Hang up for a return to safer days
If you’re older than 30, hearken back, tax your brain and recall the days before cellphones. Can you? Somehow, you managed without one. You did the grocery shopping without it. You sometimes ran out of gas without it. You got from here to there without ever being tempted by a ring, buzz or a look down at that screen. Remember?
Well, we all need to retrain ourselves to learn how to manage without one again.
The two latest installments of the Daily Herald’s “Fatal Distraction” series underscore this. Daily Herald Staff Writer Lenore Adkins describes a 16-year-old Crystal Lake girl who drove her parents’ Lexus straight through a curve and into a garage because she was texting while driving.
Adkins’ report investigated tickets issued for cellphone use while driving for the first year of Illinois’ new law that attempts to punish that dangerous practice. The study showed that several of our bigger communities really aren’t issuing many tickets for what has been called an epidemic by national transportation officials. Requests for a year’s worth of tickets from 11 larger suburbs and the two state police districts that span our suburbs produced only 308 citations. Among the 11 largest communities in the Northwest and West suburbs, Schaumburg issued the most tickets in 2010, but only 36 were written in the first 365 days. Libertyville police did not issue any tickets for illegal phone use.
The law is tough to enforce. It’s difficult to always prove someone was using the phone. Still, we must do better. We strongly encourage more police departments to make ticketing and enforcement more of a priority.
Several law enforcement agencies are working actively to educate drivers about the new law, but we know from personal experience with other traffic laws that only a crash changes bad behavior better than a deep dent in the wallet.
A U.S. Department of Transportation study of 2009 crashes found nearly a half million people were injured in distracted driving-related incidents. Sixteen percent of fatal crashes involved distracted driving and 20 percent of crashes with injuries involved distracted driving. Notice we didn’t call them accidents. The definition of an accident is something that occurs unexpectedly or unintentionally. If you use your cellphone while driving, or otherwise multi-task by eating, looking away to reach for the stereo or painting your nails, the plain truth is you are taking action you know could result in a crash. It’s really akin to choosing to drink too much and then drive. You make that choice to endanger lives.
We have few real emergencies in our cars. Still, too many of us live with an “it’s-all-urgent” mindset that has us multi-tasking constantly. It must stop. The texts, calls and status updates can wait. If we do have an emergency while driving, we must pull over to use the phone. Our lives and our loved ones’ lives depend upon it.