ROFLMAO, Interupted by a Screech, or Not
Last week I heard about more “Driving While Texting” accidents than ever before. The problem has drawn heavy attention from lawmakers and law practitioners. Oprah is talking about it. The Georgia legislature is looking into the problem. Months back I heard about a proposed bill that targets young people. Supposedly older drivers are mature enough to divide their attention while driving…WHAT? or in the vernacular WTF? It is true that the newest drivers are the least experienced at handling a car, but I’ve been driving longer than not and there was no age when I became mature enough to have an extra set of hands or an extra set of eyes to feed divided attention. According to The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration 80 percent of automobile accidents are caused by driver distraction. The only relationship that age has specific to the texting problem is that there are a greater percentage of younger people texting in the first place, therefore a larger number are texting while driving. Only reasoning I can imagine for putting this issue in an age based context is that it is easier to get a law passed if it does not restrict the group passing the law. Better laws are good, but many new laws simply feed an overly litigious lose/lose proposition.
We have evolved to this problem socially with emphasis on greater productivity, multitasking and multimedia ad nauseum. We took our children from one planned activity to the next with Gameboy in hand while also attending radio, video, conversation, whatever. We used television as a baby sitter in the home and in the car. There is a constant feed of multiple stimuli in every aspect of life with no down time. It is not surprising that we would carry that one step further to the operation of a car, even sadly, the operation of a commercial passenger jet. The words usually used to describe a quickly growing problem like “epidemic” or “rampant” are so over used as to be meaningless, but the difficulty with divided attention and driving is growing at such a rate that “Texting While Driving” covers those concepts without any additional words to convey the magnitude or prevalence of a problem so large.
There is hope. Sometimes the solution to a problem lies in finding a way to accommodate a desire rather than trying to suppress it. There is a way to get commute time and down time or texting time at the same time. Those kids in Japan wearing the school uniforms know the answer. It’s called public transportation, something we’re strangely lacking and strangely resistant to in the United States. On a recent visit to Japan I was invited to dinner by a Japanese family. The son was traveling a long distance to go to the better school and excused himself to go study. A friend asked “Do you study while you commute?” The mother interrupted protectively “NO no no, that is his down time” and went on the convey that he uses that free time to relax, text, listen to music and “regroup” on the way home. Public transportation is magic. It allows one to do the impossible, to multitask down time. How great is that? And you won’t drive your car through someone else, their bumper or their living room while you do it. I dream of the day when I can multitask my commute with down time or distractions without embarking on international travel.
We can have our cake and eat it too. We don’t need to pave over paradise to put up a parking lot, or make more lanes to accommodate more gridlock. We don’t have to spend our mind space primed in anticipation of hitting the brake when 70 mile per hour bumper to bumper traffic converts to gridlock. We can switch to seeing faces instead of tailpipes and and let someone else do the driving.
Leave a reply.
You must be logged in
log in