Re: OSHA: Two Federal DOT Agencies Ban Hand-Held Phone Use [telecom]

US Occupational Health & Safety has reported on their web site

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that "Two DOT agencies, the Federal Motor > Carrier Safety Administration and the Pipeline and Hazardous > Materials Safety Administration, published a final rule Dec. 2 that > will prohibit use of hand-held mobile phones by commercial drivers > while on the road...."

It seems that the DOT has put a higher penalty on hand-held cell

> phone usage while driving than probably most states have imposed on > over-the-road drivers and have even added a fine on their employers, > too. According to the article, "Drivers who violate the restriction > can be charged a civil penalty of as much as $2,750; a civil penalty > of as much as $11,000 can be imposed on employers who fail to > require their drivers to comply." These new rules take effect > January 3, 2012.

Do these rules also apply to CB use, which is mostly truckers now?

Wes Leatherock snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com snipped-for-privacy@aol.com

Reply to
Wes Leatherock
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No. According to the order, they used the same definition of "mobile telephone" that the FCC does - it's a device which uses commercial mobile radio services. CB, FRS, GMRS, and amateur radio are not commercial mobile radio services.

"The push-to-talk feature of a mobile telephone can be replaced with the use of a compliant mobile telephone, two-way radios, or walkie-talkies for the short periods of time when communication is critical for utility providers, school bus operations, or specialty haulers. The use of CB and two-way radios and other electronic devices by CMV drivers for other functions is outside the scope of consideration in this rulemaking." This is consistent with how the California DMV has decided to interpret California's no-hands-on-mobile-phones-while-driving regulations... they don't apply to CB, walkie-talkie use, or ham radio (although I suspect that using a ham radio to access a telephone autopatch would be technically forbidden, and I always pull over and park before using one).

Reply to
Dave Platt

The cited rule applies to "hand-held mobile phones". It would seem obvious that this does not include 2-way radios (of any sort), where the radio is mounted to the vehicle body.

***** Moderator's Note *****

I wonder: would this law apply to a /cell/ phone that was mounted to the vehicle? I know that AMPS phones mounted in the trunk are passé, but there must be a zillion vehicle-mounted "Onstar" phones out there.

Bill Horne Moderator

Reply to
Robert Bonomi

[Moderator snip]

Plenty of regulations based on state laws continue to allow the making of hands-free phone calls, completely missing the point that the danger isn't from the fact that the hands are engaged but that the brain is disengaged from driving.

***** Moderator's Note *****

Maybe the state legislatures which passed those laws decided that forbidding "hands free" use would be unenforceable, or placed the language in the bills to solve a safety problem without inviting a fight with the FCC, knowning that hands-free use is a negligible percentage of the potential violations.

To my mind, the bigger question is whether using two-way (non-cellular) radios while driving is inherently dangerous. I don't think it is, but I don't know what, if anything, the statistics say: the first hard data about the dangers of cell phone use while driving came from countries that allow their police to access cellular call data without court orders, and that means that those police forces had access to enough data to make justifiable statistical inferences. In the U.S., AFAIK, it's a different story.

In any case, there's no equivalent mechanism to track use of two-way radios during or preceding an accident, since there's no way to gather the data in the first place.

Bill Horne Moderator

Reply to
Adam H. Kerman

But it's not a negligible share of the collisions. Later studies showed hands free was just as distracting, but state legislatures were lobbied extensively to ignore the studies. A great deal of legislation was passed after the results of studies of hands-free were well known, so it was really just inexcusable.

I think drivers behave differently. They don't act like they are having a private conversation on a land line, no lengthy personal calls and chatting, no lengthy business discussions. Nextel's cellular walkie talkie-like service probably isn't inherently dangerous.

Maybe if cell phones were set up to appear to be the radios that they are, requiring the user to hold in the button to talk, the problem would be solved.

***** Moderator's Note *****

Please cite the studies that showed "... hands free was just as distracting".

Bill Horne Moderator

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Reply to
Adam H. Kerman

The following was in today's Phila Inqr:

More drivers texting at wheel, despite state bans - About half of American drivers between 21 and 24 say they've thumbed messages or emailed from the driver's seat. And what's more, many drivers don't think it's dangerous when they do it , only when others do, per a national survey.

full article at:

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Reply to
HAncock4

This summary paper cites the major studies between 2003 and 2008.

