Cell-ebrate this!
by Mark Lansing
Picture this, if you will: a motor vehicle being operated by someone seemingly not paying close attention to the task at hand. The subtle cues are as numerous as rain showers in Roseburg—little things like staying in the freeway’s left lane after passing a slower vehicle, or something larger like running a red light and smacking into somebody.
Whatever the behavior, the unspoken message is always: “I, Dingdong, am not fully engaged with my driving. La La La La.” You’ve seen this one, right? You glance over: and, lo and behold, said motorist is talking on a cell phone.
Is anybody else getting tired of this? And it isn’t just a point of irritation. Somebody is going to get killed; somebody already has been. For a fact, driving and cell phones do not go together.
Wouldn’t be so bad if it was just a matter of people speaking on a hands-free unit, which wouldn’t be a whole lot different than conversing with a passenger. The problem is all that fritzing around—punching buttons, playing with the apparatus, attempting to hold the phone to one’s ear. And looking away. Even after the call starts, most people seem to focus their eyes somewhere besides the road in front of them. Someone ought to pass a law.
B.A.D.D.
When and how did this happen: the average citizen is more condemning and concerned about drivers who drink than drivers who drive bad.I’ll probably get hate mail for saying it— and the last thing I want to do is defend drunk driving —but the M.A.D.D. crowd has led us ever so slightly astray. We’ve developed a national obsession with drinking and driving, while our moral outrage over bad driving seems to have taken a Valium.
Imagine this, if you will: A man runs a bicyclist down with his car. No good reason for it; the bicycle was in plain view and had the right of way. The rider is horribly injured. Everyone agrees that the driver should have been paying better attention. What does society make of this fellow?
Well, the answer will be radically different depending on his blood alcohol level. If he’s driving with that juice in his system he’ll be gored and vilified in the eye of the public and the law. If not, folks won’t be anywhere near as upset with him. They’d be more irate if he’d been drinking without hitting anybody. The drinking will be charged as a crime, while bad driving will usually warrant at most a ticket, even if there’s been a collision. Would you rather be passed by a drinking driver or run over by a sober one?
Which brings me back to the cell phone thing. If somebody is smart enough to pass a law outlawing phones while driving, like the law against drinking and driving, we should not lose sight of the fact that bad driving is the real problem. A couple of years back, Steve Duin of The Oregonian wrote an excellent piece entitled, “Juries acquit when negligence feels familiar.” Duin pointed out that people are often willing to forgive careless driving if they can imagine themselves making the same mistake. While many of us have no tolerance for drivers who might drink or talk on a cell phone, we’ll cut some slack to people who go smashing into stuff with their two-ton vehicles. As long as they weren’t phoning or imbibing, we can live with it – which doesn’t make much sense when you think about it.
Is anybody ready to join Bikers Against Dangerous Driving? Someone ought to start a group. That would be B.A.D.D.
YHIHF may be emailed at lansingatlaw@rvi.net.
Possibly Related
- March 2007: Crosswalks, buffers & clear signals
- April 2008: Lessons from California
- April 2008: Motorist's repeat harassment of bicyclists
- November 2007: What shall we do now?
- July 2008: Citizen prosecution of dangerous drivers
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