“…have seen crashes actually go up rather than down.” [Andrew Adams, KSL via Alex Tabarrok, on Insurance Institute for Highway Safety figures]
Posts Tagged ‘cellphones’
Politics roundup
- Michigan Supreme Court race: three seats at stake, including Stephen Markman’s [Charles Crumm/Mt. Pleasant Morning Sun, Collin Levy, WSJ]
- Notable state attorney general races include West Virginia, Missouri, Montana [Ballotpedia, Governing; Carrie Severino, NRO] Battle of the sleazy ads in Washington race [Seattle Times]
- “Fixed-income retiree” in Kaine ad turns out to be well-connected Virginia trial lawyer [Paul Bedard, Washington Examiner ] “33% of settlements is a fixed income, in a way” [Chris DeRose]
- Federal free-cellphone scheme enriches some political influentials [Washington Free Beacon]
- History of judicial elections in the US: rethinking the received account [Stuart Banner, Jotwell, on Jed Shugerman]
- After election, expect renewed push for limits on campaign spending [Ira Stoll]
- John Roberts’ doing? “Supreme Court not top campaign issue,” didn’t come up at debates [USA Today] Do libertarians fare better with Republican presidents’ Supreme Court picks, or just libertarian lawprofs? [Bernstein, Radia, etc.]
Italy: scientists sent to prison for faulty earthquake predictions
“Six Italian scientists and an ex-government official have been sentenced to six years in prison over the 2009 deadly earthquake in L’Aquila. A regional court found them guilty of multiple manslaughter. Prosecutors had said the defendants gave a falsely reassuring statement before the quake after studying tremors that had shaken the city.” [BBC, earlier] More: Orac.
Speaking of science and the Italian courts, Italy’s Supreme Court has ruled in favor of a litigant claiming cellphone use caused his brain tumor; most authorities have found no such link [Telegraph]
Feds’ scheme: have cops peer down into cars from overpasses
Politico quotes me on the latest harebrained idea from the U.S. Department of Transportation, known for Secretary Ray LaHood’s crusade against “distracted driving”:
Olson called the idea that law enforcement would be focused on using spotters perched atop overpasses “creepy” and suggested it turns police officers into “peeping toms.”
“We drive under [overpasses], so it’s not a perfect expectation of privacy; but if we saw someone staring down and hoping to look into our laps, we’d think of them as creepy,” Olson said.
Barbara Harsha, executive director of the Governors Highway Safety Association, which has been out front of the effort to curb distracted driving, scoffed at the notion that there is any expectation of privacy in a car.
Earlier here, etc.
Freebie phones everywhere
Thanks to the federal Lifeline Universal Service program — you helped pay via an extra line of charges on your own bill — freebie cellphones now abound in many American cities, with 231,000 having been given away in Maryland alone [Fox Baltimore via Amy Alkon]
Here’s some money. Now ban cellphones in cars.
The federal government should keep its busy hands off local traffic laws — and that goes for bribing states to its will, as well as issuing direct orders. Today the House will debate a measure that would make that point by cutting off a fledgling program that would pay states for doing what “distracted driving” crusader and DoT secretary Ray LaHood lacks the constitutional authority or political capital to do directly. I explain in my new post at Cato at Liberty.
Judge: text-sender can’t be sued for recipient’s crash
“A woman who texted her boyfriend while he was driving cannot be held liable for a car crash he caused while responding, seriously injuring a motorcycling couple, a judge ruled Friday in what is believed to be the first case of its kind in the country.” [AP/USA Today, earlier]
LaHood’s cellphone crusade, cont’d
Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood’s press spokesman describes as “inaccurate” Reuters’ report that his boss endorses a Congressionally enacted national across-the-board ban on cellphone use. (The Newspaper; our earlier posts here and here; Ramesh Ponnuru, Bloomberg View).
More from The Newspaper:
At the same time that the US Department of Transportation is pushing laws to ban in-car cell phone use, it is promoting the “511” government program that encourages drivers to dial 511 for information on traffic conditions instead of tuning in to a traffic reports on AM radio.
Related: “Communities start to fine for texting and walking” [USA Today]
New Jersey woman sued over sending text to someone who was driving
A judge in Morris County, N.J. is expected to rule soon whether to dismiss Shannon Colonna as a defendant in a lawsuit over a car crash. Colonna was far from the scene at the time, but plaintiffs said she had sent a text message to the driver whose inattention caused the accident, and thus aided and abetted his negligence. [The Record; AP; NJLRA] Update: judge dismisses claims against Colonna.
A universal driver-cellphone ban?
I’ve got an op-ed in Saturday’s Orange County Register taking exception to Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood’s call for Congressional legislation to ban “talking on a cellphone or texting while driving any type of vehicle on any road in the country.” Something you might not have known: the feds blame a crash on distraction if a cellphone is so much as “in the presence of the driver at the time of the crash.” (Distracted Driving Summit Press kit (PDF), “Traffic Safety Facts” p. 2, h/t Investor’s Business Daily; earlier here, here, etc.) More: Rob Port, SayAnythingBlog. Update: LaHood spokesman says Reuters overstated his boss’s position.