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Hang up and drive
If you drive a car, you’ve almost certainly done this. You’re driving along at night listening to the radio/CDplayer/iPod and you’ve got your tunes/sports/inane neocon yammering turned up pretty loud, and then you get to within a couple blocks of where you’re headed and you’re looking for the right address and it’s dark, and you’re having trouble seeing the street numbers. And the first impulse you have, the first action you take to help you see those street numbers?
You turn the radio down.
It doesn’t make sense, does it? Why should sound interfere with sight? But it does. It distracts you, making it harder for you to focus on the other. It can be the 50,000th time you’ve heard the Zep playing Over The Hills And Far Away, and still the sound creates a cognitive interference that makes it harder for you to read street numbers in the dark.
What common daily tasks are more complex than driving? Damned few. Maintaining awareness of your own speed and trajectory, as well as the speeds and trajectories of all the cars and trucks adjacent to you, is hard enough, and that’s just the baseline. There’s anticipating the speeds and trajectories of the vehicles in your way, paying attention to your plans for the next mile or so, and maintaining a little cognitive space so that you can react to things you weren’t anticipating, like when the pickup truck doing a safe and sane 65 mph four vehicle lengths ahead of you disgorges the differential it was hauling to the dump. It’s true, there are a lot of people on the road that don’t think of driving as such a complex task, and you often hear about them on the radio in the morning as the announcer describes just how late for work their fiery death will make you. The idiocy of people who think they’re immune from the laws of physics: yet another thing to keep track of.
A recent study suggests that eating and drinking at the wheel doubles your likelihood of an auto accident. Makes sense to me, and that’s not even counting the spillage of hot liquids. I recently bought a car stereo for Becky, and was, frankly, kind of amazed at the complexity of some of the controls on some models, requiring that you look below the dash for some seconds to select which track you want to hear on the CD you’re playing. In-dash GPS is bad enough, but the models that offer you capsule reviews of restaurants in the vicinity boggle my mind. I mean, it’s one thing if you have a passenger who can read them to you. But you know people aren’t going to think to themselves “I don’t have a date, I’d best not use the GPS.”
But to me, one brain-sucking cognitive black hole outdoes them all.
The other day I was walking Zeke and saw someone stopped dead still in the middle of a street, nosed into a T intersection, and he had managed to block traffic in three directions. People were lining up both behind and in front of him, and on the other street as well. Zeke walks slowly, and so it took about three minutes for us to pass out of his sight, and he was just pulling away when we left.
He was talking on the phone, and the conversation was apparently so interesting that he just stopped in the middle of the street.
Now I admit that’s a better choice than continuing to drive. Witness the woman who nearly ran me down on Sansome Street a year or so ago while chatting on her phone, seeing me only at the last minute. If not for me and my amusing, panicked gesticulations, she likely would have sailed on through the red light. Her response to my angry, frightened yelling at her to watch where the fuck she was going? “I’m on the phone.”
I’ve started a little survey over the last couple years. If I see a driver who’s weaving back and forth in his or her lane, or driving at a markedly different rate of speed than one would expect — say, 25 miles per hour in the fast lane of a limited-access highway — and if my course involves pulling abreast of said driver, I look to see if that person is doing something other than driving. Even with my own biases and expectations going in, I’ve been shocked at the results. Almost all of them seem to be talking on a cell phone. True, sometimes with the wireless headsets it’s hard to tell: the person could be talking to some invisible toddler in the back seat. And true, on rare occasions the driver has no phone but is instead swigging from an open bottle of Wild Turkey, in which case I breathe a sigh of relief and drive on. I kid! I know full well that drinking whiskey at the wheel is almost as dangerous as driving while on the phone.
Oh, bullshit, you say. I drive and phone all the time, you tell me. I drive just fine when I’m talking. Yeah, yeah. I used to work with someone who said, in all seriousness, that she was an excellent driver when drunk. Sure, maybe your reaction time is such that slowing it by one fifth isn’t such a big deal. But why would you do so voluntarily?
“Well, ok, so it’s more dangerous. But I need to call while driving for my job,” you tell me. “My job requires that I be in constant communication with my office and/or clients.” Well, employers did fine before cell phone use became common, even in high-pressure fields. What they had then instead was more support staff. Cell phones are cheaper than support staff. Dumping pollution in the creek is also cheaper than treating it or reducing the amount of pollution you produce, and yet few seem to think dumping pollution in the creek is a bare-bones necessity for businesses. Think of it as actuarial pollution: If your job requires that your office externalize its overhead into a statistically significant increase in traffic deaths, there is something seriously fucked up about your job.
The good news is that people tend to slow down in unconscious compensation for their slowed reaction time. The bad news is that they are always in front of me when they do so. Let’s look at a salient quote from the linked study just above:
“If you put a 20-year-old driver behind the wheel with a cell phone, their reaction times are the same as a 70-year-old driver who is not using a cell phone. It’s like instantly aging a large number of drivers,” says David Strayer, a University of Utah psychology professor and principal author of the study…. The study found that drivers who talked on cell phones – regardless of whether they were young or old – were 18 percent slower in hitting their brakes than drivers who didn’t use cell phones. The drivers chatting on cell phones also had a 12 percent greater following distance – an effort to compensate for paying less attention to road conditions – and took 17 percent longer to regain the speed they lost when they braked.
