If the National Transportation Safety Board has its way, cellphone use of all kinds behind the wheel — from texting down to talking hands-free with a headset — will be illegal in all 50 of these United States.  That was the ruling the NTSB issued Tuesday, in what chairman Deborah A. P. Hersman called “a difficult recommendation, but the right recommendation.” Her five-member board agreed to a new set of guidelines that go far beyond laws that any states have on the books yet.  States are of course free to make their own laws about driving within state lines. But recommendations from Washington’s top traffic safety body are likely to carry a lot of weight — especially given that they were made in connection to a horrific accident in Missouri in August 2010. A teenager sent 11 texts in 11 minutes at the wheel of his pickup truck, then smashed into a school bus, killing himself and a 15-year-old student.  Missouri already had a law banning texting behind the wheel, but the NTSB concluded that law was not being rigorously enforced. That gave Hersman her best soundbite of the day: “No call, no text, no update is worth a human life.”  So a nationwide ban on texting while driving clearly makes sense. Holding your phone to your ear while driving seems like an obviously bad idea, too, as the millions of us who have watched such drivers swerving around the road can attest. But did the NTSB overreach by recommending we nix hands-free calls? U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood certainly doesn’t think so; he’s been inveighing against the evils of hands-free distracted driving for years.  And there’s good reason to think that way: a Virginia Tech study found that drivers were just as distracted when wearing a headset and talking as when they hold the phone to their ear. It’s the call, researchers said, not the location of the phone, that does the distracting.  Systems completely built into cars, such as OnStar, wouldn’t be affected by the proposed ban, the NTSB said. Neither would GPS devices.  Do you think the NTSB’s recommended ban goes too far, or is it a sensible precaution that will save lives? Let us know in the comments.
The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board issued a ruling Tuesday calling for a national ban on all cellphone use while driving.