Wow, I haven't posted in a while. I'm going to have to get better at this blogging thing. Anyway, it's the Spring Equinox which was a soft-line goal for one of my New Year's resolutions. I didn't reach the goal, but I'm on my way.
Because of the warm weather, I've been able to bike to work fairly regularly which I plan to keep up, rain or shine (I hope). I've also added strength training to my workout regimen as well. Here's to reaching goals!
On another note, a new law banning texting while driving went into effect a couple weeks ago. While I personally don't text while driving, I know people who will and it freaks me out when they do it while I'm a passenger. While many news sources jumped on the "studies show texting ban ineffective" bandwagon, I was unable to find any citations for these studies. The best I was able to come up with was here and based on my glossing over of that document, it seemed that the frequency of accidents after the bans had taken effect had not really changed all that drastically. While it's somewhat true that the number of accidents hasn't decreased, it's important to note that they haven't skyrocketed either.
There are several issues around the ban. First of all, there is the issue of enforcement. The law prohibits the sending, reading, or writing of text messages on any "Interactive Wireless Communication Device" (http://www.drivinglaws.org/pa-laws.php). Does a police officer now have the right to search my phone's texting history (which would raise other issues if it is the case)? How does a police officer know that a driver is texting and not entering a phone number? Reading various comments on news sites tell that officers rarely enforced even the complete cell phone bans and would themselves not follow the bans (again, reader comments, take with a grain of salt).
Second is how the law is defined. What makes texting any different than calling? On top of that, why is it that it is the explicit sending of data which makes up the text and not the act of interacting with a phone at all? This law even bans text messages sent via voice recognition applications such as Siri. So I can hold the phone to my head to talk to my brother, but talking with the intent of sending a text in which I am in no contact with the phone means I'm breaking the law?
I'm sure there are other issues, but I don't have time to go through them all right now. While I question the motivation of this law, my goal is to make people pay aware to the dangers of distracted driving in general, whether it's texting, calling, messing with MP3 players, GPS units, whatever. This was a big concern of mine when all I did was drive, but now that I am on the roads as a cyclist, it is even more so.
As a final note, I'll leave you with the PA cycling laws which all PA drivers should know. http://www.dot.state.pa.us/bike/web/bikelaws.htm
