Ban on Cell Phones in Restaurants Is Reconsidered by Councilman
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Banning cell phones in restaurants? It was a proposal that seemed to die before it was even born.
The chairman of the City Council’s Consumer Affairs Committee, Leroy Comrie, is backing away from a bill he was set to introduce that would have added city eateries to the list of places where cell phones are outlawed.
The proposal was included on an initial draft of a council meeting agenda earlier this month, but Mr. Comrie pulled it off to do more research. Now, after hearing opposition from restaurant-industry officials, Mr. Comrie says he probably won’t introduce the bill at all.
While the lawmaker said he expected restaurant owners to welcome the bill as a way to crack down on rude customers, the response was the opposite. Industry officials said restaurants could handle the thorny issue by themselves and argued that a no-cell-phone law would harm business rather than help it.
“I was surprised at the feedback from the restaurant owners, that they didn’t like it,” Mr. Comrie, a Democrat of Queens, said. The idea for the law came out of discussions with his staff, as well as the annoying experiences of having restaurant meals disrupted by rude cell phones users, including one, he recalled, in which a patron appeared to be conducting play-by-play of a baseball game over the phone.
The negative response quickly changed his mind about the bill. “The restaurant business is an industry we want to flourish and support, and not unduly burden with over-regulation,” Mr. Comrie said, adding: “I don’t want to be seen as anti-business.”
In the interest of safety and common courtesy, New York lawmakers have targeted cell phones for years. State law prohibits drivers from chatting on cell phones without a headset or handsfree earpiece, and the City Council in 2003 over-rode a mayoral veto to bar the use of cell phones in theaters and concert halls.
Mayor Bloomberg has stood behind a ban on cell phones in city schools, to the chagrin of the council and many parents and students.
Mr. Comrie said his bill would have applied only during dinner hours to “white linen” restaurants, not fast-food places like McDonald’s or family chains such as Applebee’s. But he acknowledged that in practice, the line between different types of restaurants would be impossible to draw.
A law against cell phones in restaurants would be seen as unenforceable and a case of government overreaching, some restaurateurs said.
“You can only go so far regulating a person’s behavior,” the executive vice president of the New York State Restaurant Association, Charles Hunt, said.
Others said that restaurants could easily enforce their own rules about using cell phones. Some have signs posted, while for others, a discreet whisper from a maitre d’ is sufficient to quiet loud phone chatter.
“Most of our customers know to go to the front of the restaurant or step outside,” the manager of Wolfgang’s in TriBeCa, Scott Mark Brown, said. “I wish they would just let us legislate it ourselves.”
Mr. Comrie said he was also persuaded by the industry argument that a ban on cell phones in restaurants would have the same effect as the ban on smoking: pushing the problem out onto the street, where clusters of people would draw noise complaints from nearby residents.