Driver Using Two Cell Phones Gets Year-Long Driving Ban 478
coondoggie writes "This guy is the poster-child for why cell phone use in cars should be banned in more places. According to press out of the United Kingdom, a man who was driving at 70MPH while texting on one phone and talking on another has been banned from driving for a year. Initial reports said that the driver, David Secker, was apparently using his knees to steer the car, an accusation he tried to refute in court."
Re:And the sad part is... (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, I used to agree with you. But since California started doing hands-free only, the number of idiots swerving around in their lane has decreased tremendously. And the only people that still do it are the ones that are still breaking the law.
Nice try, Limey (Score:5, Interesting)
Back in the late eighties, before all these fancy gadgets came into being, I had (to my eternal amazement) the luck to witness a woman driving 75 mph on 285 west of Atlanta in bumper-to-bumper traffic reading a book. We're talking five lanes full of writhing idiots jockeying for position in a rush-hour race to get there first. That road was (and definitely still is) a horror story in progress. It was only a couple months before that I saw a car wrecked on the median, propped sideways on the concrete median divider, its engine block a good 150 feet down the road. Seriously, they just flat could not stop rush hour traffic to clean up the car, and I suppose an ambulance had taken the corpse(s) away previously. They'd have to wait for a break in the traffic at about 2 AM to get the car and its engine out of there.
A book, for you youngins, is a stack of paper bound together with static text on each piece; when reading one, you are confronted with one to two thousand words at a time, and the words are all longhand. So, for the guy dealing with a couple hundred or so characters of text messages while yakking on the phone -- heh.
There truly is nothing new under the sun.
Re:And the sad part is... (Score:4, Interesting)
You'd think wrong. The studies into this show repeatedly that a conversation with someone there actually impairs you far less than a conversation on the phone. There are a couple of explanations for this thrown around...
1) The person who's there can see what's going on on the road and time the conversation to not distract significantly... You can also more easily tell them to shut the fuck up if you're hitting difficult stuff.
2) Your brain actually works harder in the weird situation where it's got to talk to someone who's not there – humans haven't really evolved to do it well.