Saturday, February 03, 2007

The answer's 42 - now what's the question?

Mobile phones in cars - what's to be done? I think before we can begin to find an answer to that question, we need to clarify just what the problem is. There seem to be two schools of thought - the one is that by using a hand-held mobile phone you are not in proper control of the car, because you only have one hand on the wheel, and the other is that carrying out a conversation on a mobile distracts your concentration from the road, and is therefore unsafe. The only answer to the second of those is to ban using a mobile while driving - full stop. The first however is solvable by technology - require all mobiles to be sold with integral hands-free kits, or perhaps better still, require all cars to be fitted with hands-free provision. I take no particular position on which road we should go down, but I think there are so many people today (particularly business people) who are on the road a lot and rely on being contactable at any time, that an outright ban would probably not work.

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