Change of Subject

Change of Subject

August 09, 2009|By Eric Zorn

This one oughta be interesting to enforce

I agree very much with the sentiment behind the ban on texting while driving that Gov. Pat Quinn signed into law last week. The research, as well as ghastly anecdotal evidence, is convincing that typing little messages with your thumbs is incompatible with steering a multi-ton vehicle on the public way.

What I can't figure out, though, is how police will be able to enforce this ban and write tickets that will hold up in court when the law takes effect in January.

Every moving violation now on the books is either visible to police -- you blew that red light; your shoulder belt wasn't on; your cell phone was up by your ear -- or, in the case of drunken driving, based on evidence gathered or observed after the traffic stop.

But texting takes place somewhere around lap level in most cases, out of sight of any police officer who's not right next to the vehicle.

And even when an officer sees a motorist seeming to poke away at a visible hand-held device, what evidence refutes the defense that the driver was simply dialing his phone, changing songs on his MP3 player or even trying to turn the power off?

Time-stamped data on the device itself or records kept by the carrier, of course. But absent on-the-spot confessions, are police and prosecutors really going to go to the trouble of subpoenaing such records just to nail Joe Texter?

"I don't think that's going to happen," said Brenda Glahn, assistant general counsel for Illinois Secretary of State Jesse White, who helped write the new law. "For serious cases in the aftermath of accidents, yes. But not for routine traffic stops."

Glahn, a former assistant state's attorney in Sangamon County, allowed that it isn't clear what visual evidence will constitute probable cause for a driving-while-texting traffic stop, and the extent to which police could search a car if the driver, having hidden the phone under a seat, claimed merely to have been adjusting his seat belt.

"I'm sure case law will start to develop on this as defense lawyers challenge the conduct of police officers," Glahn said. "In the end it's likely to be a judgment call -- like improper lane usage -- and up to a judge to determine whose story is more credible, the officer's or the driver's."

What I suspect is that the police will quickly tire of the inevitable legal hassles of trying to prove up DWT charges and only pursue them in the aftermath of serious crashes.

Yet that this new law will provide a constant, inspirational reminder that texting and driving don't mix.

Parking perks

"The Parking Meter Geek," who blogs at and is our town's acknowledged expert on his pet issue, wrote that I am either "really brave, or just crazy" for daring, last week, to say something positive about the city's new parking program.

Yes, I know that the privatization deal probably ripped off future generations and that parking fees have quadrupled in most places, even as hours of enforcement have been extended. Outrageous. Granted.

And I wish the big signs had more information about cost and time limits, and that limits could be extended during evening hours. But outside of the Loop, the prices seem reasonable, at least compared with commercial parking lots. The marginally higher cost of street parking seems to prevent people from squatting at ultracheap meters all day in shopping districts, meaning you can usually find a spot now in commercial districts where, before, in my experience, you usually couldn't. And since the pay boxes take credit cards as well as coins, you no longer have to worry about having a pouch of quarters with you at all times. With the parking receipts for your dashboard, you also get a printed record of your excursion and, potentially, documentation to fight a parking ticket.

In the minority

Gosh, I thought I made a great argument in my column Tuesday that the constitutional requirement that a U.S. president be a "natural born" citizen instead of just a naturalized citizen was a vestige of 18th Century bigotry and paranoia and ought to be removed.

Only 32 percent of roughly 300 respondents to my click survey agreed. Sixty-eight percent disagreed. Though the poll was unscientific, it closely tracked the results of several scientific polls taken earlier this decade.

Toss or treasure?

Just doing the dental math, we have three kids over age 12 and so approximately 60 "baby teeth" are floating around the house somewhere. Some are squirreled away in envelopes ("Annie's First Tooth," and so on), but neither my wife nor I have any idea where the other ones are.

It doesn't seem right to throw them away (well, actually, it kind of does, but not at the very moment you retrieve them from under your child's pillow), nor does it seem right to mount, label or otherwise archive them as though they were actual keepsakes or, God forbid, to turn them into jewelry.

So, evidently, probably, there are a couple of dozen loose teeth resting at the bottom of drawers or at the backs of shelves. By the way, the formal name for such chompers is not "baby" but "deciduous," a term most of us associate with plants and trees that lose their leaves in the fall. Yet the follow-up teeth are not "evergreen," unless you have appallingly bad dental hygiene, but "succedaneous," (suck-seh-DAY-nee-us). Dazzle your friends at parties with this knowledge.

Anyway, these deciduous incisors, bicuspids and so on were cute in their day, hardworking, the source of drama and a little bit of pain at the last. But now they don't even rise to the level of souvenirs.

A friend told me recently that she'd found a baggie of her boys' baby teeth and, with barely a pang, tossed it out. When ours turn up, maybe just one by one, is there a better option?

If you have any ideas, the floor is open at Change of Subject online,