize about running my SUV over the top of the moron in front of me who slows to a crawl waiting for the tiny robot to tell him to turn right. GPS is great for longer journeys in sparsely populated areas. In a dense city, GPS is diabolical.
If cops can do either of these things without being a menace, then what says ordinary peasants can't?
Either it is dangerous, or it is not.
You can't have it both ways. Sorry.
If the cop is chat hatting away on the police radio, no real difference. But everyday I see drivers doing dumb and dangerous things, and a majority of the time, when i look, they are yapping on the phone. I see drivers holding the cellphone between their shoulder in the ear, waving their arm around, going 50 in the fast lane, every day on my drive to work. Or not even slowing down as they blow through a stop sign because they are so distracted that they didn’t even see it If they are too lazy to use some sort of hands free device, you deserve the ticket.
So that’s whats going on! I have wondered why the last few months I seem to get behind drivers who start slowing down to a crawl three blocks before their turn and no cell phone evident.
You know of course that patrolmen are not required to wear seatbelts either.
Apparently the laws of physics do not apply to to policemen.
They did appear to choose the time they're doing it to maximize the potential for cocomitant DUI ticketing. I imagine there's big money in those.
There fixed it...
I do not see how passing a law fixes anything.
States that have passed laws outlawing cell phones while driving have had and INCREASE in accidents.
A law like this can only be enforced selectively, which means that equal protection under the law is officially a joke.
We have enough selectively-enforced laws. We don't need any more.
Show me the money!
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