At last, we have a date for the enforcement of hands-free legislation in Ontario.

It'll be Oct. 26, says Transport Minister Jim Bradley, though there will be a period of "education" until Feb. 1, during which police will issue only warnings to drivers seen talking on their hand-held phones, or texting, or watching movies on their laptops or DVD players, or scrolling through their BlackBerrys and iPods.

Once February arrives, those warnings will become fines of up to $500. The amount of the fine for a first-time offender will be considerably less, but we don't yet know the details. We do know that no demerit points will be tacked onto a convicted driver's licence.

In fact, even though Bill 118, which amends the Highway Traffic Act to legislate this, was passed back in the spring, it's taken until now to come up with a date for enforcement – the government has been fine-tuning the regulations, apparently.

That's okay. This new law isn't nearly as straightforward as it might seem.

On the surface, it's a great idea to ban the use of cellphones while driving. We've all seen people behind the wheel who seem oblivious to what's happening on the road because they're distracted by their conversations with unseen others.

Here at Wheels, we've been banging home the message for a quarter-century now that there is nothing more important when driving than focusing on the task at hand, and that means no distracting conversations with people unaware of your surroundings.

It's one thing to talk with your passenger in the car who's sharing your experience on the road, but it's quite different to talk with a client in California, or a friend on the other side of the city, or a spouse at home in front of the TV.

The real issue is not the preoccupation of your hands by keeping one of them off the wheel to hold the phone – it's the distraction of the conversation itself. That's what competes for a driver's attention, and that's what causes accidents. And conversations – chat, business deals, gossip, phone sex, whatever – are all still quite legal with a hands-free device.

I worry that this new legislation will provide a certain legitimacy to hands-free conversations, and we'll see more drivers jabbing the fingers of their newly freed hands at imaginary chests to make a point, waving off jokes and the like.

It's a good start, but if you drive with the bad habit of only having one hand on the wheel anyway, nothing's really going to change.

In Quebec, they're moving to change the legislation to forbid any phone conversations at all while driving. Lawmakers there understand that driving is the only thing that a driver should be doing; plenty of people in our overstimulated world believe that driving is itself a boring task that distracts from the real priority, which is to conduct your business during a tiresome period of otherwise isolated travel.

Actually, the experience of other countries and jurisdictions that have enforced legislation against hand-held phones is that it is certainly not a bad thing. But perhaps this is mostly because a large number of people don't get around to hooking themselves up to hands-free devices, so fewer calls are made in the first place. Such devices are becoming cheaper, better and easier to use, though, so this advantage may soon be lost.

No, the real benefit of this law is to stop drivers texting, which is a hopeless distraction, and to stop them dialing 10-digit numbers on tiny keypads when they need to be braking for the car in front that just stopped. There is absolutely no justification for such behaviour, and none of us want to share the road with such thoughtless, selfish individuals.

But we do.

So don't expect this law to make your life any safer, because it's only giving the police the freedom to stop someone they happen to spot in the act. There are laws against speeding, too, and rolling through red lights, and not signalling turns.

The only way this law is going to make your life any safer is if you abide by it. Don't talk while driving with anyone outside your car, and leave yourself alert to watch out for all the other idiots who are never going to go away.

Mark Richardson is the editor of Wheels. mrichardson@thestar.ca

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