Home » Government Articles » A Poster Child For Distracted Driving? Sadly, Yes
A Poster Child For Distracted Driving? Sadly, Yes
Anchorage Chief of Police Mark Mew demonstrated that even someone even a Chief can be distracted by his cellphone and cause an accident.
November 20, 2011 /Government PR News/ -- The Anchorage Chief of Police, Mark Mew, was recently in a minor accident, apparently caused by his attempting to deal with an alarm on the calendar of his iPhone. This alarm distracted him enough to bump the car in front of him when thought the light had turned green.
He was reprimanded and admitted in a KTUU.com story that "I shouldn't have been fiddling with it."
How true is this statement and it provided a reminder for us all. There are a thousand different distractions that can occur while driving, and iPhones and all Smartphones only represent the most recent and, perhaps, the most insidious.
The same article notes that study by the Alaska Injury Prevention Center shows one in four Alaska drivers use a cell phone while driving.
All The Modern Conveniences
Driving is a big part of American life. In 2010, we drove a collective 3 trillion (yes, Trillion) miles. When you add all the parts of the manufacturing, petroleum, and transportation elements of the economy are over 10 percent of the nations GDP, at well over a trillion dollars.
Driving all this distance, especially in a state as large as Alaska, we spend a great deal of time in our motor vehicles. With all that time in cars, we do many things while in the car or truck.
We listen to the radio or iPod, talk on our cell phone, read parts of a newspaper, eat lunch from a drive-through, program a GPS to make sure we know where we are going, text on our phone, drink some coffee or soft drink, read a report for work, check email on a smart phone or watch some video on an iPad.
We can even have a DVD player built in to the sun visor in our car, so we could watch, illegally, a movie while driving.
While all of these things may be convenient, and help our productivity and sense of not wasting time, they all have a dark side. They distract us from the task at hand, driving. Maybe they often result in a benign, minor incident like Chief Mew's accident.
However, for all the minor accidents like his, there are the catastrophic fatal car crashes that take fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, friends away from us forever. And for what?
Distraction.Gov
The problem came to the attention of Ray LaHood, Secretary of the Department of Transportation, and he did something about it. He created a website that is solely dedicated to the highlighting the dangers of distracted driving.
Some have dismissed it as grandstanding or one more example of the "nanny state" attempting to regulate every activity. Nonetheless, after watching a few of the videos, by parents or siblings, telling the stories of how their family members died in distracted driving crashes is heart rendering, and it's not hard to see why something needs to done.
"Everything About My Life Changed"
A couple explains how their daughter was killed while texting on the way to school. A mother describes finding her daughter's wrecked truck. Her father tells how he knew she was texting and how, when he warned her before the accident to stop and that she would have a wreck. "No, I won't" she said. Her mother sums it up, saying, "Everything about my life changed."
A random search of the internet turns up the ongoing consequences of distracted driving.
- A 16-year-old girl killed near Pittsburgh after driving into a tree November 2, 2011, a half written text still on the cell phone recovered from the crash scene.
- October 27, 2011, a Wisconsin man charged with reckless homicide for causing a fatal accident while texting.
- A woman in Fergus Falls, MN, sentenced on October 10, 2011, to one year in jail for criminal vehicular homicide for an accident involving texting.
The concern over talking and texting on cell phones is not simply their ability to cause fatal distractions, but the fact that we all don't have or use them. Yet.
Studies by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) show cell phone use is increasing. And with all enhanced power and capability of new smart phones, the attraction to have them and use them will only grow ever stronger.
A Simple Test
The next time you think you need to text. Or talk on the cell phone, eat or do anything else think for a moment and ask yourself, "Is this activity worth my or someone else's life?"
Poster Child
And what makes Chief Mew a poster child for distracted driving? Because he is just like the rest of us.
Article provided by Law Office of Gregory J. Grebe
Visit us at www.grebelaw.com/
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