Cell phones are an inescapable part of modern life, providing information and connection that has become an expected part of everyone's routine. However, this becomes complicated the moment your phone and car meet. On one hand, the GPS is an essential tool for any road trip, on the other, distracted driving is dangerous, and sometimes fatal. A balance needs to be struck, one where you can drive without distractions, and still get where you need to go.

For many people, the use of their phone is non-negotiable. Either for location, or for podcasts and music that break the monotony of a daily commute. At the same time using one's phone has a notable impact on one's performance driving. In many states, the solution proposed is to make it illegal to touch one's phone while driving. This allows a GPS to give directions, or for a person to dictate calls or voice commands while reducing the amount of time spent looking away from the road.

With hands free driving, someone can still interact with their cellular device, give commands, find directions, and communicate with others while still looking at the road. With smartphones offering voice assistants, it's no longer necessary for people to directly interface with their phones, meaning people are no longer spending as much time looking down at their phones and away from the road.

If people were no longer allowed to use their phones on the road, while crashes may decrease, people would be cut off from a world where doing so is becoming increasingly detrimental. It would be foolish to walk away from such increasing connectivity for an extreme solution such as banning cellphones in cars. Such a ban would be an overly drastic solution to a more nuanced problem, leaving people greatly inconvenienced for the sake of a heavy handed solution.

If a proper balance is able to be found between reducing the distractions phones provide to drivers and maximizing the amount of benefit still available to them, it would be greatly preferable to an all out ban on the devices in cars, and would reduce road fatalities and crashes while still maintaining the accessibility and convenience smartphones provide on a daily basis. So no, phones should not be banned on roads, but they should not be unregulated either, as with many issues, it is not black and white, and to approach it as such would be to ignore the vastly superior solutions hiding in the swatches of grey between the two extremes.