First Mobiles, Now iPods!

in Featured General by Jon C — January 30, 2011 at 1:25 pm | 7 comments

First politicians placed bans on motorists’ cellphone use. Now they want to curb freedoms of pedestrians.
One of the downsides of global communication is that the moment one politician has a bright idea on the other side of the world, others soon hear about it and think it must be something they want to adopt.
So New York senator Carl Kruger is getting world-wide attention for his plan to make it illegal to use any electronic device while walking on a pavement or crossing a city street on foot. And Arkansas Senator Jimmy Jeffress wants to ban pedestrians from wearing iPod headphones in both ears on or near a roadway.
Kruger heard of one case in which it’s suspected the pedestrian was actually killed while listening to the iPod or talking on a mobile. That’s enough to make him want a total ban.

Now NSW police say they would support such a ban locally.

In fact. last year, vehicles killed 162 pedestrians or cyclists in New York, down from 180 four years earlier and pedestrian fatalities have fallen almost 20% from 2001.
This is one US news account about the Senator’s plan.
One incident the Senator from NY quoted involved a woman “engrossed in conversation on her cell phone walking straight into a park fountain.”
Now that woman was plain stupid and was probably the woman who became a You Tube sensation for always doing such things. So because of her we have to place a ban on all people?
Pedestrians may well get distracted by using a phone or iPod. Noise-cancelling headphones can cut out the noise from a car that suddenly appears out of nowhere straight in your path while walking.
But there are lots of distractions - and it’s not all one way.
As a daily walker, I encounter cars that roar out of driveways oblivious to pedestrians. Some days, I get so angry I want to ban cars!
New nanny laws to remind us of the need to be careful on the street are stupid. Do iPods cause accidents or is the cause people being stupid or not paying attention? Stupidity is difficult to legislate against.
And, while I strongly support mobile restrictions in vehicles because I have seen drivers very distracted, have the curbs on mobiles in cars worked or changed behaviour?
The taxi driver I got the other day spent much time on the phone arguing with a relative about something -talking while cradling his phone on his shoulder.
There has been other recent publicity in a newspaper recently showing Aucklanders, even cops, still talking on their phone while driving. After the initial law coming into effect, some people gave gone back to their old habits assuming they’ll never be caught. Part of the problem now is I see drivers hiding their mobiles to avoid detection  and still texting or calling while holding the mobile under a seat etc which means fumbling around may be even more distracting!

In the US, a recent study by the insurance industry-funded Highway Loss Data Institute found that since three of four states that imposed such bans, crash numbers have increased.

“These results indicate that distracted driving crashes are a complicated issue unlikely to be affected greatly by laws banning only one or another potential distraction. Distracted driving has long been a major contributor to the motor vehicle crash problem in the United States. In 1979, a report on the “Indiana Tri-Level Study” concluded that “driver error” had been the proximate cause of 9 out of 10 crashes investigated.
Anecdotal evidence from insurance claims files and police crash reports over the years have provided an astounding array of ways in which drivers manage to be distracted from the driving task at just the wrong time — from adjusting the radio, to eating and drinking, to tending a child in the rear seat, to reading, shaving, and applying makeup, to swatting bees.

“The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) estimates that 21 percent of injury crashes and 16 percent of fatal crashes in 2008 involved driver distraction (NHTSA, 2009), but this probably is an underestimate of the distracted driving problem due to the fact that many crash reports don’t have information on distracting events. The long history and ubiquity of distracted driving crashes, coupled with the current findings, suggests that public policy that focuses on only one source of distraction (for example, cellphone conversations or texting) may fail simply because it doesn’t recognize that drivers always are subject to distraction.
“Taking away cellphones may result only in drivers defaulting — even unintentionally — to new (or old) forms of distraction. In any case, the evidence to date indicates that cellphone conversations and texting no doubt increase crash risk during their occurrence ; however, despite the increase in cellphone conversations and texting, there has not been an upwared trend in either fatal crashes or collision claims. And most importantly for policy makers, laws banning these practices are not reducing crash risk in the United States.”

None of that changes my view that texting while driving is extremely dangerous.
But turning the spotlight on pedestrians using mobiles and iPods is just draconian. 99% of those users are responsible pedestrians and understand the danger. You can not legislate for anyone who is naturally foolhardy.