(Spirit Lake)– Beginning today (Mon.) in Iowa, expect to get pulled over if a law enforcement officer sees you with your phone in your hands while you’re driving. While the hands-free law is now in effect, trooper Kevin Krull of the Iowa State Patrol says they aren’t fining violators just yet. He says that will change in January…
“But right now it’s still just a warning. We’ll address that while we’re still in that soft phase of that aspect but we want people to just start doing the right thing, which is put that phone down. Because when we talk about distractions there’s basically three elements or three types: one is if it’s manual, something that’s just in your hand and distracting you taking away your attention from that. The other one is visual, so your eyes aren’t on the road, and the third one is the mental. When you use your cell phone you’re doing all three of those so you’ve really increased the safety factor, or decreased your safety, if you will, by using that cell phone. So we just want people to put that phone in the carrier, use that blue tooth, use that speaker phone aspect of it, but it’s got to be a voice-activated, hands-free mode.”
Krull says the new law also prohibits entering GPS information while driving.
