Most places – including Harrisburg – only ban hand-held cell phones, but it’s not really that much of a deal to drop your phone on the floor. It’s probably not even going to be damaged, and it won’t interfere with your driving. We’ve had people using CB-type radios for half a century, using hand-held press-to-talk microphones, and there’s been no problem with those.
Dropping a hot cup of coffee could result in a scalded crotch – which likely would result in a traffic accident even if nothing else was going on. A Pepsi can dropped on the floor invariably will roll behind a pedal, keeping it from being depressed.
Talking on the cell phone means you’ve turned the radio off. If you listen to talk radio, taking a cell phone call is probably much less distracting. And after a couple subtle suggestions applied with a 2×4, the other passengers in your car quickly learn to shut their yap while you’re on the phone, and that is less distracting, too.
I used to commute 50 miles east of my home in the morning, which meant facing the sun for another hour at the end of the day as well. The visor on the window would rarely be in the right place to block the sun, but if I held the newspaper just right, I could see fairly well – and I stayed up on current events as well. Rather than ban cell-phones, they ought to require all newspapers to switch to tabloid format. Newspapers are only 28″ wide now, compared to 34″ wide back then, but today’s cars are smaller, too, and turning those pages to read the rest of the story is dangerous.
