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California Bans Front-Seat Computer Use
An anonymous reader submits "As of January 1, 2004 the State of California has banned the use of notebook computers used anywhere in the front seat (PDF) of a moving vehicle. Previously, the ban applied just to TV sets. Even if your car-pooling front seat passenger is just doing some programming, you can be charged with a crime (AB 301). Thanks go to CA Assemblymember Sarah Reyes for this well meaning but overly broad piece of legislation." The text is mercifully short, but still contains some tricky language; probably the meaning of "installed" at the very least needs to be clarified. Would a laptop affixed to a installed bracket count? Considering the complexity of modern automotive navigation/control systems (now sneaking into budget vehicles, too), it seems like a very fine distinction. The law would seem to ban handheld computers being used as navigation aids, too, or GPS devices with games, and very soon, nearly all cell phones.
I almost wrecked into a guy with an LCD screen mounted in his passenger seat. some things are not meant to do while driving. If you "think" you can do it while you drive, then you should pull the car over.
In one respect I'd sad that such a law has to be passed... What kind of idiot would use his laptop while driving? but then what kind of idiot reads a bok while driving, watches TV while driving, puts on MAKEUP WHILE DRIVING????
we all must remember.... over 50% of the population has an IQ below 100. so I guess such laws need to protect the rest of us from the complete morons that are just a inch away from being drooling idiots. now we have to deal with the retards that drive BMW's 3 inches form the rear bumber. why is it that the more you spend on your car the smaller your brain get's behind the wheel?
Although some of this does sound overbroad, at least having less drivers using cellphones (especially while driving) is not necessarily such a bad thing, IMO.
Actually, they should just enact a law that states that while driving a car, your attention should be focused on (duh!) *driving the car*, and if you weren't, and you get in an accident, then you should be held responsible for your negligence.
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I've seen people reading the newspaper while driving. The idea of having someone driving while working on a laptop is MUCH more frightening that the ida of someone driving while a passenger dows the same thing. Plus, everyone knows that when someone in on the computer is dead tot he outside world. Ever try to talk to someone who's surfing the web? Passengers with laptops would probably be LESS distracting to drivers than passengers WITHOUT laptops.
-------- In Soviet Russia, "Soviet Russia" sigs hate Slashdot.
Really, what's the huge deal? The driver's job is to keep the vehicle on the road and going from point A to point B as safely as possible.
I have seen some real morons driving around the state I live in, fiddling with their cell phone, playing with the radio and many other things. I have also witnessed a number of accidents because some nut was to busy doing everything else instead of driving their car.
I say kudos to legislation that will force drivers to drive, instead of fiddling with all of their electronic gadgets. I am also a little guilty of that myself, I have a cell phone and I really should be using one of those hands free devices and I do intend on getting one.
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
lets make all cars remove vanity mirrors too then they are distracting for women putting on their make up in the morning. And make women where less revealing clothes so I don't get distracted looking at them. And remove all billboards, they distract me. Hey listen, I pay taxes, I pay for insurance, and I have never been in an accident. So don't be my mother and tell me a bunch of little small things I can't do, because something might happen if I do them. Lets have a little self government. Lets not make a thousand oppressive laws that just replace laws already in place. Like the laws that say you can't hit other vehicles on the road, those laws cover this inherently because if I am not paying attention and hit someone, I get in trouble. Simple as that, no more specific law needed.
Anonymous Cowards - Oh God, How I hate you
I think people just resent being told what to do because everyone almost automatically considers themselves to be "probably the safest driver on the road" so when they are eating their breakfast, grooming their dog, practicing their golf swings etc whilst driving they are sure that they are "doing it responsibly and safely"
The problem is of course that in reality they are no where near as perfect as they like to think they are and even if they are perfect 99.9% of the time they spend driving it's the 0.1% when they aren't concentrating that they end up crashing.
