As is usually the case around here, last week’s action by the City Council to ban the use of some hand-held electronic devices while driving has absolutely nothing to do with public safety and everything to do with money.
You think our elected officials care one bit about driver distraction? All you have to do is look at their recent action history and you will quickly discover that’s not the case. In fact, that’s probably the last thing that enters their collective conscientiousness. If you need a memory refresher, remember it was just a little more than a month ago, back on Aug. 5, that the council heard two out of three reports it had commissioned state that electronic billboards cause driver distraction. Did the city try to ban them? Just the opposite. It passed an ordinance encouraging them, but, then these billboards bring money. And the folks who install these billboards give to political campaigns. Can’t let driver distraction stand in the way of that.
Think about this as well. We have a long, long history of having electronic gadgets to play with in our cars. For the first 10 years of my life, my family lived in Manhattan and we didn’t need a car. In fact, in Manhattan then, as it probably still is today, a car was more a curse than a blessing. In area, New York is comparatively small, so if we couldn’t walk to where we needed to go, cab rides were quick and relatively inexpensive. If, for some reason, we needed to leave the island — to say hop across the Harlem River to go to a Yankee game, or across the East River to see the Dodgers or hit the beaches at Jamaica or Coney Island — we always had the convenience of the subways. Then there were the commuter trains to take us up to Westchester County for Thanksgiving dinner with the grandparents.
It wasn’t until my dad’s job transferred him to the wild and unknown regions of northern Indiana that we purchased our first family automobile — a brand new blue and white 1952 Dodge that looked very much like this (except ours was a lighter shade of blue). That car came equipped, of course, with the standard AM radio and on the road between New York and Indiana, my dad, the family driver, kept searching on that radio dial to find the clearest station carrying the Mutual Radio Network’s baseball Game of the Day. Distracted? You bet your New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Ohio Turnpike tolls he was distracted.
Many years later, drivers could multiply their distraction levels with the addition of FM to the radio dials and that was followed by 8-track tape players (I never indulged), cassette players (which I loved), then CD players and then the mother of all distractive devices, the in-car DVD player. Was there ever — ever — A discussion about banning any of these devices. Do you get to do much snow skiing in Kyle? People spent money on these devices, not only added to the sticker price when they bought the cars, but more often than not as expensive add-ons, all purchases that aided local economies. If driver distraction wasn’t such a lucrative business, there might not have ever been a store known as Best Buy.
Which brings me to the recent bans enacted here in Kyle and in other cities on hand-held electronic devices. These bans are actually encouraged by the manufacturers of these items, because now people have to trudge back to the stores and purchase additional gadgets to allow them to operate these same devices "hands-free." More money into the local economies. This article makes for interesting reading, but the argument presented here that’s also presented in numerous studies conducted by government safety experts in addition to the ones actually cited in the article is that there is no discernible difference in driver distraction between drivers using hand-held electronic devices and drivers using hands-free ones. This is especially true when it comes to talking on the phone. It’s not using the hands that’s distracting, it’s the conversation. Drivers are devoting more attention to what they are saying and hearing on the phone than they are to their driving.
It is also interesting to note that GPS devices were not included in the ban. Wonder why? Because some driver tooling down I-35 between Dallas and the border might suddenly get hungry and have a craving for Italian food, or barbecue or Chinese right around the time he hits the Kyle area. He can play with his GPS and ask it where’s the closest eatery that fits his needs. Armed with the feedback from his device, he can pull off the highway and spend some dough to eat some dough in a Kyle eatery. Further proof this ordinance has nothing to do with driver distraction and everything to do with money.
In fact, I can hear the cry now seconds before the next accident caused by driver distraction: "Look, ma, no hands."
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