Cabbies on Cell Phones

It seems like every time I get into a cab these days, the driver is engaged in a non-stop cell phone conversation via a headset. I understand why cab drivers want to do this, but it’s incredibly dangerous:

A cabby paced beside his wrecked car, an earpiece dangling from the side of his head. An emergency worker, Ralph Ortiz, asked him what had happened.

“I was on the phone,” the driver told Mr. Ortiz, who several months later said he was still stunned by the response. “I didn’t see the light turn red.”

New York City cabbies have been banned from using cellphones for a decade — even the hands-free type, putting the city a step ahead of state law. But the stringent rules remain almost entirely unenforced, even amid research that shows drivers who talk on cellphones are four times as likely to cause a crash.

As long as the country is on the general subject of health care and public health, it’s worth pointing out that Americans’ tendency to die or be seriously injured in motor vehicle crashes seems much more amenable to policy remediation than does the country’s issues with obesity. Traffic engineering is reasonably well-understood by experts, and the research on things like the dangers of talking and texting while driving is pretty unambiguous. It would be a simple thing for a major city to mount a few “sting” operations aimed at handing out heavy fines to phone-using cabbies. And once stepped-up enforcement had been in place for a little bit, violations would drop rapidly, norms would change, and it would become much more practical for passengers to lean on drivers not to put everyone’s lives at risk.

You could even do something as simple as post a sign in the back of the cab clearly stating that the driver’s not supposed to be on the phone.