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Driver Using Two Cell Phones Gets Year-Long Driving Ban
coondoggie writes "This guy is the poster-child for why cell phone use in cars should be banned in more places. According to press out of the United Kingdom, a man who was driving at 70MPH while texting on one phone and talking on another has been banned from driving for a year. Initial reports said that the driver, David Secker, was apparently using his knees to steer the car, an accusation he tried to refute in court."
I used to have a coworker who complained a lot about the price of car insurance. Then at some point he complained that he could not find insurance at all. I found it bizarre because I had no problem whatsoever with car insurance and we were practically neighbours.
Apparently he was "extremely unlucky" (his words) because idiots kept stopping without warning in front of him on the street so he got in accidents all the time. Obviously these accidents had nothing to do with the fact that while driving he was also watching movies on his portable DVD because he "wanted to keep his mind busy". I also remember him submitting a bug fix from his laptop while driving.
On a completely unrelated matter: this guy recently went back to visit his hometown... in China.
lucm, indeed.
It's not about having your hands on the wheel. It's about having your mind on the road.
Anyone who thinks it's okay to divide their attention when they are supposed to be controlling a lethally dangerous machine surrounded by innocent bystanders is a selfish prick. If that's how you drive it's sheer dumb luck which has thus far stopped you killing someone, and that may not hold out forever.
You missed the point. The ban on using mobile phones while driving isn't down to people taking their hands off the wheel, it's because studies have shown that it causes drivers to take their attention away from the road, thereby causing accidents.
Yes, the extent of this particular guy's idiocy is thankfully rare, but your own apparent ignorance of the true danger of driving while using a phone only highlights the practical value of the ban (which already exists here).
Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.
A couple of morons with bad habits are going to ruin it for the vast majority who know better than to take their hands off the wheel.
He didn't just take his hands off the wheel - he took his eyes off the road. There is no safe way to drive without being able to see the road. Nobody that I know of considers it a good idea to have people who cannot see allowed to drive; but this person is for all intents and purposes blind while writing or reading a text message.
This is equally as dangerous to the public as driving drunk, and should be handled the same way the rest of the industrialized world handles DUI - mandatory felony for the first offense.
That said I am not aware of "nanny states" looking to use this to take away reasonable cell phone usage privileges from drivers. You can still talk on your phone, but for the sake of everyone on the road don't take your eyes off the road. Reading and writing text messages is simply not safe while driving. You can't read the newspaper while driving and expect to get away with it, there is no reason why a text message should be any different.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Totally! And I've driven drunk a bunch of times (including right now) and never had any problems - drunk driving should also be legal!
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
The driver was also driving without insurance which would have helped to get the driving ban.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Actually, I used to agree with you. But since California started doing hands-free only, the number of idiots swerving around in their lane has decreased tremendously. And the only people that still do it are the ones that are still breaking the law.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
How do you measure the impairment of a person after you've stopped them?
By their actions before you stop them. Crossing the yellow line multiple times, failure to maintain a constant speed, not noticing that the cop put his lights on until a minute later when he finally hits the siren. Breathalyzer or blood test if the impairment is alcohol or drugs. Those kinds of things.
Just as you can generalize and say that someone with a blood alcohol content of .10 or .08 is "impaired" in the eyes of the law, texting while driving is also impaired at any level, and simply talking on a cell phone has been shown to be just as dangerous (4x) as driving drunk, so it is easy to conclude texting is worse.
With the availability of hands-free options, there is no excuse to talk while holding the phone anyway. Or pull over. More importantly, there is never a justification for texting while driving. I'm a Libertarian at heart, but that goes beyond personal freedom and enters into the "acts that affects others", and needs a heavy fine, to discourage those activities.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
Back in the late eighties, before all these fancy gadgets came into being, I had (to my eternal amazement) the luck to witness a woman driving 75 mph on 285 west of Atlanta in bumper-to-bumper traffic reading a book. We're talking five lanes full of writhing idiots jockeying for position in a rush-hour race to get there first. That road was (and definitely still is) a horror story in progress. It was only a couple months before that I saw a car wrecked on the median, propped sideways on the concrete median divider, its engine block a good 150 feet down the road. Seriously, they just flat could not stop rush hour traffic to clean up the car, and I suppose an ambulance had taken the corpse(s) away previously. They'd have to wait for a break in the traffic at about 2 AM to get the car and its engine out of there.
A book, for you youngins, is a stack of paper bound together with static text on each piece; when reading one, you are confronted with one to two thousand words at a time, and the words are all longhand. So, for the guy dealing with a couple hundred or so characters of text messages while yakking on the phone -- heh.
There truly is nothing new under the sun.
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