Governor Margaret Wood Hassan signed New Hampshire’s hands-free device law in 2015. We told them it wouldn’t do what they claimed and might just make matters worse. After all, the research showed that people who got distracted still would, and people less inclined would be more often, as they tried to avoid detection.Goodness knows I’ve seen numerous blatant violations of this law over the years with the worst being a fellow traveling south on I-93 with a tablet on his steering wheel he was using to watch video. I let him get far ahead of me because I didn’t want to be a statistic if he ended up causing an accident because of his inattention. Another blatant example I’ve seen again and again is people at stoplights texting and being so focused on their texting that they never saw when the light turned green and would sit there, oblivious to the fact that they were blocking the traffic behind them...or they didn’t care because their texts were far more important.
The law prohibits drivers from using hand-held electronic devices while driving. This does not include styling wands, razors, or anything else you can hold. It also does not include interacting with embedded in-vehicle devices the size of iPads or anything else distracting, including passengers.
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Ten years later, there is no evidence it did anything but inconvenience safe drivers and jack up car prices, as every model had to have hands-free tech, even the sort that was more distracting than talking with a cell phone held to your ear.
As I have written here and in comment threads, the auto industry’s move to touchscreens to control vehicle functions may have seemed logical from a cost point as the touchscreen eliminates most of the buttons, knobs, and switches which is convenient since just about everything in a vehicle is controlled by computers these days. But when those cost-saving moves add to the distractions experienced by drivers, then it can end up being more costly than any of the supposed savings, particularly in damage to vehicles and injuries or fatalities to drivers, passengers, and pedestrians. This has prompted some auto manufacturers to take a step back and return to those archaic buttons, knobs and switches because the touchscreens require a driver to take their eyes off the road in order perform a simple task on the touchscreen.
Yes, I did get a little off topic as the original reference was made to Hands-Free Laws, but those off-topic items did show that even if a driver wasn’t using their phone or tablet or whatever in contradiction to the law, there are plenty of other things inside a vehicle that multiplied the distraction problem.
In any case, I have to wonder about how other states have been handling their versions of Hands-Free Laws and if they’ve seen the same thing seen here in New Hampshire or are their laws working as they were supposed to work?