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My state senator wants to ban phone calls while driving. Idiot.
Ted Cruz caves on red flag laws.
Remember, I do this to entertain me, not you.
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April 6th, 2019 at 4:14 pm
of course he did, conservative republicans are just 2-12 years in DC from being dems.
April 6th, 2019 at 7:30 pm
If it was feasible to restrict it just to 911 calls/GPS while moving, I might go for it. Phone users kill and injure lots of people while driving. About 20 years ago they estimated 2-3k motorcycle riders/year.
When I patrolled freeways in the early 00’s, I estimated 40% of drivers were talking/texting/reading on their phones in traffic. Sitting up higher than most cars/lt trucks, I could easily see into them.
One of the first things they wanted me to do after a crash was help them find their phone. Which generally meant they were using it then.
People are really bad at multi-tasking, and the mental effort exerted to use a phone makes anything else secondary. Not a good situation when in control of a vehicle. The lack of attention to their primary job of driving is the problem, and I’ve witnessed it.
April 7th, 2019 at 11:26 am
Will, a lot of these clowns want to make it a crime to have a remote conversation with both hands on the steering wheel and eyes on the road. Not just trying to dial a handheld while driving, or trying to drive with one hand to your ear. That is almost as asinine as saying that pilots shouldn’t be allowed to talk on the radio.
The day that states criminalize LEOs using hands-free comms in patrol cars is the day that they can start thinking about doing the same for regular citizens. Until then, no.
FWIW, many of the people trying to outlaw no-hands comms are also trying to ban eating or drinking anything while driving (aka more deaths from drowsy driving and dehydration/hypoglycemic impairment…and not coincidentally, many of the same people who wish to eliminate private transportation altogether.
April 8th, 2019 at 7:58 am
Distracted driving is already illegal, they should enforce that.
I detest technology that disables itself while moving. Multiple times I’ve been a passenger in a car trying to operate the GPS and it won’t let me because we’re moving. So we’re supposed to pull over to set the GPS because it’s not smart enough to know whether it’s being operated by the driver or someone else.
Ditto for taking the train. Nothing worse than having a app I cannot use on the fucking train because it thinks I’m driving.
April 8th, 2019 at 2:53 pm
“restrict it just to 911 calls/GPS while moving,”
Pay attention.
Which is the actual problem that I am talking about. When people have a conversation, they put a great deal of focus on it. Mental effort. They stop paying attention to what is going on around them. “Hands-free” is not really different. A matter of degree, and not much at that.
For example, I watched a pickup driver, on the phone, hit the center of a full size extension ladder laying across the freeway. He was the lead vehicle, with a sizeable gap ahead of him, so no excuse for not seeing it in time to avoid it. Everyone ahead of him missed it.
I was parked on the shoulder, waiting for a gap to grab it, but I could see he was not going to give me a chance. The surprised look as his truck bounced a foot in the air was funny. He was on auto-pilot, and an obstruction in the roadway was not on his mental programing of things to notice.
This is the problem, compounded by the fact that most drivers are not very good to start with.
You think the cops don’t have problems trying to drive while using radio and computer? Hah! Pilots have problems too. Stimulus overload. We don’t multi-task well at all. An actual two-way conversation is an attention hog. Doens’t matter if they are in the car with you, or remote. Same-same. MAJOR distraction.
You might as well be drunk as far as driving performance goes.
April 8th, 2019 at 4:48 pm
This brings up the question of why you all seem to think that it is your RIGHT to add a measurable increase in danger to all and sundry while driving a vehicle? The vast, vast, vast percentage of ALL calls on the road are NOT important. They are merely a convenience, and the desire to chat while being bored behind the wheel.
I had decades of driving experience before the advent of cell phones (got my first hand-held in ’89), so I never developed the need/desire to simply chat on the road (it was too expensive at that time, for one). Younger people seem to think they are dying if their hand isn’t holding a phone. The problem from my observation is that phone-driving is indistinguishable from drunk-driving. Same bad results.
April 8th, 2019 at 6:13 pm
For some reason it was OK for people to use CB radios while driving in the 1970s when CB was all the rage. It didn’t turn deadly until decades later.
We have strong evidence that there has been a campaign against cell phones well before someone decided that they are deadly if used while driving. Ergo; cell phones will give you brain cancer and make gas pumps explode (and probably make you fat).
Connect the dots. Never take the assertions at face value. Assuming that the highly public campaigns are all lies is the safest bet; they typically are.
Texting while driving? Sure, and as it has been said already; distracted driving, by any means, has already been illegal. Specifying and singling out one cause of distraction, in law, is pure redundancy, which, again, points to ulterior motive.
April 8th, 2019 at 6:26 pm
Teaparty candidates, for the most part, existed for one reason; to co-opt, dissipate, diminish, and destroy the Teaparty.
Don’t knock it; it worked!
I knew Cruz was on the wrong side after hearing his treatise on drug laws, years ago. One may as well have been listening to Woodrow Wilson or FDR.
It is the Republican way; speak publically the language of liberty, gain thereby a following, get elected, then start right into the slow, inexorable pack-pedal. Eventually they’ll attack you for questioning their adherence to Romish/fascist principles, when once they courted you on libertarian terms.
They are shills. Controlled opposition. This is also known as the Dialectic Method, and I believe Karl Marx advocated it, among other creeps.
It is an inevitability we should, once and for all, acknowledge and then move on. We need our own “Move on Dot org” campaign.
April 9th, 2019 at 8:51 am
I almost got hit once because some lady was eating a bowl of cereal while driving.
Maybe we need a law specifically banning cereal.