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Anything that’s existed for as long as you have is normal; anything invented while you’re between the ages of 15 and 35 is something you can profit from; anything invented after you’ve turned 35 is “against the natural order of things.”Historically, the men and women who regulate America’s roadways almost always fall into the third category. Take Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, whose office released a report last month encouraging automakers to dumb down their dashboard consoles and in-car electronics. The recommendations are almost comical in their concern and specificity, going so far as to suggest the maximum amount of time a driver should spend looking for and then pressing a button (two seconds), the maximum number of intermittent two-second glances required to complete an entire task (6, for 12 seconds total), and the maximum amount of digital text a driver can see while the car is moving (no more than 30 characters, "not counting puncuation marks").LaHood’s latest attempt to revise the rules of the road in response to hysterical fears about in-car technology is nothing new. The proliferation of the cellular phone in the late 1990s was met with a similar response, as was the advent of the car phone in the preceding decade. In fact, the state’s attempt to engineer the ideal driving experience—during which the automobilist's hands are always at 10 and 2, his eyes glued to the road, his ears pricked only for the sounds of emergency vehicles and the laughter of children bouncing their balls too close to the street—dates back to 1930s Massachusetts, and a man named George A. Parker.Parker was appointed Massachusetts Registrar of Motor Vehicles in 1928. That same year, he earned the ire of Massachusetts fishermen by printing new license plates with the likeness of a cod that “resembled an oversized guppy,” and looked as if it was swimming away from the state’s likeness. A bad season ensued, and the fishermen called for Parker’s head. So Massachusetts quickly designed and released a new plate that featured a more cod-like creature swimming toward the state outline.By 1929, Parker had graduated to social engineering. That year he testified before a Massachusetts state senate committee that “when a person has driven an automobile for 10 years or more, he begins to lose his ability to operate the car.” Parker had always believed this, and told the committee that he had recently come across “research” that confirmed his hunch.Two state senators were more than happy to empower Parker, according to an Associated Press report from the hearing. Senator James C. Moran offered legislation that would enlist “neighbors of an applicant” to “sign affidavits as to the driver’s moral fitness”; Senator William E. Weeks sponsored a bill that would “require a physician’s certificate for an applicant for a driver’s license.”The Automobile Legal Association, an industry lobbying group, objected to both pieces of legislation, on the grounds that “speeding and indifferent driving”—two of the biggest causes of accidents—“could not be eliminated by tests.”Predictably, the legislation failed, so Parker turned his attention to an even more dangerous culprit: “distracting” car radios. If Massachusetts could pass a car radio ban, Parker claimed, the rest of the country would likely follow. “Several states were only ‘hanging on the fence,’" he told the Christian Science Monitor, "waiting action by someone else before taking it themselves.” (St. Louis was also hard at work on passing one.)There was only one problem. Massachusetts residents, like most Americans, were enamored with the radio. They liked them in their homes, and they wanted them in their cars.
Instead of calling for his head, they should have gone and taken it.
i wish they still had the button for the bright light switch on the floor by my left foot. why did they change that. it was so easy and i didnt have to move my hands.