That's why laws like this one are so important, it's a way of impressing on people the actual definition of responsible driving as opposed to their perceived definition of responsible driving e.g. "it's me doing playing quake on my laptop and I sure don't want to kill anyone on the road so I must be playing quake responsibly".
The fact is that cars and driving are a part of almost everyones daily routine and it's also a fact that it's very easy to kill a lot of people through a lapse of concentration in a car so any law which helps promote the idea that when driving a car you should be concentrating properly on the job in hand is a good thing in my opinion.
I'll allow you these laws that limit my freedom (however justifiably) if you relax other laws that limit my freedom. To wit, for every communication device that I don't carry in my vehicle, let me go 5mph faster, since I would clearly be less distracted and therefore more able to drive at higher speeds (slower traffic move right, damn it! :-). Given that I have a motorcycle with no possible distraction from radios, cell phones, TVs, computers, massage seats, kids, or anything else to take my attention from the road, I would finally be able to open this baby up! As it stands, I'm expected to putter through traffic at the same speed as a soccer mom on her cell phone with 4 screaming kids in the back watching TV. TANJ!
I assume law enforcement is exempt from this? Have you seen lately all the computer equipment in the front seat of a police car, aimed directly at the officer driving? Doesn't seem fair that they are allowed to use that stuff and the average joe isn't. Most of the time around here, I see the police driving far worse than anyone else on the road.
today is spelling optional day.
ouch...
Next it will be the way you hold the steering wheel or the shoes you wear while driving. You'll be forced to buy state mandated fire proof clothes and install halon systems just to leave your driveway.
When your car has a cage to keep you from interacting with your passengers, you'll be free to wonder what happened to your rights as a human. Think I'm kidding? Watch this law die soon.
Obviously because you want to stop accidents from occurring, rather than just punish people after the event.
It makes sense that drivers are banned from doing things that affect their ability to drive the car. But does that really need all these explicit laws about phones, laptops, etc.? There is a concept of 'dangerous driving' / 'driving without due care and attention'. Surely that by definition covers using phones, etc. I guess that the law is really only passed to bring attention to the fact that you can't do it, whereas previously it may have been considered that you could - that and to clarify the penalties imposed.
But the blanket 'front seat' ban is bizarre. How is a front seat passenger using a laptop causing more of a distraction than - say - having a conversation with the driver?
"Why on earth to legislators think you need a new law to deal with every permutation of idiocy. Just enforce the !#$#% laws on the books for the new situation."
Because laws like this one make it easier to enforce laws like dangerous driving laws, if you have already classified using a computer on the front seat as driving dangerously then it's very easy to enforce the law.
Secondly when new methods of driving dangerously are invented e.g. cell phones, laptop computers it's a good idea to update legislation to recognise these new developments.
I really can see anything bad about this law at all, no privacy issues, no pandering to corporations, no dilution of rights etc.
Whether a process has been implemented in software is not a good indicator of whether that process is effortless vs impossibly hard for humans. Humans recognize speech without even thinking about it, while computers still are in the dark ages when it comes to speech recognition. Computers render 80 fps full motion game video on the fly, while humans can barely scratch out a crude line drawing of something taking minutes for a single frame.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
Last January 1 (2003) A state law went into effect banning the talking on cell phones while driving. Consider that I can wait at a light and see every other driver crossing the intersection blathering away while one-handed-driving, I don't think this is going to be any more enforced.
In the USA you drive on the right hand side. Drivers going slow are to remain to the right lanes, leaving the left for passing. Yet on multilane freeways I frequently observe cars crawling along, well under the speed limit, while the driver gesticulates (why do people even do this while on cell phones?) and ignores all the traffic having to pass on the right because they can't be bothered with merging traffic while they concentrate on their phone call.
Just one day of the police rigidly enforcing the ban on cell phones while driving would be a good thing to get the message across, too bad they don't. I see patrol cars pass drivers chatting away. There's no enforcement
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
"Funny, I thought law was to protect our freedoms. You suggest law should pre-emptively limit our actions? How odd."
