Stuck in Traffic? Thanks, Obama!: Feds to Regulate Waze, Google Maps, and Other Navigation Apps

The Obama
administration wants to cripple the navigation and traffic
reporting apps on your smartphone. In the name of safety, of
course.

Provisions in the proposed transportation bill—which Congress
will look at in the next few months—would give the National Highway
Traffic Safety Administration the power to regulate apps like
Google Maps and Waze, the crowdsourced traffic reporting
tool. 

They’re going to start with built-in navigation devices, since
regulatory authority is clearer there. But of course, if they make
the onboard navigation systems in cars suck, people will just turn
to their smartphones, right? So they had better regulate those
too. 

The impulse to regulate against distracted driving has a long,
not terribly glorious pedigree, dating all the way back to efforts
to go after people who were changing
the radio station while driving. In more recent years, talking
and texting bans have
failed to show clear positive results and may even cause
harm.

Meanwhile, the courts are already
working this one out: 

The underlying issue has already worked its way into the courts.
In California, Steven R. Spriggs received a $165 ticket two years
ago for using his iPhone while driving in stop-and-go traffic near
Fresno. A highway patrol motorcycle officer rolled up alongside his
car after seeing the glow from the screen on Mr. Spriggs’s
face.

“I held it up and said, ‘It’s a map,’ ” Mr. Spriggs said.
He was not talking on the phone, which is prohibited by California
law.

But the police officer would not budge. “He said, ‘Pull over, it
doesn’t matter,’ ” said Mr. Spriggs, the director of planned
giving at California State University, Fresno.

An appeals court ruled this year that it did matter, and Mr.
Spriggs’s conviction was reversed.

In other breaking news, a group beholden to Congress and run by
a former top transpo bureaucrat totally thinks the government
should act:

Safety advocates say regulators need to do more.

“We absolutely need to be looking at these nomadic devices,”
said Deborah A. P. Hersman, president of
the National Safety Council, a nonprofit
group chartered by Congress, and a former chairwoman of the
National Transportation Safety Board.

Reason has covered the government’s insatiable
desire to regulate apps in the health care arena as well.