Hands Free In California

Today marked the first day of California's new hands free cell phone law for drivers 18 and older and a total prohibition on cell phone use for younger drivers. While I personally don't want this particular law applied to myself I'm actually kind of happy that it has gone into effect; I haven't lived in that many places but I can say with some certainty that California drivers are some of the worst I've ever seen. Maybe it's the proliferation of female Asian drivers out here (just kidding (not really)) but I've had many close calls on the road and the other party was almost inevitably yakking away on their cell, oblivious to the world.

So I'll need to buy a new bluetooth device (mine's old and kind of crappy but slightly nicer than the one in the picture above), and if anyone knows of a particularly good one that looks really cool in your ear please let me know. Of course this all reminds me of this study out of Australia a few years back that found that cell phone use, hands free or no, increases the odds of a wreck by a factor of four; it seems that the real problem stems not from using your hand to hold the phone but from the fact that you're carrying on a conversation with someone else who is not experiencing the same sensory input as yourself.

The thinking goes like this: you're on the phone with someone while driving and a dog runs out in front of your car. Now if you were conversing with someone else in the same car, they would see the dog at the same time as yourself and react to it in the same way, interrupting the conversation so you can concentrate on the road. The person on the other end of the line however doesn't have any clue about what's occurring around you so they pull your attention away from your immediate surroundings by continuing to talk, thus distracting you enough that you end up turning poor Sparky into a bright stain on the asphalt.

So again, while I think that it's a good idea to prevent young, new drivers from using their phones at all I wonder: did the California legislature actually do their homework by reading studies like this one, which says that the difference between hand held and hands free is negligible in preventing accidents, or did they just pass a law that seemed to make sense to them without consulting any research or experts in the field? I'm inclined to believe the latter rather than the former, as I watch government get just one more claw embedded into our civil rights and everyday lives. How long until those self-driving robot cars again?