"Punish crimes that actually occur not ones that might (or might not) potentially occur. If someone was intentionally distracting himself when he should have been fully absorbed in guiding a half-ton of speeding metal down a roadway and he hurts somebody, throw the freakin' book at him! Until them, leave him alone!"
I hope you find that of great comfort when you are lying in a hospital bed for months unable to move because someone thought the importance of their phone call and car journey were both higher than that of your health.
I have two problems with your comment. Firstly, it's the idea of 'justice'. We are supposed to have a system of 'justice'. If you can't put right the wrong after the event, then no amount of punishment can give 'justice'.
Secondly, you fall in to the same problem of many other drivers - "if I'm the only car in sight for miles" - do you really know what is around the next bend, over the next hill, approaching the next junction? And that is just dealing with cars. Of far more concern, what about the pedestrians that may be around, or other people's livelihood that you may have a devastating impact on (for example, if you crash into a farmer's field)? I am sick of drivers that think the only thing that matters are other vehicles on the road - I've lost count of the number of times I've nearly been run over by cars that have failed to indicate that they are about to turn when there are no other cars around.
> Funny, I thought law was to protect our freedoms. You suggest law should pre-emptively limit our actions? How odd.
Not odd. Some laws protect rights, and other laws abrogate them. But by definition, laws restrict actions. The only question is whose actions.
> No, I prefer not to live in a police/nanny state. Punish crimes that actually occur not ones that might (or might not) potentially occur.
There are too many situations where this doesn't work because the risks are too high, based on potential outcomes. Also, there are situations where the outcome of a failure in judgement might not be a crime, but still has repercussions that are unacceptable. Take for example prohibitions against personal ownership of high explosives. If it was legal for me to keep dynamite in my garage, and because I stored it wrong I blew my house off the foundations, the result wouldn't be a crime but could certainly have repercussions for others. By the same token, it's accepted that driving under the influence has unacceptable risks, and it's been deemed insufficient to charge people only with crimes based on what happens after they crash, because innocent people die too often. So, we charge people for the behavior, not just the consequences. There are those who think that operating these devices is too dangerous to let people do it and only punish when it causes grief, because the grief is too high to wait for it to happen.
> Also, why target computer use? Or TV viewing? Or whatever? Tuning the radio, applying makeup, talking on the phone, eating McDonald's...these are all distractions, as others have mentioned. I don't think we any of them should be banned outright. If I'm the only car in sight for miles, darn right I should be able to do any/all of these in my car, and I'll make that judgment, not the cop hiding in the median trying to make his ticket quota.
The problem is that statistics show that too many people are not capable of making this judgement call rationally. Yes, it's true that some of the people are spoiling it for the rest of you, but the numbers don't lie. If everyone did these things only when no other cars were in sight, then it wouldn't be such a big deal (it would still be dangerous, but less so to bystanders). The problem is that people still do it in traffic, so it stands to reason that if they won't stop themselves, someone has to do it for them.
> Freedom is like fire: a wonderful and powerful thing that can harm if used unwisely. But I don't think we should restrict freedom for everyone just because a few morons can't cope with it.
Good idea in theory, but as stated above some of those morons are doing things that involve external effects, so they need to be restricted to protect those innocent bystanders. You and I may not need a law that says to stop at red lights, but there are those who do.
Virg
Gee, for one thing, you didn't say anything about watching your car's internals on a laptop, you said:
I see lots of people reading books on the road, and it takes more concentration for me to read in my car than glance over at mapquest on laptop.
