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This comes from the Dallas (a big Telecommunications Mecca) Morning News. This is known as irony.
22/12/2000
By Frank Greve / Knight Ridder Newspapers
WASHINGTON – A nation suddenly keen to run on safer tires remains unmoved by what may be a greater highway hazard: drivers using cell phones.
Note: as a cell phone user myself whom does NOT use his cell phone while driving, I must say that I'm totally shocked at this statement. I have never seen this anywhere (this is known as sarcasm).
In simulator tests, drivers on cell, mobile, or car phones tend to veer out of their lanes more often and check mirrors less often than the average driver. They tend to lose track of surrounding traffic and don't maintain proper distance between vehicles.
Note: Again, I'm totally shocked at this statement. I have never seen this anywhere (this is known as sarcasm).
Alarmed, 14 industrialized countries, including Great Britain, Germany, Japan, Israel, Spain and Italy, restrict cell phone use by drivers. But the United States does not, and will not in the foreseeable future, for an array of political, legal, economic, bureaucratic and lifestyle reasons.
Note: Political (tell that to Mayor Willie Brown of San Francisco)? I guess it's good economics for Funeral Parlors and Cemeteries. I'll buy the bureaucratic excuse. Lifestyle reasons are no excuses.
The main one is that drivers love their cell phones. Moreover, the hazards of cell phones are offset by their life-saving utility when it comes to summoning emergency aid, reporting reckless drivers, warning of traffic jams or simply relieving stress with a call to say the driver is running late.
Note: more lame excuses regarding the offset of a life-saving utility (tell that one to more than 3 times the number of people that died from the Ford/Firestone tire shenanigans. Oh wait, most of you can't talk to dead people.).
But there is a darker side of the picture: Some highway safety researchers, among them Frances Bents, co-editor of the most comprehensive appraisal of cell-phone-accident research, implicate cell phones in 450 highway deaths a year or more.
Note: Again, 3 times the number of people that died from the Ford/Firestone tire shenanigans.
Dee Yankoskie, a spokeswoman for the Cellular Telecommunications & Internet Association, the Washington-based trade association for cell phone and service firms, calls Ms. Bents' data "incomplete" and says the real numbers are unknown. If Ms. Bents' figures are even in the ballpark, fatalities associated with cell phones would far exceed the 148 U.S. deaths now linked to Firestone tires over a decade.
Note: Ms Yankoskie evidently doesn't drive in the United States, stand in line besides some BITCH talking about how her boyfriend is fucking her sister while the cashier waits for her to pay for her items purchased, or has not been in a movie theater or play when someones' phone rang 4 times before they answered bellowing across the theater.
The cell-phone industry doesn't accept a link between its products and traffic accidents, arguing that accidents linked to cell phones reflect reckless driving, not problems intrinsic to the devices.
Note: de nile is a river in Egypt. What the cell-phone industry is saying is REGULATE us because we don't give a damn about people as long as a buck is made (even if it's at there expense).
Whatever the interpretation, with cell-phone use growing at 34 percent each year and e-mail, Internet and navigation aids about to become widely available in vehicles, fatalities associated with electronic driver distractions are likely to grow.
The dangers are real (as opposed to "fake dangers"). Consider:
•Madison County, Fla., Sheriff's Deputy Steve Agner, his cruiser's blue lights flashing, was creeping along at the end of a lane of construction-zone traffic on Florida's Interstate 10 two summers ago when he saw his death in his rearview mirror. The weather was clear, the road flat and dry, and Deputy Agner was still waving a red warning flag from his window when Angela Wallace, 21, talking on a cell phone in her Chevy pickup, plowed into him at 74 mph. She left no skid marks.
•Lisa Duffner of Lawrenceville, Ga., and her two children were walking the family dog in March 1999 when a local girl, 16, lost control of her car while dialing her cell phone. She hit Ryan, 2, hurling him 60 feet, and his mother. Lisa, 5, retrieved her dying brother and carried him to their seriously injured mother.
•Motorcyclist Michael Roberts, 24, of Allentown, Pa., was picking up hot dogs for his family when James Tarone, a stockbroker making a business call, ran a red light in his red Mercedes and struck and killed Mr. Roberts. Mr. Tarone drove on, explaining later that he thought he'd sideswiped a parked car. His employer settled with Mr. Roberts' heirs last year for $500,000.
