The other day, I was driving home from work towards the end of rush hour. A Silver BMW pulled onto I-94 just in front of me and proceeded to weave back and forth in his lane and drive really, really close to the car in front of him. It didn’t seem possible to me that he was driving drunk at 6pm. As he was in the center lane and I was in the right lane, I decided to pass him so that I was out of his way in case he caused an accident with his erratic driving. As I was passing, I looked over and discovered why he was driving that way. He was holding an iPhone at dashboard level next to the steering wheel. I could tell by the motion of his thumb on the screen that he was scrolling down. It appears to me that he was either surfing the net or reading his email… at 65 mph on a fairly busy freeway.
Archive for the ‘Cell Phones’ Category
More Bad Driving Habits
September 20, 2008Texting and Driving Don’t Mix
September 16, 2008Webster defines multitasking as:
the performance of multiple tasks at one time
In business, multitasking is considered to be a positive attribute. It allows you to work on many projects at the same and minimizes slack time between tasks. When driving a commuter train, however, multitasking is not a good thing. You should be focused only at the task at hand. This article, indicates that it is likely that the engineer of the commuter train that crashed in California was texting with a couple of teenagers that had befriended him. The article says that the train company, Metrolink, has banned its engineers from using cell phones on the job but there is no federal law against it.
Does there really need to be a federal law against texting while driving any vehicle? Common sense should take over in these cases. Come on, people. Driving any vehicle requires your undivided attention. When you are in control of tons of steel being hurled at extreme speeds near other similar objects, it is you obligation to be focused on that one task. Laws aren’t going to fix this. Unfortunately, many people ignore certain laws all the time. Parents, teach your kids some common sense when it comes to cell phones.
