Cell-Phone-Free Driving Starts at Home

Emily and Will, I completely agree with you that it’s time to get serious [1] about cell phone use while driving [2]—and I think there’s an interesting generational angle to consider as a crusade, I hope, gets under way. Texting is an ideal impetus for real action: It’s so hair-raisingly obvious why you shouldn’t be doing that at the wheel, plus it’s kids who text more than adults. We tend to like liberty-curtailing crusades better when they focus on youth.

But as the experts will all tell you, it really helps if adults walk the talk—or, in this case, forgo the talk while in the car. And because plain old phoning is not so self-evidently dangerous—after all, no one’s proposing that chatting in the car be prohibited, or that radios and CD players be banned—generating a sense of urgency for the broader prohibition is going to be much harder. We should beware of expecting a lot of high dudgeon about delinquent young texters to do the job—and of letting it blind us to the thornier challenge of getting grownup yakkers to set a stringently good example.