Now that your hands are free, what can you do with them?

My first week in Los Angeles five years ago, I was simmering on the I-10, stopping and rolling between 0-40 mph, when I looked over and saw a young woman painting her nails. OK, not recommended, but not heinous, right? Except that she was painting her toenails. She had her foot up on the dash and she was dabbing red lacquer on her toes, very carefully, one by one, while steering with her knee. It was then I knew I had landed far, far from Kansas.

Personally, I believe the new California law banning handheld cellphone use is misguided. First, because cognitive scientists have discovered hands-free cellphone use is scarcely less distracting than using the phone. In other words, you're just as likely to pull a boneheaded maneuver while just chatting along hands-free as you might with the phone held to your ear. Two, the audio quality on headsets and in-cabin microphone systems -- the Bluetooth hands-free modality -- is so bad, so frustrating and irritating, it constitutes a menace to navigation all on its own. A case of the cure being worse than the disease. Third, much of the best driver-assistance technology to emerge in the past five years -- range-keeping cruise control, lane-departure systems, side-object avoidance -- have evolved precisely to compensate for the added cognitive workloads that cellphone use represents. And in my opinion, the more automation that is available as driver assistance, the better.