In the name of all that’s holy, will some elected
official entrusted with the public’s safety — man or
woman,Republican or Democrat, local, state, or federal — please find
the conscience or the ‘nads to stand up to the telecom industry and propose legislation
banning cell-phone use while driving? Is this a
difficult call to make? Nothing is more enraging than to be held up
in traffic by some grinning, oblivious, self-absorbed fool, yammering
into a cell phone with one hand on the wheel and the other up to an
ear, while angered drivers maneuver to pass on the left and right.
Don’t they still teach driver’s ed in school? And if so, whatever
happened to “both hands on the wheel”? At the risk of sounding
curmudgeonly, I believe that cell-phone use is a prime contributor to
the breakdown of civility in society, but using the dastardly devices
while driving a car is simply stupid, and deadly.
Now we discover that, according to The New York Times, the
National Highway Traffic Safety Administration withheld hundreds of
pages of research confirming the deadly results of cell-phone use in
cars “because of concerns about angering Congress.” The research, begun
in 2003, estimated that cell-phone use by drivers caused 240,000
accidents and nearly 1,000 fatalities in the previous year, and we
would never have heard about it had not the Center for Auto Safety
petitioned for the findings under the Freedom of Information Act.
Clarence Ditlow, the center’s director, said, “We’re looking at a
problem that could be as bad as drunk driving, and the government has
covered it up.” Why am I not surprised that the Bush-era Transportation
Department, under Secretary Norman Mineta, decided to quash the report
as “inconclusive”? The Bush team caved in to every other corporate
interest with political donations in hand, why not the cell-phone
industry too? Ditlow added, “No public health and safety agency should
allow its research to be suppressed for political reasons.” Can I get a
witness?
There are currently 14 states that ban texting while driving (which
is like outlawing mixing cocktails behind the wheel) but only six that
forbid yakking on the phone. The movement to ban texting grew after the
April 29, 2009, incident involving a bus driver in San Antonio who was
captured on film while he texted his way directly into the rear of
several vehicles stopped at a red light. Tennessee has a texting ban,
but although we have crash statistics, there is currently no effort to
ban hand-held devices while driving. There is some irony in the fact
that, as a nation, we mourn the brave soldiers, now over 5,000 in
number, who have sacrificed their lives in the Iraq and Afghanistan
wars over the past eight years, yet we barely swallow hard over the
nearly 40,000 traffic fatalities on our nation’s roads annually. A
University of Utah study comparing 40 volunteer drivers of a “virtual
car” discovered that drunk drivers did better than cell-phone users and
that chatting on the cell was the equivalent of registering a .08 on
the breathalyzer.
I understand that there now exists a “culture of the cell phone”
that will be difficult to alter. I carry a cell phone, but I don’t
answer it if I’m driving, and if I need to make a call, I pull in
somewhere and stop. It’s not that I’m not smart enough to multi-task,
it’s that I realize that driving today’s roads requires complete
attention, if only to protect yourself from some Suburban Assault
Vehicle drifting into your lane because the driver is on the phone.
Unless you’re a doctor or a fireman, there is no phone message so
urgent that it can’t wait a few minutes to be answered safely.
In Europe, cell-phone use is already banned while driving, so why
does it always take this country so long to enact the obvious? Oh, I
forgot, we disdain European culture. The Old Country takes the matter
so seriously that there is a kit for sale that includes a paint-ball
gun for drivers to mark the cars of violators when the police aren’t
around. Of course, anyone shooting another car with a paint-ball gun
around here would have their heads blown off with a real gun. The
effete Europeans don’t allow guns in cars either, but at least in this
country, we’re able to report a real shooting by using the cell phone
that’s already in our hands.
