8:00am | A prediction: Maybe next week, maybe five years from now, a child in Long Beach will be killed because a driver is busy doing something with a mobile communication device. There will be a vigil to raise awareness of the problem. The matter will be heard at city council. The police will weigh in. State lawmakers will be importuned. And, finally, something serious will be done in the way of deterrent and enforcement of this dangerous behavior.
This may not be an avoidable scenario. We can’t, after all, force drivers to be attentive. But there is a systemic problem here. Even for texting while driving1—which numerous studies have been found to be more dangerous than driving drunk—the fine for a first offense is $20, and $50 for each subsequent offense. That’s parking-ticket level. Not much of a deterrent for behavior that can—and has repeatedly—resulted in death.2
Many people would argue that, in contrast with the spirit of the effete the law, it’s perfectly okay to talk on a handheld cell phone while driving. To be frank, I think that’s nonsense. With the possible exception of stunt drivers, no one drives as well with only one hand available for steering a car. Are you a stunt driver? You are not. Sure, most of the time you drive perfectly well with one hand. But accidents don’t happen most of the time—they take place in moments of crisis: when your front right tire blows out, when a nearby vehicle makes a sudden unexpected maneuver, when a kid chases his soccer ball out into traffic. Tough enough to react to when you’re engaged in telephonic conversation. All the more difficult when one of your hands is occupied, too.
But that’s the least of it. I think I’m the only person left in America who uses his cell phone almost exclusively for talking. For the rest of you it’s all apps and Internet and so forth. And the studies bear out that while your reaction times are only a bit slower when you’re just talking, even when you’re just dialing—never mind all the other stuff your new-fangled superphones can do—things change dramatically, to the point that you’d be better off high than doing what you’re doing behind the wheel. And really, how many people who refuse to go hands-free never do anything but talk and listen while their cars are moving, never take their eyes off the road? Puh-lease. I’ve ridden with plenty of you; I see how it goes.3
How seriously do people take this danger? Stand for 15 minutes in any one spot on Ocean Blvd.—or any busy street in Long Beach—and you can easily spot 20 people driving with a phone to the ear, and more than likely at least one who is in the act of texting or some such activity.
I stopped driving a car in 1992 after witnessing a pedestrian being hit, knocked forward, clawing at the asphalt in an instinctive attempt to move, her legs no longer working. At that point I had driven for eight years without incident, but I had always felt uncomfortable behind the wheel, always aware that I was not a particularly skilled driver.4 I was careful and non-aggressive in my driving, but it was always readily apparent to me that I did not have the mastery I would like for the operation of such a dangerous machine—which is, after all, 2,000+ pounds of metal routinely traveling at over 45 mph.
Perhaps my first conscious awareness of this condition came in high school. I was riding shotgun as my friend Darren drove us down the 57 Freeway towards Newport Beach. Without warning, at 55 mph, the car directly in front of us somehow went into a full 360-degree spin as it shimmied across the traffic lanes. Almost miraculously, every driver proximate to the clockwise turn of events made exactly the right maneuvers to avoid every other car on the road. Had I been in Darren’s place, things might have come out very differently.
But had Darren not had both hands immediately available to him, things would have come out differently. And had he been glancing at Yahoo! Maps, forget about it. But he was doing what you’re supposed to do when you’re piloting a car: maintaining a certain vigilance.
If you do much walking or bicycling around town, I’ll bet you can tell me about more than one occasion when, through no fault of your own, you came at least near to being hit by a car, a car driven by someone who was not paying sufficient attention to the most important task at hand. And for every ten of you who can tell me such a story, I’m guessing eight would say that some of that missing attention could be found going into an iPhone or the like.
I’m sure all of our city officials will tell you that resident safety is the City’s number-one priority. And that using handhelds while driving is a safety issue. The police certainly think so. “I think it’s up there on the list [of priorities],” says Detective Jeff Jonkey, who administrates the LBPD’s red-light camera program (which, by the way, cannot legally be used in regards to this issue). “It’s a great law, […] but it’s hard to enforce.”
He’s talking not only about limited resources but also about how easy it is for drivers violating the law to drop their Droids the moment a police car pops into view. And even if officers could be assigned to the type of vantage point I mentioned above, the logistics of enforcement would remain difficult.
Moreover, Jonkey tells me that my wish for the City to layer additional penalties on top of the state-sanctioned schedule of fines will never be granted. State Senator Jenny Oropeza’s proposed SB 949 evinces that rather clearly.
“We’re doing what we can for now,” says Jonkey, and you can more or less hear the sigh in his voice when he says that only a change in public perception of the issue will make the roads safer on this front.
In January of this year the Christian Science Monitor reported that usage of handheld communication devices while driving is the cause of 1 of every 4 car accidents in the U.S. One in four. Twenty-five percent. That’s 1.6 million accidents per year.
How many is too many? And how close to home does it have to get before we change the paradigm?
If you’re one of the many, many people engaging in this practice, wait to make the call until you get home, buy the hands-free rig, pull over if you simply must look at your Palm Pre, etc. It’s really not so much to ask of you. Whatever you feel the need to do while driving, it’s not as important as giving the road your undivided attention.
Yes, that sounds like an all-too-obvious public-service announcement. But when I look at the statistics, when I think about the close calls I’ve experienced, and when I stand on Ocean Blvd. and watch the cars go by, it seems clear that not enough people are speaking up about it.
Footnotes
1See, for example, those conducted by Car and Driver magazine, the University of Utah, the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute, the United Kingdom’s Transport Research Laboratory, etc.
2Because of various administrative fees, the actual cost of a first offense ends up being close to $150. Why the state wouldn’t publicize this is beyond me—because if people don’t know the cost, they can’t be deterred by it.
3A recent survey by the Pew Research Center backs me up, noting that 47% of adult cell-phone users admit to having sent or read a text while driving.
4I will say, though, that my skills were no worse than those of many drivers on the road currently.