Georgia Senate approves House Bill 673*, outlawing motorists from holding their cell phones while operating a vehicle AKA the stop fucking texting while driving bill.
*behind paywall, but just hit the stop loading button before the paywall script popup has a chance to load to read content anyway because fuck myAJC
That’s great and all, but it’s going to be completely meaningless when no cop in the state is going to bother enforcing this law. Unless they’re extremely bored and want to do work to pass the time and/or they’re targeting minorities. One of my best friends works in law enforcement, and every time I have questions about “is X illegal?” the answers are almost always yes, but with a disclaimer that it’s basically discretionary on the officer to whether or not it’s worth the effort to tie themselves up with menial violations when there are bigger fish to potentially fry.
And considering Georgia’s lax discretionary ambivalence about HOV lane violators, blackout license plate covers, jaywalking, and other seemingly innocuously negligible yet illegal misdemeanors, HB 673 seems destined to be as useless as most of these other laws, because if nobody’s going to bother enforcing it, what’s really the point?
Believe you me, I would be stoked if this bill actually fully passes both the Senate and the House and actually becomes a legitimate law. It’s not as bad as when I actively worked in the city, but still not too many car trips go by where I don’t have to honk my horn, pass a slow-moving vehicle or unnecessarily brake, because some fuck face’s face isn’t watching the road but glued to whatever bullshit is on their cellphone’s screen instead. It’s so painfully obvious too when someone’s been busted on their phones, because anyone with eyes can see a head snap up when they’ve been honked at, as they put their phone down and then floor it, or you see a car going unnecessarily slow, because as their eyes fixate on a screen, their foot comes off the gas or worse off brake, because slowing down is justification enough to safely compensate for the risk of distraction.
I would rather forfeit the OCD need to spin a Pokéstop or check a text message at a red light than to allow other people to be shitheads on the road. But I have 0% faith that the introduction of this bill would actually do anything. People are far too selfish shitheads to change shitty behavior, and as long as they believe no cops are around, they’ll be all over their phones while driving, as they already are. And even if the police are in sight, I don’t have much faith that they’re going to bother pulling over people talking on their phones, because the fines don’t be seem to get any higher than like $150, and that’s for multiple violations, and they could much more easily justify their existence by busting the thousands of speeders throughout the state instead; if they even choose to do anything at all.
It’s a good thought by the senate, but it’s definitely one that has no chance of actually making an impact unless there’s a 100% buy-in from all those who would be in charge of enforcing it. I know most cops deny the allegations of quotas, but honestly, would it be so bad if it were publicly known that there were? Bad behavior can’t really be curbed unless the infractions are actively reinforced, and if a few people have to be made lambs to the slaughter in order to prevent a larger populous from thinking they can get away with it, then so be it; they’re the ones doing illegal misdemeanor shit in the first place, someone should have to pay the price eventually. Far too many people are living their lives getting away with stupid shit on a far too frequent scale, and pretty much all of it needs to be scaled back to some more reasonable levels.
Put your fucking phones down and get good at using Siri or Google Voice, and prepare for conversations of poorly speech-to-text composed messages instead, but at least be safer on the god damn roads.
