The 5th District Court of Appeal reversed the case of a Fresno man who was ticketed in January 2012 for looking at a map on his iPhone 4 while stuck in traffic. That was the message Thursday from a state appeals court in Fresno, which threw out a driver's traffic ticket and $165 fine for using a map app in a traffic jam. Asked whether it might promote distracted driving, he declined to comment, but said, "If the state wants to broaden the law, they can write new legislation." He had grabbed his cellphone to find an alternate route when a California Highway Patrol officer on a motorcycle spotted him and wrote the ticket. Because the law specifies that a phone should be used in a way that "allows hands-free listening and talking," its evident target was hands-on conversations and not other uses, said Justice Herbert Levy in the 3-0 ruling. Texting while driving remains illegal under another California law passed after the one at issue in Spriggs' case. Attorney Scott Reddie, who represented Spriggs, said it's now up to the state attorney general's office to decide if it will challenge Thursday's ruling to the California Supreme Court, which is choosy about which cases it hears. But it's OK to pick up your phone and look at a map to see where you're going and how to get there.
– Using a smartphone to look a map while driving is allowed under the California law that bans motorists from talking or texting on a handheld phone, an appeals court has decided. The court sided with Steven Spriggs, who was fined $165 after a highway patrol officer spotted him looking at a map on his iPhone while stuck in freeway traffic, reports the San Francisco Chronicle. The court noted that the law was enacted in 2006, a year before the first iPhone came out. The judges decided that the law only applied to conversations, and interpreting it otherwise would make it illegal to look at the time on a phone "or even to move it for use as a paperweight." Spriggs says the law should be written more clearly, adding that his son suffered a broken leg from a driver who was chatting on his phone and he definitely doesn't approve of distracted driving. "We're distracted all the time," he tells the AP. "If our distractions cause us to drive erratically, we should be arrested for driving erratically."