I’ve been scrubbing through my blog archives since my WordPress migration to clean up categorization, tagging, formatting, and a bug caused by my blogging style that left some posts half-imported.
This morning, I went back over this post from February of 2007, regarding Sen. Carl Kruger’s proposed law to ban cellphones and music devices while walking.
“While people are tuning into their iPods and cell phones, they’re tuning out the world around them… If you want to listen to your iPod, sit down and listen to it. You want to walk in the park, enjoy it. You want to jog around a jogging path, all the more power to you, but you should not be crossing streets and endangering yourself and the lives of others.”
The crux of my argument in 2007 was “we already have laws against jaywalking, why do we need this?”
Not ten minutes after cleaning the post, I saw that Colleen Taylor had shared a NY Times article from this week on Google Reader: States’ Lawmakers Turn Attention to the Dangers of Distracted Pedestrians.
The New York bill was proposed by State Senator Carl Kruger, a Brooklyn Democrat who has grown alarmed by the amount of distraction he sees on the streets in his neighborhood and across New York City. Since September, Mr. Kruger wrote in the bill, three pedestrians have been killed and one was critically injured while crossing streets and listening to music through headphones.
My argument in 2011 is the same as my argument in 2007.
I look forward to revisiting this proposed law again in 2015.