Saturday, May 22, 2010

Update: Texting, Driving, and the Law

As the summer vacation season begins, worldwide interest in officially restricting cell phone use while driving continues. Just this week, the United Nations Secretary-General banned all UN employees from using mobile phones for texting while driving UN vehicles, hoping to take the lead in curbing global deaths from distracted driving. United States government employees are already prohibited by an executive order from texting while driving on official government business or using government issued mobile devices. As reported by JURIST, several Canadian provinces, California, and New York have also enacted driver cell phone use or texting legislation. Speaking of New York, the sections of the New York Vehicle and Traffic Law dealing with cell phone use and texting can be found here, and here.
Ernster, the Virtual Library Cat

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

My three year old daughter was nearly run down right in front of me last fall by a texting driver. It changed me but I don’t hate texting. The way I see it, that would be like hating nightfall – its coming no matter what. 72% of teens text every single day - some over 3000 times a month. The texting drivers I spoke with, including teens and truckers, all said that laws and Big Brother type software devices that "lock down" their phones would not deter them at all. They feel their civil liberties slipping away. So I built a tool called OTTER for the individual to help manage their texting on their terms.

OTTER is a comprehensive text management system for the home, office and certainly, the highway. It has GPS based Parental Control Feature for teen drivers, a GPS Mode for adult who choose to use it and an Auto reply with unlimited customized responses. We are getting 4.5 to 5 star rating from the tech community and great response from teen groups and safety organizations. We have heard of teens and business people alike using OTTER to schedule their own "texting blackout periods" so they can get some focused work done without feeling disconnected from their social network. If a someone uses OTTER like this, then we think they will see the benefit of OTTER's road safety features. We are not going to stop until change hits our roads and not just our laws. Please give us your feedback.

Best,
Erik Wood, owner
OTTER LLC
http://www.OTTERapp.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xG3ObwwU4po