by Salahuddin Khan

Created on: December 02, 2008   Last Updated: December 04, 2008

Not at all!

OK, I know there are those statistics relating the increase in accident rates from cell phone use, and there are those which focus on the division of attention, even in hands-free mode, but a legislated ban is not the answer. There are many things I COULD do in a car which are not illegal and which are probably widely occurring among drivers even now, which are also outright dangerous. Screaming at the kids who have entered into a distracting argument sitting in the back seat is sure to diminish your available attention to the road. It isn't specifically banned. Neither is adjusting the radio, nor selecting the seat heating button nor fine-tuning the rear-view mirror angle, nor even selecting the climate control temperature adjustment and, given my most recent profession with digital map-maker NAVTEQ, neither, thankfully, is using the navigation touch-screen (though trying to enter a destination on a touch screen while driving, might be a reasonable ban).

I recall a building contractor friend in Massachusetts, whom I had engaged in a remodeling project, was severely injured and put in the hospital for weeks when a lady driving a car in the opposite direction was adjusting her radio and came into a head-on collision with him. This is not a reason to ban listening to or re-tuning the radio while driving. It is, however, a reason to prosecute someone for reckless or dangerous driving. There are literally so many things that have the potential to allow distraction that an absolute ban on their use while driving is impractical.

The answer is not going to be found in making a crime out of using the cell phone which, in any case, is extraordinarily hard to police, especially for hands-free users. Instead, the crime arises from being distracted enough to be dangerous. The well-meaning preventive posture of a cell phone ban seems appealing versus an "after-the-fact" prosection of a distracted driver, but in a reasonably free society, there are plenty of circumstances where we deem it practical only to prosecute the crime after the fact versus legislating preventive measures, especially when the criminalization focus is on the use of the technology rather than the manner of the use. If you want the "reductio ad absurdum" of this line of reasoning, cars kill people all the time, let's ban their use because they're "dangerous". That would then capture every conceivable distraction, not just from cell phones, and deem the car to be the culprit instead of the person

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