This week, an acquaintance of mine was among the first to receive a $75 ticket for yakking away on her cell phone while driving through Center City. She was still pretty steamed about it when she called me Tuesday night.
She admitted that she knew about the new law, and even knew that police considered the grace period over and were about to go into mad ticket mode, but she still resented being flagged on the first day of enforcement.
As she went on and on about the unfairness of it all, I couldn’t help but notice the background noise on her end of the line sounded suspiciously like… traffic.
Hard headed, my grandmother used to call it – usually while describing me.
The law is in effect folks, and griping about it won’t help.
If you’re caught using your handheld phone while driving in Philly, it’s going to cost you $75. This applies to both talking and the increasingly popular text messaging. It also applies, by the way, to bicyclists, skateboarders, rollerbladers, and the people who ride those hideous little motorized scooters, the least dignified means of transportation ever devised. Ever seen anyone look cool while driving a pink Vespa? Neither have I.
Then Montgomery County attorney Philip Berg offered free legal services to anyone who wants to fight their newly minted citations in court.
This is the same Philip Berg, mind you, whose lawsuit against President Obama was thrown out of the Third Circuit Court of Appeals only a few weeks ago.
You remember the story: Berg sued the president, on behalf of crackpots everywhere, on the basis that Obama is not an American citizen, and is therefore ineligible to be elected President of the United States. These hate-filled lunatics, known as ‘birthers’, have spent the last two years screeching to anyone who will listen that Obama is actually a citizen of Kenya, or Indonesia, or wherever. This, despite the fact that President Obama’s Hawaiian birth certificate, along with every single detail of his entire life, can be easily accessed on the Internet.
And this is the guy you’re supposed to call for free legal representation? I’ll take my chances with Traffic Court, thanks anyway.
Berg’s latest argument on behalf of Philly’s cell phone scofflaws is that city ordinance can’t countermand state law, and the commonwealth has not yet banned the use of hand held devices while driving. While it’s true that the state legislature has been sitting on a similar ban for almost two years now with little action, the end may be in sight.
House Bill 2070, HB 1375 and Senate Bill 143 seek to ban texting while driving. The hope, in the end, is that the local municipalities will spur our state legislators to pass the bills. Also, an interesting amendment to HB 67 would expand the state's careless driving statute to include reckless driving caused by distractions including, eating, drinking, grooming and reading.
Countless polls have concluded that laws banning cell phone use while driving are favored by ordinary citizens, police, and even the insurance companies. Perhaps they should include another demographic: emergency room doctors. Here are the latest statistics from the National Transportation Safety Board, and they’re not pretty:
Talking on a cell phone causes nearly 25 percent of car accidents. Motorists who use cell phones while driving are four times more likely to get into crashes serious enough to injure themselves. An estimated 2,600 people die each year as a result of using cell phones while driving, with another 330,000 injured. And perhaps most frightening, 21 percent of all fatal car crashes involving teenagers between the ages of 16 and 19 were the result of cell phone usage. The NTSB expects this number to grow as much as four percent every year.
I applaud City Councilmen Bill Green, William K. Greenlee, and Frank Rizzo, who sponsored the bill, and the rest of City Council for approving it. Rarely does a city law apply directly to the health and safety of every citizen like this one does.
Yes, it’s a pain in the neck to pull over just for a short conversation, and true, those wireless earphone devices are not all they’re cracked up to be. But you only have to observe the erratic driving patters of motorists chatting away merrily on the phone to know that eventually, they’re going to kill someone.
And if it costs some stubborn folks like my friend $75 to get that through their heads, all the better. The city needs the money.
