If Common Sense Makes Good Sense...

Here in New York, Governor Patterson has just made it official: Texting while driving is a ticket-able traffic infraction. Unlike the State’s driving while using a cell phone ban—unless using a hands-free device—the texting legislation makes it only a secondary infraction. That means an officer can’t pull you over just for texting; you have to be stopped for something else, like speeding. Then he can also cite you for texting.

How is this law going to be enforced? A car whizzing by a police cruiser at 55+ miles per hour is going to be gone in the blink of an eye. Is a cop really going to notice if the driver is hammering out a text? Let’s say a driver gets pulled over for speeding, and while waiting for the cop to tap on the window whips out his/her cell to send an “oh $#!*” message to a friend—does this count as texting and driving?

Obviously this law is going to be laughably hard to enforce at best. And with several recent texting and driving crashes here in Buffalo, some ending fatally (and one with a tow truck in a residential swimming pool), local governments are toughening up. At the county and even town level, legislatures have enacted tougher texting-and-driving rules. For starters, many make it a primary offense, meaning a cop can stop someone for texting, even if no other traffic laws are violated.

Besides some of the local cases, legislatures have other good reasons to be moving quick to enact laws on this touchy subject: Car and Driver recently published the results of their own controlled testing of sending/receiving texts and its impact on driver reaction times. In general, hammering out a <160 character message on your phone's keypad can be worse than if you've slugged a few too many beers before climbing behind the wheel.

While I think tougher texting restrictions are a good idea, there is something sad about the whole thing. Why do we pay out hard-earned tax dollars to politicians so they can write laws like this? I think it’s sad that we as a society have become so foolish that public “servants” have to write codes legislating what should be common sense.