Seriously, I don’t know. Would have to look it up. But people did that for ages. It was a meme long before Dawkins coined the term that old males with a green Mercedes and a crocheted toilet roll cover and a Wackeldackel on the trunk cover would also wear a (brown) hat while driving a car.
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It’s mandatory if you’re over 65 and drive a mercedes.
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My workplace just made it mandatory to wear a face covering to enter the building. Unfortunately, many people interpret that to mean “I dont have to wear it once I’m INSIDE the building”
Le sigh.
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In North Rhine-Westphalia, anyway. German police forces being organised at the state level, other states may (in theory) come up with their own interpretations.
As I said, the main point of the no-concealing-the-face rule in the traffic code seems to be that they want to be able to figure out who’s driving the car on speed camera/red-light camera photos. If they believe they can do that just from the forehead and eyes then more power to them. Police departments are just now trying to decide how to enforce the rule in the face (no pun intended) of widespread – and officially recommended – mask-wearing; formerly it was mostly used to discourage people from wearing niqabs, bandit-style bandanas, etc. at the wheel.
I personally prefer to wear sunglasses when driving (so I can see better, especially on my weekly grocery-shopping expedition early in the morning when the sun is low in the sky and the queues at the supermarket entrance are short) and thus will have to make do without the face covering …
(The press release also says that hats, sunglasses, etc. are not allowed with a mask if they’re being worn with the intention of concealing the driver’s identity. That would mean that if you’re wearing sunglasses with the intention of increasing road safety by being able to discern other vehicles, pedestrians, … earlier and more reliably you should be OK – but I would prefer not to have to debate this with a police officer.)
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It’s basically up to the police officers. Ermessensspielraum.
Well, maybe not only that.
The main reason for the mask ban when driving a vehicle is that other road users can react quickly and intuitively using your facial expressions, especially in dangerous situations. If your face is covered, possibly even with a mask and sunglasses, misunderstandings and accidents are easier to happen. When in doubt, the danger from this is greater than the risk of driving a car without a mask - especially if you are healthy.
[ETA: that’s no legal source, of course. I looked it up. The legal reason is, indeed, the ability to identify the driver in case of an automated speeding control.]
I’ve survived my share of dicey situations over a few decades of driving (fortunately without major accidents!) but I don’t think that in any of them I was able to make out the other driver’s facial expression. I would venture to guess that in most cases that expression would have been one of surprise or terror, as would have been my own. But who am I to disagree with Stern?
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Note, that’s re-published from Brigitte.
(But they do have a point when negotiating with a driver by facial expression as a pedestrian or while on a bike. Seriously. I’ve been in the situation already, wearing a mask, crossing a street. I didn’t even realise I was trying to communicate with the driver. However, it worked, despite the mask!)
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You ask that, and from what my g/f tells me, it’s not a stupid question. She’s on the till at a general food and household goods store, B&M for those in the U.K., and she really does get some clueless examples of what passes for humans in these parts. And some really entitled ones - around the time this whole C19 crap kicked off, one woman she was serving had seen her use some hand sanitiser after she’d served the previous customer; (she does this all the time, handling cash makes her hands dirty, regardless of C19), and said woman demanded my g/f put her own, personal bottle of sanitiser on the counter for her, the customer, to use!
Said woman was very indignant when my g/f refused, saying it would be stolen within minutes, wall-mounted dispensers in local hospitals had already gone missing, replying no, it wouldn’t!
Good thing she’s better tempered than me, my response would have probably got me the sack, I have a very low tolerance for fuckwitery.
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