•Sara Ann Burns, 17, and John Shelman, 19, were passengers in a red Plymouth Laser driven by a close friend who, while talking to his girlfriend, dropped his cell phone. As he groped for it, he lost control of the car, crossed the median at 70 mph, and hit an I-435 overpass pillar in Leawood, Kan. Ms. Burns died instantly. Mr. Shelman died urging rescuers to help Ms. Burns.
•Ashley Sumner, 27, of Grand Rapids, Mich., was talking to her boyfriend last summer when she ran a stop sign in her Honda Accord and collided with a Jeep Grand Cherokee. Her last words: "Oh my God, I'm going to be hit!"
No one knows how common accidents such as these are. Safety researcher Bents' analysis of about 60 cell-phone accidents suggests two troubling characteristics: The victim typically isn't the cell-phone user; it's a person struck by the distracted driver. Also, most fatalities occur while drivers are talking, not while they're fumbling with their equipment. So hands-free phones – the most popular idea to make cell-phone use safer – may not solve the problem.
Note: I think the bolded text (in the above paragraph) says enough here.
It sounds like a job for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, created by Congress to find "ways to change people's unsafe behavior," among other things, to "reduce the mounting number of deaths, injuries and economic losses resulting from traffic accidents."
Note: there's that economic word again but after the "mounting number of deaths."
But the NHTSA doesn't have jurisdiction over cell phones; the Federal Communications Commission does, although its regulation mainly involves technical characteristics. Neither agency regulates driver behavior, however; that's the job of state legislatures. NHTSA researchers can prove that tougher laws on drunken driving or cell-phone use would save lives, but it's up to state lawmakers to pass them.
Note: does your state care about you? Probably, as long as you pay your state taxes (in states that have those unlike Texas).
The NHTSA deploys its resources accordingly. In the case of cell-phone-safety research, that amounts to two employees and about $1 million a year in outlays and contracts. Through a representative, NHTSA Administrator Dr. Sue Bailey declined to be interviewed for this article.
Note: she declined because she would not withstand the pressure and/or she is one of the people discussed in this article. $1 Million dollars a year for this "department of 2 employees"? Talk about a bureaucratic waste. And, women have no power.
It's not that the NHTSA is unaware of the problem. At a public hearing on in-car electronics in July, deputy administrator Rosalyn Millman admitted that her agency is overwhelmed.
"The stunning speed from innovation to installation," she said, "is such that NHTSA's first awareness of a product or service may well be when it is already being designed into or carried into a vehicle and used by a driver."
Joseph Kanianthra, the director of the NHTSA's Office of Vehicle Safety Research, doubts that his agency will ever have data good enough to support regulation.
Note: how many needless deaths of small children or teenagers does it take? How many would it take if the victims were Sports Stars, Movie Stars, CEO's, or Religious leaders?
There are two big problems: Most findings are based on simulations, not the real-world experience that legislators need to write laws that will stand up in court. Second, cell phones vary so much – handheld, hands-free, speed-dialed, voice-activated, etc. – that it's impossible to generalize about their risks.
Note: a cell-phone is a cell-phone. As mentioned earlier in this article, the most common risk is when people are talking while driving (or if I'm in a theater with a gun and you talk during the movie).
Real-life data linking cell phones and fatal crashes are hard to come by. For police, helping the injured and restoring traffic flow are more important than investigating whether cell-phone use – which is legal in all but a few U.S. jurisdictions – contributed to the accident.
Note: how many needless lawsuits have to be brought up? How many needless deaths of small children or teenagers does it take? How many would it take if the victims were Sports Stars, Movie Stars, CEO's, or Religious leaders?
Only Minnesota, Tennessee and Oklahoma now require police to determine whether the driver in a crash was using a cell phone. Pennsylvania, Maryland, Michigan, Iowa, Montana and Texas will join them in 2002.
Note: why does it take Texas over 2 years (at the time of this article) to require this? How will they force police to do this? How many needless deaths of small children or teenagers does it take? How many would it take if the victims were Sports Stars, Movie Stars, CEO's, or Religious leaders?
