A California woman has entered a not-guilty plea in the case of a traffic ticket that has gained national attention. The woman’s unprecedented fight to be able to wear her Google Glass while she is behind the wheel will continue to wind its way through the court system as she challenges a traffic law that prohibits drivers from viewing a screen of any kind while they are behind the wheel.
The traffic law is designed to curb distracted driving, which now causes a significant number of car accidents in the United States each year, many of them fatal. Safety officials have compared distracted driving and its risks to drunk driving and have urged action by state and federal lawmakers to try to curb the behavior that puts so many at risk.
California has been one state to take those issues seriously, enacting tough laws to empower police to stop drivers who have taken their eyes off of the road to look at a cellphone or other handheld device. Naturally as technology progresses the array of devices that could distract a driver have taken different forms, so the traffic ordinances were written to intentionally include not yet invented types of screens.
In this case the woman claims that the screen mounted in front of her right eye on the Google Glass device was not on at the time she was driving her car 80 miles per hour in a zone marked for 65 miles per hour. It is not yet clear what the outcome of this case will be and if it will impact other Google Glass users in the future.
Source: The Raw Story, “California woman denies ‘Google Glass’ caused driving distraction,” Dec. 3, 2013
