State Bans Texting While Driving 329
netbuzz writes "The state of Washington yesterday became the first in the nation to ban text-messaging while driving. The law could use sharper teeth, but it's a natural and necessary progression of the movement to clamp down on those who find the need to constantly communicate more important than the safety of their fellow travelers."
Its actually disturbing (Score:4, Interesting)
I am on BOTH sides of the issue (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Whatever happened to common sense? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Great, Another Backwards-looking law (Score:2, Interesting)
I can drive safely while texting (Score:5, Interesting)
Zero.
It comes down to prioritization and common sense. I didn't say I read *efficiently* while driving -- I certainly don't operate anywhere nearly as quickly on my reading/writing/etc. while driving as I do when I'm not engaged in driving. I check the road ahead of me and to the sides once every second or two, then glance down at my text to be read, get a line or sentence, then look up again at traffic while I process that line/sentence. I don't do these things at all in severely-inclement weather: snow, ice, heavy rain, high winds. Nor do I do them in situations where traffic conditions are changing rapidly: at high speed with lots of merging traffic, in crowded downtown streets with lots of pedestrians, along twisty mountain roads, etc.. I do it primarily in bumper-to-bumper, stop-and-go, sub-10 mi/hour traffic where, if an accident were to occur, it almost certainly would not be serious.
The simple fact is that we are not all created equal and we do not all evolve equally-fast or in the same directions. Some people are competent to perform actions which are dangerous if managed poorly, while others are not. I'm not competent to do something as dangerous as landing an airplane -- but plenty of trained pilots are; the mentally insane (as the VA Tech shootings exemplified) are not competent to use firearms safely, and nor are (IMO) people convicted of any violent crimes - but most other people are, or would be with sufficient training & education.
A better approach, rather than banning an activity outright, would be to test an individual's competence to perform the activity. An outright ban is too broad and inspecific [econlib.org]; it has all the surgical precision of the Bush administration's "it's for national security" argument used to justify its actions...
Re:Whatever happened to common sense? (Score:3, Interesting)
Personally it's not that big of a deal for me since I usually smoke outside anyway, but what really pisses me off are the do-gooders (see some of the other posts in this thread) who don't believe that a bar owner should have the right to make a bar smoking or non. Seattle had quite a few non-smoking bars before the new law and yeah, they were pretty busy. But the inescapable truth of the whole matter is that even though a fairly small percentage of Seattlelites smoke, that amount increases drastically among people who drink. Most of the bars I go to are somewhere between 50-75% smokers. Why in the world can't they have an environment to do what they want to do?
States like Idaho actually have it right as far as I am concerned. Bars with food=no smoking. Taverns and pubs, up to the owner. I think that is perfect.
But... Seattle is so full of PC numbnuts that will never happen. Oh, well.
Re:Whatever happened to common sense? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Whatever happened to common sense? (Score:3, Interesting)
Needless to say, I had to make a U-turn to drive by again just to be sure I was seeing what I was actualy seeing. Sadly, he was still there, stopped about 40 feet back from the stoplight, still playing.