Well, I still remain unconvinced safety/danger is the political issue. I speculate that if using a cellphone while behind the wheel made you driver _faster_, then there would be no uproar, no demands for studies, any studies that were conducted that show a danger would be happily ignored, and no laws would be passed against the practice.

Gary Kavanagh: “There should be a standard set for distracted driving that is open ended and police updated with guidelines of what to look for as technology and in car distractions change.”

Distraction has been killing people in cars more or less forever, and probably people on horses before then. Is there any evidence “technology” has increased the kill/injury rate? There is also stuff like this:

http://edition.cnn.com/2003/TRAVEL/08/06/distracted.drivers/

In essence, ~70% of observed distractions are the tech-free things like picking your nose.

Thought experiment:

You are driving, on your cellphone, talking with someone. You have slowed to 80km/h (to the irritation of the type A drivers behind you, expecting a minimum of 100km/h), and proceed along the road for 5km in deep conversation about differential equations or something.

You are driving along the same 5km section of road, at 100km/h, no one cares about you … except you are looking at all the road signs, the flashing TV billboards, checking out the babes in other cars, fiddling with your CD player, giving the finger to that jerk who just cut you off, and generally acting as you normally do.

Which would be the safer drive? Near as I can tell, no one knows the answer to questions like this. If this ignorance is true, are any laws against specific behaviors justifiable?

Texting becomes illegal in California on Jan 1. I think it’s unfortunate that – as your news clip shows – common sense just doesn’t work and legislatures feel compelled to codify every single activity of dangerous behavior