City Councilman Jim Brown of Cheyenne, Wyo., thinking it was time his city joined the movement to keep drivers from being distracted by their handheld cell phones, steered an ordinance banning the practice into law last month.
Now, he’s getting an earful from outraged Wyomingites.
“We have the right to bear a cell phone,” said M. Lee Hasenauer, 49, who collected more than 3,500 signatures in support of his petition against the ordinance.
If the city clerk validates at least 2,800 of them, officials must either repeal the ordinance or put it to a public vote.
If the residents’ effort — dubbed “Can You Hear Me Now?” — succeeds, Cheyenne would become the first city to enact, then retract such a law, said Russ Rader, spokesman for the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.
Seven states, as well as a dozen cities, have banned driving while talking on a handheld cell phone; 18 states and the District of Columbia have prohibited texting while driving as well.
In Cheyenne — where motorists last year acknowledged they were using cell phones in 50 out of 2,900 crashes — the new ordinance bans texting or otherwise using a handheld phone, although using a headset is acceptable. The first offense carries a $125 fine. After a month-long grace period in which three dozen warnings were given to violators, police began issuing tickets last week.
City Councilman Don Pierson, who argued against the ordinance, felt police shouldn’t be permitted to stop a driver for a behavior that hadn’t caused a traffic problem.
“If I’m driving down the road, minding my own business and talking on my cell phone, leave me alone,” said Pierson, a former police officer who said he was besieged with calls from residents objecting to the ordinance.
Others chafe at the notion of being told what to do.
“Local State and Federal Government thinks it can shove something down our throats when we are not paying attention,” one resident commented on a message board on the Wyoming Tribune Eagle’s Web site.
“I was raised in Wyo … the state used to pride itself in personal freedoms,” wrote another.
To Hasenauer, it also was a matter of becoming too much like another Western state.
“This was California law, word for word. That’s what people are in an uproar about,” said Hasenauer, who doesn’t believe talking on cell phones is dangerous, although he concedes that texting is.
“My eyes are on the road all the time,” he said, adding that hands-free devices can be unreliable. He needs his phone to keep track of his five children, he added. “This is technology that has made life a lot better. I don’t see the crisis about cell phones.”
Yet, supporters also have been vociferous, citing safety concerns.
“Anybody that thinks blabbing on their cell is fine while driving is sick,” one reader wrote on the Tribune Eagle’s Web site.
“They don’t care about anybody but themselves and they could care less who they run into,” another agreed.
Brown said many have contacted him to express their support, and if the petition is deemed sufficient, he favors holding a special election — at a cost of up to $50,000 — to let voters settle the issue.
If the ordinance stands, the question will be whether it would lead to any real change, said Rader of the Insurance Institute. “There isn’t much evidence that (cell-phone bans are) very effective at getting people to put down their phones,” Rader said.
Jurisdictions, such as Washington, D.C., that have implemented sustained, publicized enforcement have had more success in changing driver behavior than others, such as New York, he said.
In Cheyenne, Brown believes the ordinance already has had an effect. He used to see someone on a cell phone in one of every five cars, he said.
“Now I see one out of 25 or 30,” he said.