Why? I really enjoyed Mankato while slowly breaking it (Arch is just not for people like me)

Excellent comment!

Design towns and cities that can only be easily traversed by car.

Just to reiterate, there is something you can do about this. Lobby your local decision makers. They’re not waiting around to be guilted into anything, but they are generally happy to talk to residents and are open for reasonable arguments.

(That doesn’t mean local politicians are reasonable people. 90% of the ones who run things where I live are a lost case. But there are always the odd exceptions who are willing to listen and will work hard to make a difference.)

I’ve read the article already and I’m well aware. And like I said, it depends on what the law says on phone use. It’s not as simple as ‘oh she wasn’t holding her phone so she wasn’t using it’. It depends on case law, how phone use is defined and whether the law is using a kind of prophylactic rule.

You can get fined for texting and driving while you’re standing still. It’s not something that you’d be able to say makes sense based on an article like this, but looking at case law and how the law was written, it does make sense.

Personally I think it makes a lot of sense to have prophylactic rules in place for what constitutes phone use. There is generally no reason why a phone should be laying in one’s lap while driving except to be used illegally whilst driving, so such a rule could help enforcement and save lives.

It depends a lot on what the law says I’d say. Just like having an open container of alcohol in your car is illegal in many places, it’s not a bad thing per se if having a phone on one’s lap is treated the same way as if it’s being used.

Unlike what the article says, phone use in a car is not seen as a minor traffic violation in many places. In the US literally hundreds of people die each year due to phone use while driving specifically.

If anything, this makes it more likely it wasn’t written by AI. These are typical mistakes people make when they’re overthinking their writing, while writing.