From a safety perspective, I would like to see cell phone use banned in ALL vehicles - both passenger and commercial.
You might get your wish. One gummint official, and I think it was La Hood, suggested making the passenger compartment of all vehicles impervious to cell phone signals. Government vehicles would, of course, be exempted.
From the motorcycle enthusiast perspective cell phones should be banned in all vehicles period. In that one to seconds it takes you to reach that cell phone to take that ever so important call you could easily veer into my bike.
Who looks down for their phone? Doesn't everyone keep it in the same place all the time? Like the radio knob or the CB mic, muscle memory should tell you where it is.
As for even looking at the screen, there are hands-free systems like the one I have on my visor that announce that you have a call, announce the number to you, and prompt you to say "answer" or "ignore." The free market, given a chance, provides the answers to all our problems.
When I was younger there were no cell phones. There were no telephone answering machines (when I was really young), no text messages. It amazes me how I (we) ever survived without these things. Even more amazing is the people trying to call us survived. When we were home and the phone rang - we answered it.
And when my grandfather was young, a candy bar was a nickle.
We live in a different world now, one commonly called "the information age." There's no way back to that other world, and sometimes it's good, and sometimes it's not.
When I'm on a run, one of my companies calls me every two hours, or even every hour for some customers, to update my location. No way can that mandate stopping the vehicle every time. Expedite would no longer be expedite, even in a van, but especially in a straight truck or big truck.
Bottom line is that no person's cell phone call or text message is worth more than another person's life.
Thanks,
John Mueller, CDS
Safety Director/Partner
All right. That's true. However, if we're going to do the SAFEST thing in every circumstance, the safest thing to do RIGHT NOW is take every motor vehicle off the road and pour cement into the engine block so it can never run again. Then we can all travel by horse and buggy again, with a load to California taking, what, 3 months? And we'll have manure in the streets.
Ridiculous, you say?
The fact is that we make judgment calls all the time on where to draw the line between safety and practicality. Just as we don't ban all automobiles for safety's sake, let's not go overboard with the cell phone ban. Mandate hands-free devices in moving vehicles (after which auto manufacturers will make them standard equipment) and call it a day.
Instead of having safety fuhreren, maybe we could get by with safety
untergruppenfuhreren.