Janet Froetscher, the group's president and chief executive, likened talking on cell phones to drunken driving, saying cell phone use increases the risk of a crash fourfold.

"When our friends have been drinking, we take the car keys away. It's time to take the cell phone away," Froetscher said.

No state bans all cell phone use while driving. Like the City of Detroit, six states -- California, Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, Utah and Washington -- and the District of Columbia ban the use of handheld cell phones behind the wheel, according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. Also, 17 states and the nation's capital restrict or ban cell phone use by novice drivers.

Let me say from the start, I just don't do it.  I can think of one time in the last three months when I spent about thirty seconds on the phone in the middle of traffic and the fact that I jumped onto the highway heading in the wrong direction simply reinforced to me how categorically incapable I am of that particular kind of multi-tasking.  I hung up, I exited, I turned around and I made it home safe and sound.

Others are a little more adept at those sorts of maneuvers.  

On the flip side, I could drive from here to Lansing and rap along with every word of Mars Ill's seminal underground hip hop album Raw Material without sacrificing a millisecond's worth of response time or a modicum of attention to the road.  Others would perform better with a phone to their ear than they would to a rap album pumping through the subwoofer.  

So where do we stop interfering?  Ultimately it's a question as foundational as common good and societal formation itself.  How much are we willing to give up to be a part of this particular collective?  I tend to think we already give up plenty of freedoms, thanks, and if someone needs to make a quick phone call and can manage to drive respectfully and responsively while they're at it, I'm not worried.  If someone drives poorly because of the phone, well then, they've committed X, Y and Z traffic violations and each already comes with a corresponding penalty.  

Though none of this might matter in Michigan, if Anchorage, Alaska has its way.  Recruiters are preparing to travel to Ann Arbor as we speak (or will be once they wake up out on the hyper-left-coast) to scalp some of Michigan's best and brightest... our police officers.

Read on...