As a commuter, I am in favour of improved road safety. However, enforcing the new law making it illegal to use your hands to operate electronic devices while driving may be difficult to enforce. It is likely that many court cases will be quashed because of exemptions like …
“Exemption for pressing buttons
14. (1) A person may drive a motor vehicle on a highway while pressing a button on a hand-held wireless communication device to make, answer or end a cell phone call or to transmit or receive voice communication on a two-way radio if the device is placed securely in or mounted to the motor vehicle so that it does not move while the vehicle is in motion and the driver can see it at a quick glance and easily reach it without adjusting his or her driving position.”
So if I understand this correctly, as long as the phone is attached, the driver can still press buttons to operate it. It seems that the intention of this exemption is to make it legal to press one button but not more or maybe some of the buttons but not all. Is pressing one button more distracting or dangerous then pressing two buttons? How exactly will it be proven in court how many buttons were pressed? Will there be a list of exempt buttons?
It is interesting to see how the sales of hands-free Bluetooth wireless devices are going throught the roof. I wonder if drivers are buying them for the right reasons. Isn’t that just adding to the number of devices and buttons in your car? I have tried the Motorola T-505 device in my car as an experiment. I found that I periodically had to scan the status of the visor-mounted T-505 to make sure it was ready to make or take a call and that it didn’t power down because of inactivity, etc. Then, I would also point my eye balls on the phone itself to see if I missed any calls. Talk about distracting! I am not picking on Motorola but, like most new gadgets, it will take some time to get used to. The unfortunate thing is that the drivers will be learning how to use their new devices strarting this week WHILE DRIVING!
As for me, I am going low tech on this one – sticking some Velcro on the back of my smart phone and the dash and turning on the speaker button. I hope that button is legal.
