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NTSB’s Simple Solution,
‘Ban Everything Electronic’
By William Finucane
Ban all guns. Similarly, ban all electric devices in cars.
Both are misguided thoughts that are supposed to save
people from themselves and others in one grand sweep. Neither does.
In mid-December of 2011, the National Transportation Safety
Board unanimously recommended that all types of portable electronic devices like
cell phones ought to be forbidden in all vehicles. And of course it was tragedy
and spilled blood that became the reason behind the all encompassing legislative
reaction.
To justify such sweeping regulations, the NTSB held up as
the horrible case, an Aug. 5, 2010 accident in Missouri in which a pickup driver
was texting, 11 messages in 11 minutes, and hit a school bus as it was slowing
down; the pickup truck driver was then rear ended by two other school buses.
This was on Interstate 44 near Gray Summit, Missouri.
The pickup driver, Daniel Schatz, 19, died. One student in
a bus died too.
Tragedy, no doubt; but this is not the bedrock for a
nation-wide, complete ban on any use of such an electronic device anywhere by
anyone.
There is room for prohibiting texting communication among
drivers. That requires drivers to work a keyboard and run a car simultaneously.
A nationwide recommendation forbidding text messaging makes sense.
But that is not what the NTSB did. It flatly recommends
forbidding call communication among drivers, whether texting or cell-phone use.
That goes for hands-free or hand-held cell phones. However, the NTSB would
approve a car with a built-in cell phone.
Clearly this is favoring the new cars with new technology;
those customers are free from the outright prohibition.
It is not the NTSB’s intention to promote newer,
higher-priced cars and deny all other drivers the right to use a cell phone, but
that is exactly what the nation-wide agency is proposing. Surely, someone will
challenge this provision in court.
Of course the NTSB is not a law-making body. Every state
that wants to adopt anti-car-phone laws has to go through the process on its
own. But the NTSB is a powerful national organization that serves as a
repository of evidence on which state legislation may be based. Many states have
similar laws on their books already.
NTSB members have been hammering away at the cell phone
issue for a decade. Only now have they taken this dramatic step. They note that
at every moment there are 13.5 million drivers using their cell phones. That
came from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Of those drivers,
3,092 were killed.
There are many things that can diminish a driver’s
capacity, including eating, sickness, arguments, sleepiness, confusion over
directions, alcoholic drinking, drug use and many others. Some are illegal, some
are not. But the NTSB has zeroed on just one to make a blanket ruling regarding
all types of cell phones and texting machines except one – the cell phones build
into some models.
The NTSB is throwing out some non-vetted statistics and
using a single Missouri accident to justify a nationwide shutdown on virtually
all cell phone use.
No one wants to encourage the risk of tragedies, but this
NTSB proposal is unworkable despite the horrific example and the statistics. It
just won’t work.
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