This cognitive interference isn’t limited to driving, of course. Just this afternoon I watched yet again as a suited drone walked out into four lanes of high-speed traffic in North Beach, against the light, while gazing at whatever web page he was surfing on his PDA. I have thought at times that Blackberries might prove a source of selective pressure increasing the average level of human intelligence by just such means, but what of the cost? It’s traumatic to run someone down with your car, even if he is a corporate attorney.
Seriously though. I don’t care who you are. Your call is not important to me. Not so much that I’m willing to drive next to your wobbly, distracted ass while you argue over toner cartridges. Hang the fuck up.
Posted by: Chris Clarke
Running down a corporate attorney might be traumatic, but running down merchant bankers could be cathartic.
(ex-clerk in merchant bank during greedisgood 80s)
By: By tigtog on 2006 08 22
I heard a recent report of a one-car rollover crash along a rural interstate on a weekday morning. The skies were clear, the road was dry. The driver’s PDA was found in the wreckage, still on, still displaying his e-mail.
By: By Charles on 2006 08 23
you pull up next to them? very daring. defensive driving nowadays means staying home.
By: By dread pirate roberts on 2006 08 23
There’s two places me and Miss Patsy argue: in the Container Store and in the car. We each have scorn and disgust for the type of container the other would pick to put shit in. She also has a Tardis-like sense of space and believes that the inside of everything is bigger than the outside. And I am a big old controlling, C——.
Just last weekend we pulled up to a gas station and slammed car doors and exchanged places so I was driving. Because I can’t take the inexplicable slowing to 40 mph then speeding up; the candy unwrapping; the when-I-look-that-way-the-car-GOES-that-way-THING, and other things. It’s much more relaxing for me to drive.
In NY, you get a ticket for driving and talking on a cell, but of course I see it all the time. When Miss Patsy calls me from the car she knows better than to be driving.
I have made a few calls on my cell while riding my bike on a bike path, though; just the “I’m almost home, bring the dogs out and we’ll go for a walk,” or “Do we have soy milk?” type. I wouldn’t do it on the road, although, here in Manhattan, I have seen people riding bikes, smoking and talking on the phone, all at one time.
yrs, B. Dagger Lee
By: By bdaggerlee on 2006 08 23
I hear you. The last near-accident I was in was because my supervisor was talking on her cell (I was her passenger) and couldn’t even f**ing steer her damn car.
I will admit to having used my own cell in the car. I do so much like I do other damnfool things while driving (such as eating, drinking, reading a map, taking off a sweater, changing a tape, or rolling down a window - what can I say? Lots of long solo commutes will do this to a person.):
As briefly as possible (under 30 seconds or less), with eyes firmly on the road ahead, one hand always on the wheel, during straight stretches without heavy traffic, prepared to drop it all and give full attention to the car in case of emergency.
Doing ANY of these things under any other conditions are profoundly unsafe, as opposed to merely stupid.
By: By Rachel Shaw on 2006 08 23
I’ve caused an accident while talking on the phone. No one was hurt, and my insurance took care of the damage to their truck (my car sustained oner $2K worth of damage, which I had to pay out-of-pocket). I’m kind of a shitty driver to begin with, and they came from out of nowhere as I tried to pull into a parking lot (although I’ll readily admit my culpability, the other driver wasn’t paying a lot of attention), so maybe the accident would still have happened if I weren’t on the cell. But the phone conversation was probably a factor.
I talk on the phone much less now. Brief conversations, and never in traffic.
By: By the_bone on 2006 08 23
Perhaps you are familiar with the sign that resides in the window of City Lights Bookstore (and is taken out for play on special occasions): “Stash your sell-phone and be here now”? http://www.emptymirrorbooks.com/keenan/citylights-8.html
Ferlinghetti should be added to your list of “The Top 25 Most Dangerous Fictional Unhinged Characters Who Are Dangerously Hurting America” - for over 50 years!
By: By Fred Levitan on 2006 08 25
Oops! I guess I actually intended to describe Ferlinghetti as a “Publisher, Purveyor and Enabler of Unhinged Fiction and Characters Who Are Dangerously Hurting Amerikkka for Over 50 Years”. I think he’s already done his time in the kangaroo courtrooms and virtual dungeons of the anti-intellectual boobocracy, though… Nattering Nabob award, anyone?
By: By Fred Levitan on 2006 08 25
I’m with CMD. If I look like I’m talking on the phone, I’m no doubt just singing along with the radio.
But I can’t Just Drive. If there is no other input, I lose focus on the road—music or another passenger is more than enough to keep my mind from wandering off the road.
Some people can’t walk and chew gum at the same time, but I have a much harder time walking if I’m not chewing gum.
By: By Tiltmom on 2006 08 31
Thanks for so eloquently putting this issue into words. I also have been doing a survey for the past year or so and I swear, every near-accident, case of erratic driving or almost-hitting-a-pedestrian.. you got it, the idiot is on their cell phone. Frankly, I have gotten sick of seeing people with their damn phones permanently attached to their ears. Driving while talking *is* dangerous and I have seen enough cases of reckless cell phone driving to state that there is absolutely no reason it should be legal anywhere. I don’t understand this need to be in constant contact, but if the call is so important, how hard is it to pull over somewhere and take it?
By: By Alena on 2006 09 13
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