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 driving it for their manner of driving. Indeed, I'm sure that for some people, the very act of driving is a sufficient division of attention to be dangerous.
If nothing else, legislation ought to strive for consistency and when looking for it, we should consider a wide variety of variables that govern safety, and balance them with economic value. If we didn't we'd still be arranging for friends to be walking in front of the car with a red flag so as not to frighten the horses!
Fundamentally, those over-zealous legislators that have made cell phone use illegal while driving, have focused on the wrong thing. A much more level-headed approach is to address the root cause, which is the distraction itself. That begins by understanding that the distraction is caused on the one hand by handling the phone if not hands-free, and much more importantly on the other hand, the emotional state of the conversation passing through it.
For the handling part, we can easily integrate cell phones into the overall configuration of the vehicle and this needn't require built-in cell phones. Hands-free systems with voice recognition would make the handling part of the distraction all but a non-issue, and for hands-free capability, I wouldn't hesitate to require it legally. It is generally BOTH more appealing and safer.
To act preventively for the distraction part, beyond criminalizing driving while distracted, we have to look to technological innovation. If only we could figure out ways of detecting, eliminating or mitigating distraction, and (safely!) disabling the vehicle or alerting the driver when such distraction is detected, we would do ourselves a much greater service than singling out only one problematic device for banning. Moreover, if done properly, such systems promise to affect those equally dangerous conditions where no accessory or device is involved.
Now, I wouldn't be going down this track if I didn't have a modicum of optimism about what's under development. This is an area that, at least before the financial meltdown, was consuming millions of automobile company development dollars. Some progress has been made in detecting, for example, when drivers are losing alertness by getting drowsy. We have also seen technologies which would immobilize the vehicle if drivers evidence too much alcohol on their breath. Technology does exist which could integrate the numerous factors which a person exhibits when distracted in a phone call, into a verdict about the level of attention the vehicle is getting from its driver. It's not around the corner but the fundamentals are there. We can monitor eyes, we can monitor voice patterns (which is what's needed in any case for voice recognition systems already in use), we could potentially also take an infra-red signature of the face and based on the level of blood volume, who knows, probably even determine the level of ire or worry or some other such emotion that the driver might be suffering from.
A completely different approach is to judge the erratic or otherwise movement of the car, the gas and brake pedals, and the steering wheel along with having a mirror that might make "eye-contact" with the driver to know whenever he or she actually looks at it. We would (and could) probably need to factor outside traffic and weather conditions in drawing any "distraction alert" conclusions.
Ultimately however, the automobile autopilot will be with us. Driverless test vehicles have been driven up and down highways in Europe, Japan and North America for hundreds of miles, avoiding other vehicles, stray dogs and loose soccer balls along the way. This promises to eliminate driving as a chore and leave it to the "driver" as to whether they want to be involved or not, which, by the way is just about exactly what goes on in the pilot seat of most modern light aircraft. Even small single-engined four seaters.
Meanwhile, we might benefit from a few tweaks to the legal system and driver training protocols, such as requiring highway codes to make stipulations about driving while distracted, and driving tests examining for good judgment in attention demanding situations (like the airplane pilots have to show). These ought to deliver us a safer generation of drivers.
It may seem that I sound as if the panacea is in the technology, but it's easy to forget what a lot of progress has been made in making vehicles much safer in both visible and not so visible ways. It should be obvious that I'm an unapologetic techno-geek but, hey, we're the ones that had the vision to come up with anti-lock brakes, stability control, airbags, adaptive cruise control, crumple zones, and a host of other innovations that let modern cars resemble those of twenty years ago only superficially.
Let's see where the next twenty years take us and until then, lay off my cell phone!