Delaware City Council will give a first-reading tonight, May 24, to a ban on texting while driving within the Delaware city limits.
Councilperson Carolyn Kay Riggle is suggesting the law be referred to as Cindy’s Law in honor of Cindy Inscho who died in a St. Patrick’s Day auto accident with a draft text message in her phone.
Delaware City Council to consider texting ban. (Michal Ufniak/sxc)
The law is patterned after Columbus’s texting ban with anyone found texting while driving facing a $150 fine and a minor misdemeanor. It covers reading text messages, as well as writing them, and prohibits drivers from accessing the Internet while behind the wheel. Passengers are not affected by this law. Delaware planned on adopting a similar law in April but held off as the state was looking at a state-wide ban, which has stalled.
A second-reading and public hearing is planned for June 10 at 7:40 p.m.
City Council meetings are held in the council chambers of City Hall at 1 South Sandusky Street in downtown Delaware, Ohio.
I think the large cellphone companies, like AT&T, have more of a responsibility to the public and its safety than to run a paper campaign against texting and driving. While these marketing campaigns arguably just insure that these large companies do not end up on the wrong side of this issue, tangible results are lacking on our highways. Big cell companies, like big tobacco, are delivering the nicotine of the cell phone industry with texting.
My three year old daughter was nearly run down right in front of me last fall by a texting driver. It changed me but I don’t hate texting. The way I see it, that would be like hating nightfall – its coming no matter what. 72% of teens text every single day – some over 3000 times a month. This issue is in its infancy.
The texting drivers I spoke with, including teens and truckers, all said that laws, public service announcements, and Big Brother type software devices that “lock down” their phones would not deter them at all. They feel their civil liberties slipping away. So I built a tool called OTTER for the individual to help manage their texting on their terms.
OTTER is a comprehensive text management system for the home, office and certainly, the highway. It has GPS based Parental Control Feature for teen drivers, a GPS Mode for adult who choose to use it. It silences all incoming text alerts and phone ring tones while in a moving vehicle. There is an Auto reply feature with unlimited customized responses. We are getting 4.5 to 5 star rating from the tech community and great response from teen groups and safety organizations. We have heard of teens using OTTER to schedule their own “texting blackout periods” so they can get some homework done without feeling disconnected from their social network. If a teen uses OTTER like this, then we think they will see the benefit of OTTER’s road safety features. We are not going to stop until change hits our roads and not just our laws.
Best,
Erik Wood, owner
OTTER LLC
http://www.OTTERapp.com