The California State Senate School of Driving

By Liam Day
May 11th, 2008

Deeming Paris Hilton a threat to all California drivers, that state’s senate just passed a law making it illegal for people to drive with a dog on their laps. The bill is now pending in the house.

As I am sometimes guilty of this infraction - my wife and I own a little Maltese (please keep the Liam Day-Paris Hilton comparisons to a minimum) - the blurb on it in The Week caught my eye.

This particular piece of legislation make sense to me. It truly does; but what it doesn’t do is go far enough. While we’re legislating the topic, we might want to be as comprehensive as possible.

Here is my list of the driving habits I think a comprehensive piece of driving behavior legislation needs to ban (based on a partial list of the things I too often do or have done while driving): bending back the opening on a Dunkin’ Donuts coffee lid, drinking coffee, eating, chewing tobacco, lighting a cigarette, smoking (both the chew and the cigarettes were phases), looking for a CD in the car door, changing the CD in the player on the dashboard, tuning the radio, and talking on a cell phone (though, because I’m not so stupid I’ve done it while driving, not texting).

All of these actions, even if only for a moment, distract our attention from the road. I might even add to the list daydreaming. (Two poems I’ve written came to me while driving long distances, are, in fact, about driving long distances, and I’m pretty sure that, as I was playing with word choice and line breaks in my head, I wasn’t entirely focused on the road.)

Come to think of it, we might as well throw in legislative language on not doing the crossword while driving, as Paul Giamatti’s character does while navigating the Los Angeles freeway in the opening shots of Sideways.

As an enforcement mechanism, I suggest check points at 2 mile intervals on every major highway in the country. If local and state police are not manned to undertake such a large task, then I would empower the National Guard. Having lived in Northern Ireland, I can tell you that having an M-16 pointed at your face as you drive through a military check point is no big deal. Really.