Driving Without a Smartphone

Updated on July 10, 2018

Last week, for the first time in years, I stopped my car at a red light and didn’t bide the time by fondling my smartphone. This isn’t a proud admission, but it is an honest one: Pretty much every time I stop my car at a traffic signal, I pick up my phone and do something with it. I’m not even sure what. I “check my phone,” as people say. Checking your phone doesn’t really mean checking your email or text messages or social-media feed. Mostly, it means checking to see if there’s anything to check.

I’m even less proud to admit that I didn’t stop this practice by choice. On July 1, a new hands-free law went into effect in Georgia, where I live, which makes checking your phone while driving illegal—or a lot harder to do legally, anyway. Texting while driving has been prohibited here since 2010, but the new law, HB 673 or the “Hands-Free Law,” goes much further: It appears to prohibit drivers from physically contacting the device under almost any circumstances unless legally parked. Not even if the phone is attached to a dashboard mount. Not even to adjust Google Maps while stopped at a red light. Not even to skip the track on Spotify.  

To some drivers here, this seems like an extreme step—if indeed they even understand the details of the law, which is in traffic collisions here since 2015, as it has elsewhere in the nation, too.