Cell phone use generally is tough to prove. One hurdle: the precise time of an accident is often hard to fix. A bigger hurdle: Cell phone service companies usually don't surrender customers' records to police without a subpoena.
Note: i'm sure attorneys have no problems with subpoena (especially if they are going to profit from it).
NHTSA engineer Mike Goodman, the agency's chief cell-phone expert, has an idea: Why not use a computer to compare state records of auto accident times with service company billing records? As is common in statistical research, identities would be protected. In short order, Goodman says, any correlation between cell phone use and driving accidents would be apparent.
Note: whoah.. someone actually thought about using a computer for something besides doom? I'm shocked.
Asked at an NHTSA-sponsored cell phone-safety hearing last summer about allowing researchers to use service company records, Tom Wheeler, head of the Cellular Telecommunications & Internet Association, demurred. "Some folks would consider that an invasion of privacy," he said.
Note: "an invasion of privacy?" How about my "invasion of privacy" when your NEGLIGENCE causes me physical harm (not limited to death) or material loss so you could talk about how your boyfriend/girlfriend is fucking or getting fucked by your brother/sister; or how you need to purchase stock (options)?
How many needless deaths of small children or teenagers does it take? How many would it take if the victims were Sports Stars, Movie Stars, CEO's, or Religious leaders?
Wheeler was equally pessimistic about another NHTSA idea – having the industry come up with safer design standards for cell phones. "Our friends at the Justice Department frown on design standardization," he said. Through a spokesman, Wheeler declined to be interviewed by Knight Ridder. He referred questions about standardized designs to CTIA general counsel Michael Altschul.
"Antitrust laws don't allow manufacturers to limit or require features, even if they are pro-consumer," Altschul said. Any restrictions on design "would limit a form of competition which antitrust laws really prize."
Note: antitrust laws do NOT cause cell phone users NOT to pay attention.
An imbalance of power distorts the appeals of opponents and proponents of regulation. On one side is a thriving $40 billion-a-year cell-phone industry, lately joined by automakers keen to sell in-car devices. On the other is Patricia Pena, 29, of Perkasie, Pa. Ms. Pena put up a Web site, appeared on Oprah and began addressing state legislators after a cell-phoning driver ran a stop sign and struck and killed her infant daughter, Morgan, in November 1999.
Some likely driver advocacy groups, such as the American Automobile Association, advocate no more than more research. Full disclosure: Many AAA chapters earn income from offshoots that sell cell phones and service. This doesn't distort AAA's perspective, said spokesman Mantill Williams, because chapters sell lots of hands-free car phones that many regulators favor.
Note: in step with BOYCOTTing the RIAA, we should also BOYCOTT AAA.
"We make money either way," he said.
Note: as more people die (most which seem to be NON cell-phone users), at some point, there will be NO more NON cell-phone users and the deaths will be the cell phone users themselves and where will the money come from then? This tells me that money is more important than human life but if there is no more human life, where will the money come from? And, this is AAA.
Again, how many needless deaths of small children or teenagers does it take? How many would it take if the victims were Sports Stars, Movie Stars, CEO's, or Religious leaders?
The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, based in Arlington, Va., a research group for insurance companies, would like to investigate cell phone accidents. But it has the same problem NHTSA does: "It's hard to get data from cell phone companies," said Susan Ferguson, vice president of research.
Note: this means that the cell phone companies and service providers need MORE Government REGULATION.
Net result: Unless the American Motorcyclists Association, whose riders are especially wary of motorists using cell phones, gets into the act, Pena is the leading U.S. proponent for regulating cell phones in cars.
Final Note: if this offends you, then you are either the person (s) this article talks about (and feel guilty (and possibly angry) for needless hell you put the rest of the courteous people through)) or someone who cares about life.
Anything in this article that is bolded and/or underlined was added by me and was not listed in the original article. This is my opinion and I don't give a rat's ass if you agree or disagree. Your lack of disdain, lack of acknowledgement, or vehement denial is testament to the fact I have a hit a nerve. If I have a nerve, then I must be on to something.
Questions or comments should be directed to me at m%20yw%20e%20b.1995@gma%20il.co%20m
This page was last updated on Friday, 17 March 2006
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