The unacceptable side of mobile (cell) phones.

Recently, I saw something come in to my in-box that just held my attention for sufficiently long to get me to move from scan reading to actually thinking about what I was reading and how it made me feel.

The US government may require cars to include scrambling tech that would disable mobile-phone use by drivers, and perhaps passengers.

“I think it will be done,” US Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood said on Wednesday morning, according to The Daily Caller. “I think the technology is there and I think you’re going to see the technology become adaptable in automobiles to disable these cell phones.

No, this is not some other form of Government interference in areas of our lives that are irrelevant to the real world.  This is serious stuff:

Believe it or not, I wasn’t always so outspoken about the dangers of distracted driving. Like a lot of folks, I just didn’t give a lot of thought to it.

But that all changed as I met people from coast to coast who told me about the loved ones they lost in senseless crashes caused by texting and cell phone use behind the wheel. And it was their stories–of dreams shattered and lives cut short–that turned the fight to end distracted driving into my personal crusade.

These people have had a profound effect on me. And I think their stories will have a profound effect on you.

SNIP

Just last year, nearly 5,500 people were killed and 500,000 more were injured in distracted driving-related crashes.  But, these aren’t statistics. They’re children and parents, neighbors and friends.

So this really does deserve thinking about.  As The Register article puts it:

The problem is that the average driver doesn’t think that he or she is an average driver: nearly two-thirds of drivers think of themselves as safer and more skillful than a driver of median safety or skills — a statistical impossibility, of course.

When faced with the prospect of automotive mobile phones being disabled, we’d be willing to bet that most drivers, suffused with confidence in their own skills, will think in terms of personal inconvenience and a restriction on personal freedom.

Perhaps it might be better to think of the guy texting in the lane to your left, or the gal yelling at her ex on her iPhone in the lane to your right, and think not of your own inconvenience, but of some distracted dolt killing you.

Remember one unassailable statistic, as explained by the late, great George Carlin: “Just think of how stupid the average person is, and then realize half of them are even stupider!”

LaHood may be right. Disabling mobile phones in cars should not be looked at as a way of protecting you from yourself, but instead as a way of protecting you from the stupid.

Quite so!

By Paul Handover