Administration to block cell phones in cars?

What is WITH these people? Are they only happy when they are meddling in our lives? And not just MEDDLING, but controlling every aspect of every detail: salt, sugar, exercise and now your cell phone. Ray LaHood is saying no more cell phones when we drive:

“There’s a lot of technology out there now that can disable phones and we’re looking at that,” said LaHood on MSNBC. LaHood said the cellphone scramblers were one way, and also stressed the importance of “personal responsibility.”

The hosts of Morning Joe pushed the secretary about the possibility of requiring scrambling technology installed in vehicles.

“I think it will be done,” said LaHood. “I think the technology is there and I think you’re going to see the technology become adaptable in automobiles to disable these cell phones

Say Anything has commentary:

The fact is that traffic accidents and fatalities have trended down to a 60-year low according to the NHTSA despite the rise in cell phone use while driving. There’s also a more recent study released by the CDC which shows that traffic accidents among young drivers have dropped 36% over the last five years despite an increase in cell phone use.

Plus, there’s absolutely zero evidence to indicate that bans on cell phone use while driving have done anything to make roads safer where they’ve been implemented. 

  Ray LaHood's also the guy who wants everyone to ride bikes instead of drive and so is treating bicycle paths as just as important as roads. He's a proponent of the highly wasteful and ineffective high speed rail and also of livable communities in a bill that has already been passed. 
  What are livable communities? Well, not just like the pleasant Levis Commons, but the basic idea behind a livable community is that no one would drive and people would live in high block buildings with few windows. (Not, of course, Barack Obama or Al Gore.)
  American Thinker has the lowdown. Read the whole article here:

The Livable Communities Act exemplifies the progressive idea of strategic diminishment -- success is measured by the reduction of certain outcomes from today's standard. This is different from reducing outputs such as carbon emissions and pollutants, which are already declining and can be better addressed with affordable technologies rather than social engineering.

But social engineering is at the heart of the Livable Communities Act, where federal planners hope to reduce personal mobility as measured in vehicle miles traveled and shift housing patterns from single-family homes in the suburbs to small apartments in cramped central cities.

In a country as large and diverse as ours, some people will prefer the live-work-travel arrangements prescribed for in the Livable Communities Act, which is based on the Smart Growth planning doctrine. However, the vast majority of Americans in red and blue states alike have long aspired to live in suburban homes with a car in the garage.

This quintessentially middle-class version of the American Dream has long been derided by elites and environmentalists, who recast suburbs as a wasteful sprawl and liken automobile use to a destructive addiction. They want to delegitimize this land use pattern, restrict automobile use, and make suburban housing less affordable. The Livable Communities Act is thus a hammer in the progressive toolbox.

Absent from their advocacy is any acknowledgment that cars and suburbia are not just expressions of freedom, but indispensable contributors to our prosperity. For example, automobiles enable us to access more goods and services, forcing businesses to compete by offering higher quality and lower costs.