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This one was paid for by State Farm, so take it with a grain of salt.
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I cannot find any studies on distracted driving while using a CB radio. But some of Oprah's viewers felt they should be treated the same way:

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The main danger from CB radios seems to be from accidental electrocution by sticking your finger inside.

***** Moderator's Note *****

I suppose someone might have gotten a shock from a CB radio in 1958, when the Class "D" Citizens Radio Service was created: at the time, radios were made with vacuum tubes and needed high voltages to run.

Nowadays, the only people who risk shocks from CB sets are the ones using old Ham Radio transmitters illegally. Every real CB set sold today runs on 12 Volts, the same voltage you get from a car battery.

Bill Horne Moderator

Reply to
Adam H. Kerman

On 2011-12-09 10:29, Telecom Digest Moderator wrote (offline):

I'm neither being peevish nor advocating civil disobedience. I'm just taking the absurdity of this law (and those who passed it) to their logical conclusion. If they're going to have a law that bans the use of one kind of radio while driving while allowing another, based solely on whether its circuitry is mounted to the vehicle body, then by all means let's all obey the letter of this stupid law while thumbing our noses at its spirit.

In a few years, the witch-hunt mentality which produced the law will go away and find a new target, just as it did in the case of the so-called "assault weapons" ban (which, like this one, focused on looks alone and allowed many weapons to remain legal which are as dangerous as the ones it banned, merely because they didn't look as scary to ignorant legislators such as the bill's author, Sen. Feinstein).

Legislation by sound bite deserves only such cooperation as it compels us to give it.

Sincerely, John

Reply to
John David Galt

Not to beat this subject to death, but there seems to be conflicting stories and accident statistics regarding the distraction caused by texting/talking while driving.

In a recent article in the Chicago Sun-Times publication, Post-Tribune (on-line), titled "

Study shows increase in drivers texting behind the wheel",

By JOAN LOWY,

dated Dec. 8, 2011, the Ms. Lowy opens with "

Texting while driving increased 50 percent last year despite a rush by states to ban the practice, federal safety officials said Thursday...." Further along in the article, she supports the article title with, "There were an estimated 3,092 deaths in crashes affected by distractions in 2010, the safety administration said...." Then in another interesting statistic she indicates in an apparent opposition to the deaths related to driving while distracted, that over all deaths in traffic accidents are down: "Overall, 32,885 people died in traffic crashes in the United States in 2010, a nearly 3 percent drop and the lowest number of fatalities since 1949...."

Now in relation to the last sentence, the article indicates the decrease in traffic deaths with," Safety researchers generally attribute the lower deaths to a decline in driving because of the poor economy combined with better designed and equipped cars and stronger safety laws." But since the comparison statistics go back to

1949 where there were a lot less drivers than today and automobiles were built like (as I recall) "tanks" - cars of those days were made out of steel not plastics and aluminum - it doesn't seem that anywhere are these "researchers" relating "apples to apples"!

Article located at:

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A person might wonder why all the push against texting/talking while driving because another article on SmartMotorist.com indicates that, "Cell phones have gotten a lot of negative media attention recently

-- but other more low-tech distractions cause most traffic accidents. Have you ever spilled hot coffee on yourself? Dropped something on the floor while driving?...."

Notice the article indicates that "most" traffic accidents are not caused by cell phone usage. So what's the big push to stop mobile communication?

Article located at:

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Who knows, perhaps (tongue-in-cheek) some "anti-mobile communication" group who is against any form of wireless communication or maybe yet, the telephone land-line companies are at the source of all this negativism!!!!

John Stahl

Reply to
John Stahl

Here's one

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A person using a mobile phone when driving is four times more likely to have a crash that will result in hospital attendance. Sex, age group, or availability of a hands-free device do not influence the increased likelihood of a crash. In this study, we measured the seriousness of crashes by participants¹ injuries; almost all had at least one injury and almost half had two or more.

Reply to
Matt Simpson

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