Radley Balko rails against proposals to ban listening to an audio device while crossing the street:
This is all reaction to a tiny increase (0.4 percent) in pedestrian fatalities over the first half of last year. Never mind that the increase came only after a 30-year free-fall during which pedestrian fatalities halved, or that said free-fall happened during a period when cell phones and personal music devices went from nonexistent to ubiquitous.
Let us not forget that tiny increase is the result of Michelle Obama's anti-obesity campaign encouraging people to exercise more.
In all seriousness, banning cellphone use in cars also doesn't actually reduce automobile crashes, so there's no reason to believe that banning jogging with an audio device would reduce a negligent number of pedestrian fatalities. Listening to music while running seven miles makes doing so substantially more bearable, so I doubt a ban would even be effective. But if you want people to exercise more, banning the one thing that mitigates the pain of doing so strikes me as a particularly dumb idea, because if the ban actually worked, it would probably reduce the amount that people exercise. Are we going to start banning TVs in gyms the second there's a .4 percent increase in people busting their ass on a treadmill?