So EXCUSE me if I took "glance over at mapquest on laptop" to mean you were glancing at mapquest on a laptop (barring the fact, of course, that if you're using mapquest you're getting directions and that means you need to break concentration on the road to either read the directions or analyze the map). I can't imagine where I got THAT idea from. We'll also ignore for a moment that that's like saying "I see lots of people lifting 400 lb. weights. It takes a lot more strength for me to lift a 400 lb. weight than it does to pick up a baseball". That is: it's totally irrelevant and, in context, doesn't even make a point of any kind. Besides, other people being incredibly stupid doesn't justify your behavior. Other people are out there raping, murdering, and stealing. Does that make it okay for me to beat a kid up and steal his lunch money?
And for another thing, WTF are you doing with your car that requires you to monitor it like that and why don't you have analog guages mounted? Assuming you're monitoring a turbo/super setup, I can't imagine how much crap you'd have to be monitoring to have no way of placing analog guages and if you're car is so tuned that you need the pinpoint accuracy (relatively speaking, mind you) of a digital setup, you need to get a life and stop driving a near race-tuned car on the street like you were, well, in a race.
If it's a NOS setup you're monitoring, you're still out of your mind because if you're firing off shots of nitrous ON THE STREET, you SERIOUSLY need to lose your license (and, almost certainly will if you get caught). Assuming you were watching the canisters for a leak, all you need is a warning signal, you don't need to actually monitor it yourself continuously.
Sorry, but I can't picture any situation where, under normal driving, you'd need to monitor the detailed internal workings of your engine with a laptop. Race? Yes. However, if you're racing on the streets, or you're driving a race-tuned car on the streets, you're really in trouble in this discussion as far as your credibility on safety matters goes.
What amazes me most about people like you is that my point is very simple:
- Concentrating on something other than driving decreases driving skill by distracting you.
- Distracting yourself endangers everyone around you.
- Intentionally endangering other people is stupid and you shouldn't do it.
And you're STILL arguing with me! How self-centered can you possibly get when you'd argue against the fact that if you distract yourself while driving, you increase the risk of an accident? Not only that, you argue that it's okay for you to do this!And, I swear to god... the next moron that says something like "looking over your shoulder is distracting".... LOOKING OVER YOUR SHOULDER IS A LEGITIMATE PART OF DRIVING, DUMBASSES! If you can invent something that eliminates this occasional need, you'd make a fucking fortune! Stop trying to use regular driving tactics as justification for doing dangerous things unnecessarily!
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
None of the comments I've read (and perhaps I missed the all important one) seem to address the real issue.
It's not that the average person can't drive well while talking on a cellphone or otherwise distracted.
It's that the average person can't drive well.
PERIOD.
Too many people assume driving is a simple task, when in reality your well being becomes the task of those around you who are busy anticipating your sudden lane change, noticing you drifting into their lane and backing off or changing so you don't sideswipe them, or noting that while their light just turned green - you don't seem to give a rats ass and are going to run a red light 3 seconds late.
Drivers licenses are given out way too casually, and people aren't tested under real situations. I drove around in Ireland this summer - and while it's not nearly as much traffic, the roads are wide enough for two vehicles. Two vehicles hugging the shoulder - hoping their side view mirrors aren't the same elevation. I didn't get in an accident, I didn't see any accidents.
One thing that was really refreshing, is when on the faster roads that have 'passing zones' - i.e. fewer lanes than one would prefer when stuck behind a slow vehicle - people routinely calmy wait for you to move aside for them, or calmy move aside for you (depending on who's going faster). Afterwards, the passer blinks their emergency lights as a "thank you" and goes on their merry way. That's right - motorists working together, and THANKING one another afterwards. I curse a storm in the states when I drive, I ENJOYED driving in Ireland - and not just on the scenic routes. Note: roundabouts kinda suck though, imo. They're good for low traffic, but damn they are pretty annoying in high traffic.
Also: Get off your goddamn cellphone, it's sure not helping your driving. That's the bottom line - it's not helping, so unless it's a huge emergency and you're using a handsfree or a passenger is handling it - stfu.
cyn, free software and *nix operating systems enthusiast.