I was riding shotgun with my daughter a few days ago, when we picked up my son from driver’s training. She is still on her learner’s permit, so we engaged in a little educational observation of drivers around us. Nearly every car at the various stoplights on the way home contained people texting and/or playing on their phones. Most of them did not bother to put the phones down when the light turned green and simply started driving down the road looking at their phones. One driver in a brand new Corvette drove down the middle of Koenig lane taking up both lanes and weaving into opposing traffic while attempting to work his phone (prime example of someone with too much money and not enough brains) my children were beside themselves with outrage. Every time I attempt to even change songs on my mp3 player they slap it out of my hands, never mind my trying to do anything else with the phone while I’m driving. We can’t get auto-drive cars soon enough as far as I’m concerned. Most people these days seem to be incapable of understanding just how dangerous their behavior is to everyone around them.
If you know one of these people show them this video,
…maybe they’ll get the picture.
Not too long ago, the Wife and son came up next to someone in a left-turn lane that was texting on their phone at a red light. The car that pulled up behind this person honked the horn, for whatever reason, and the texting person promptly drove out into oncoming traffic without even bothering to look up first. Their car was totaled. The drivers who hit them totaled their cars as well. All because they couldn’t be bothered to even look at the road before attempting to drive. Couldn’t even be bothered to check the traffic signal. Couldn’t even be bothered to pay the slightest bit of attention to the actual peril they were driving into, because whatever it was on their phone had all their attention.
It sounds funny, until you get into a wreck yourself. I T-boned a car at sixty miles an hour once all because the couple from Colorado who pulled out in front of me stopped to argue about which way they wanted to turn after they had already started their turn without checking for oncoming traffic. I was left with a few hundred feet and less than a second to make a decision,so I decided. I decided not to kill the driver of the other car and instead impacted the rear door of his side of the car before bouncing over the curb of the side road, impacting and launching over a three foot tall embankment, and leaving half my car behind me on the embankment. If I had calculated instead for minimum personal damage, I would have killed the poor bastard in the driver’s seat by ramming straight into the arguing idiot’s car, and the Wife and I would probably have fewer aches and pains to deal with (the airbags in the Saturn worked beautifully) but when you have less than a second to decide, you spend the rest of your life wondering if you did the right thing, and that is when you are paying attention to the road under the best conditions possible.
When you are looking at your phone (or reading, or doing your nails, or your makeup, or shaving, or…) you aren’t actually driving your car. Inertia is, and nature is a cruel bitch to the stupid.
PUT DOWN YOUR PHONE AND PAY ATTENTION!
