I don't fault the eight members of the Aberdeen City Council. They spend millions of dollars on this and that and never hear a peep. Often, the people who stumble into their meetings are looking for the bathroom.
So when council members started finding their inboxes stuffed full of e-mails from citizens wondering if they had lost their minds, it gave them pause, and when they walked into a meeting two Mondays ago and there were people in the audience – no, not hundreds, but a dozen or two – well, they cracked, caved, folded like paper airplanes.
If the council had done what it originally had set out to do this summer, Aberdeen would have become the first city in South Dakota
And no one would have been happier than me.
It seems half the motorists I meet have one hand on the wheel and the other shoved in their ears. They are on their cell phones, and based on their expressions, they either must be talking to Larry the Cable Guy or negotiating world peace. What they are not doing is paying attention to those of us who are sharing the road.
Talking on a telephone while maneuvering 4,000 pounds of chrome and steel strikes me as a bad idea. It does David Bunsness, too.
The Aberdeen City Council member helped to shepherd the cell phone ban, which was cobbled together at the request of the Aberdeen Police Department. He says he did it even though he prefers not to meddle in private matters like how and when people choose to communicate to other people in their lives.
But Bunsness says hard evidence is starting to accumulate that suggests driving while talking on a cell phone is dangerous. Maybe even more convincing, he says, common sense suggests it as well. "You're putting people at risk. I don't think that's right."
The ordinance – which only one council member rejected on first reading but all eight did a week later at the final vote after "You got mail!" became a familiar refrain in their lives – did not allow police to stop a driver for talking on a cell phone. The person had to have been violating another traffic law, and once the driver had been stopped for that infraction, officers also could have issued a cell phone citation.
The ordinance carried a stiff fine: $102. At that amount, it would not have taken motorists long to get the message.
Aberdeen Mayor Mike Levsen estimates he received more than 100 e-mails from residents opposed to the ban. Some business people told him they rely on cell phones so much that to outlaw their use while driving would put them out of business.
Levsen dismissed that and other ridiculous exaggerations. But he says other citizens expressed what he and the city council thought were legitimate concerns. In particular, the local group in charge of bringing tourists to Aberdeen was worried visitors unaware of the ordinance would unknowingly break it, be caught and fined and forever refer to Aberdeen in words no young child should be allowed to hear. "That's an enemy you're probably going to have for a very long time," Levsen says.
According to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, six states and the District of Columbia Chicago and Detroit as well as Walton Hills , Ohio , and Waupaca County , Wis. District of Columbia
Based on its observation of 58,000 vehicles at 1,500 different sites in the United States, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in June estimated that at any given moment during the day, 11 percent of all motorists in the United States – more than a million vehicles – are on the telephone, be it hand-held or hands-free.
These drivers, it appears, are more apt to hit stuff.
After studying the cell phone billing records of almost 500 Australian motorists hurt in automobile accidents, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety found the odds of being in an injury accident increase fourfold if you're talking on a cell phone. A similar Canadian study of billing records found cell phone use yielded a similar fourfold spike in the risk of property-damage crashes.
Sgt. Galen Smidt of the Sioux Falls Police Department Traffic Patrol Division says for obvious reasons, motorists who get in accidents because they were talking on their cell phones seldom confess that fact to the police.
Smidt says talking on a cell phone while driving is doubly deceiving. People who do it think they are paying attention to the road. They appear to others to be paying attention, too.
But neither is true.
Talking on a cell phone, Smidt says, significantly slows the speed at which a motorist reacts to a hazard. For those who do it when they should be watching for kids or cats or other distracted drivers swapping small talk on their cell phones, he says, "eventually, something bad will happen."
The number of cell phone subscribers in the United States
Anymore when I pull up next to someone at a stoplight, they have their chin on their chest and they're squinting at something in their lap. It was a mystery to me at first what they were doing. Eventually, I caught on: They're checking their text messages.
Maybe I'm just a 45-year-old curmudgeon, a middle-aged stick-in-the-mud, but I don't understand the appeal of talking on a cell phone while driving. That isn't why I think the practice should be illegal, though. No, what brought me to that conclusion is this: Car accidents each year kill more than 40,000 people in America
At what point do the benefits of being able to phone a friend while operating a motor vehicle exceed the costs? If even one person dies because we've become so itchy and so self-absorbed we can't wait 15 minutes to find out what is for dinner, shouldn't there be a law?
David Bunsness regrets the Aberdeen City Council didn't pass the cell phone ban even if it might have meant a winter of discontent for him and the other council members. "We didn't have the stomach – and I didn't have the stomach – to make it happen. I'm a little disappointed in myself."
I'm not. The Aberdeen City Council did what their constituents wanted them to do. If anyone should be disappointed in themselves, it seems clear to me who that should be.