Go Hands Free in Washington or Get a Ticket and Take Verizon's Advice

If you are driving through the state of Washington you need to know about this new law, especially if you have a tendency to speed. Starting in July of this year, a new law requires everyone to use hands free devices because of the dangers of talking on the road.

Verizon Wireless is stepping up to the plate to help consumers find out more about hands-free devices, Bluetooth devices, what others are buying and even giving responsible driving tips.

Washington already has a ban on text messaging that says that you can't text message while driving. However, with any law there are exceptions and of course glitches. The law is a "secondary law" which means that you only can get a ticket if they pull you over for something else.

So, if you're speeding as an example and you are stopped, the police officer sees that you don't have a hands free device in your car; you drive away with two tickets instead of one. The question that comes to mind though is how will they enforce this? We can see that this is probably a low priority situation for most officers.

There are a variety of hands-free accessories that you can get and Verizon has many that range in price from about $15 to $150 depending on how you want to use them. Verizon has done this because they are committed to helping customers. They were part of the first companies in the industry to require device manufactures to start providing cell phones with a universal headset jack and voice activated dialing.

What is Available in Hands Free Devices?

Verizon Wireless has a multitude of Hands Free devices available through many manufacturers. If you order online they also give you free shipping because they want to encourage you to be responsible drivers. Here are just a few of what they offer:

Motorola -- there are a variety of Bluetooth® devices that have dual microphones and other features. As you might have guessed these work with Bluetooth enabled phones that support their headsets.

Venturi Music -- enables you to have hands free music from your phone with a free FM transmitter. The nice feature for these is that you can be listening to music when a call comes in and the device will mute the music and let you answer the phone -- hands free.

There are exceptions to this law under certain circumstances. For the most part this means that people who have a hearing aid, someone who is reporting an emergency or a tow truck driver who is helping a disabled vehicle will not receive a ticket if they are not using a hands free device.

It will be interesting to us to see how this law is enforced because it would seem that there are enough exceptions that people could get out of a ticket easily.