Illinois considers banning drivers from using Google Glass

You can’t buy Google Glass in Illinois yet, but that’s not stopping lawmakers from trying to ban it from the state’s streets and highways. Senate Bill 2632, currently pending in the Illinois General Assembly, would prohibit drivers from wearing a “mobile computing headset,” defined as a “computing device with a head mounted display that can project visual...

You can’t buy Google Glass in Illinois yet, but that’s not stopping lawmakers from trying to ban it from the state’s streets and highways.

Senate Bill 2632, currently pending in the Illinois General Assembly, would prohibit drivers from wearing a “mobile computing headset,” defined as a “computing device with a head mounted display that can project visual information into the field of vision of the wearer.”

Does Google Glass make driving less safe? It’s possible – but Google Glass also has the potential to make driving safer. For example, one new Google Glass app, DriveSafe, is designed to prevent drivers from nodding off at the wheel. Another app in the works from Harman International would provide drivers with collision warnings. Other apps could let drivers check directions, choose their music and do other things they might currently have to look away from the road at a screen to do. And perhaps many legislators don’t realize that Google Glass doesn’t actually obstruct the wearer’s view, but instead lets you see information by looking slightly up and to the right.

Oddly, the proposed ban contains an exception for a headset “that is physically or electronically integrated into the motor vehicle.” Apparently, if your car’s navigation system can connect to Google Glass – as new models from Hyundai and Mercedes-Benz will – then you’re allowed to use it. But if you rely on, say, Google Maps, which does the exact same thing, then wearing the Glass is illegal. How police would be able to tell the difference before pulling someone over – and why this arbitrary difference should matter – we don’t know.

If passed, the Google Glass ban would become part of an existing distracted-driving law that currently bans holding a cell phone while driving – but explicitly allows the use of CB radios, even though CB use entails hand-holding, knob-fiddling and therefore, one would think, at least as much distraction as wearing Google Glass.

Talk about a backward-looking law.

Maybe lawmakers are confident that CBs are safe because people have used them safely for so long. But we wouldn’t know that if CBs had been banned in the first place.

In the absence of strong evidence that it poses a significant threat, the best way to determine whether Google Glass is safe is to give people the chance to try it, too. That not only would respect individual liberty, which is important in itself, but also would show Illinois to be state where innovation is encouraged, not feared and punished.

Legislators would do better to turn their attention to the state’s actual problems, such as itsunemployment, tax burden and continuing pension crisis.