POLICE LOOKING TO BAN TWITTERING WHILE DRIVING

May 31 2009

Boston, MA – As technology advances inevitably laws have to keep pace. Perhaps no invention in history has spawned the number of changes than the automobile. From safety requirements in the construction of vehicles to speed limits on roadways, the direct and ancillary laws that have been created to keep drivers and pedestrians safe
dwarf the provisions created for any other technology. Even now with automobiles more than a century old new laws are still being created to govern the behaviour of people behind the wheel and law makers are looking for even more.

With the introduction of the car phone in the late 1970’s law makers across the suddenly had a new menace to deal with. The introduction of a normally home-borne device into the mobile atmosphere of a car suddenly brought new safety concerns to light. The cellular phone boom of the 1990’s replaced the car phone but introduced a whole host of new problems with a massive increase in sheer numbers. Now in the 2000’s as texting begins to replace talking on a phone, new dangers are starting to present themselves and law makers are looking to head off problems before they start.

“For every two seconds a driver's eyes are off the road, a motorist is twice as likely to be involved in a crash,” said Troy Green of AAA to Fox News. "Texting while driving requires your full attention and leaves no room for distraction. You'd have to be foolish at best and delusional at worst to think you can send and receive text messages while operating a motor vehicle effectively and safely. We believe that's something that should be banned.”

Text based crashes have resulted in the deaths of dozens of people across the United States over the last few years. Recently a trolley collision in Boston injured 50 people, a result of the driver being preoccupied with texting his girlfriend. Laws against the texting have already begun to go into action across the country but some lawmakers are looking for more.

“We need to be as proactive as possible when it comes to saving lives. Bringing in anti-texting laws after the fact does a lot of good for people in the future but doesn’t bring back those lost ones. True we will not be able to fully tell the future and prevent all crime and tragedy
but we can try and the first place to look at is in the technology that is grabbing people’s imaginations,” said Michael Kent of the Boston University of Law. “We look at
something like Twitter and we can see how firmly it has gripped the imagination of people especially the people who would be most prone to risky behaviour. Functionally it isn’t a whole lot different than texting when it comes to how distracting it can be and we must take steps to prevent this before it results in unnecessary deaths.”

Twitter has become a phenomenon of late with celebrity endorsers and corporate giants trying to get a piece of the internet darling. ‘Tweets’ as they are called are short messages sent to followers. Similar to text messages tweets are also 140 characters long and just as distracting to drivers.

“It would be relatively easy to ban Twitter on cell phones as it more or less involves
the same physical procedure. It would fall under texting laws. Where the difficulty would be is laptops or other less obvious mobile devices. Using a laptop could be just as distracting but because it can be left on the passenger seat a whole lot more difficult to catch,” said Scrape TV Technology analyst Ken Kevins. “If you ban laptops then you run into a whole host of legal and ethical issues. What is someone isn’t on Twitter but checking email or surfing the web? Do we prevent people going on Facebook while driving? All of a sudden a simple safety issue could turn into a constitutional fight. Obviously laws will have to adapt but the issue is how far are they able to go and what do we have to give up in the fight for safe driving.”

In the last month Boston police have pulled over two drivers for using laptops while driving. One was accessing his Facebook account and the other was using an illegal copy of Photoshop. The latter driver was charged with copyright infringement.  

Martin Philton, Technology Correspondent

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