Cty Sez No Txtng

By Prescott Carlson in News on Oct 2, 2008 8:55PM

It looks like that texting while driving ban we mentioned a few weeks ago is rocketing through the city council on its way to becoming a law. Yesterday, a committee headed by Ald. Ed Burke took the first steps necessary to add texting, emailing, and web surfing while driving to the already existing cell phone ban, and the full council is sure to green light the ban next week. So if you just can't wait to get home to text your boyfriend on your McCainBerry™, you'll have to pull over and take the car out of gear before you do it. Burke already made a preemptive strike defending the ban:

“I know the arguments against this — that we shouldn’t be a nanny state, that we shouldn’t be a nanny city, that people should be permitted to have some freedom of choice,” said Burke, who also wanted to ban trans fats and impose mandatory calorie counts.

“But I do believe that, just like the seatbelt law proved to be a great boon to safety, the anti-texting ordinance and the anti-cell phone use ordinance can help to increase the safety of people [who] are operating motor vehicles in the city of Chicago.”

We'll spot him the apples/oranges comparison, if only because we can barely change the radio without swerving into a row of parked cars so this is one ban we can get behind. Now if only they could cut down on the number of people we see reading the newspaper while driving on the Kennedy -- oh wait, that's already being taken care of. [S-T]

Photo by Tim Caynes