Terrorist Cellulars
True story: a few months ago this girl gets on the bus and sits down in the back. She’s been talking on her cell phone since she was at the stop, and she continues to chat with her little sorority friend all the while she’s riding. She covered most of the standard “riding on the bus” talking points: the unnecessary declaration that she’s “on the bus right now,” that she’ll “be there in, like, four minutes”–but she also carried on a fascinating conversation about her friend, her friend’s boyfriend, and her ruthless attempts to sleep with said boyfriend any way she possibly could. Despite the fact that there was another passenger on the bus, despite the fact that the bus driver does in fact have ears, this girl went on and on about something that normally wouldn’t even be discussed in private.
It’s stories like these that illustrate my biggest argument against the New Mobile Order: it’s impossible to go anywhere without hearing about where people want to meet up with their friends, or where they are right now, or whether or not the test came back negative. For some reason, talking on a cell can convince a person that they are less than alone. There are no crowds, no one listening in, not even the caller on the other end of the line. The interior monologue has become exterior, with predictable results.
But if the high probability of losing one’s reputation doesn’t faze the American public anymore, the possibility of losing one’s life still has a hold on us. At least in theory. Why else the maelstrom of sniper coverage back in October? Why else do people pay so much attention to whether eggs and butter are currently good for you, or the Washington Post devote space on the front page about how cancer is now more like a chronic disease than a death sentence? Life and death issues grab hold of our consciousness damn near immediately (it’s the reason for those heavily-hyped, under-reported sweeps segments on the local news). Yet there are people, otherwise perfectly sane (minus their willingness to discuss herpes in a coffee shop) who still use a cell phone while they’re driving.
Let’s be fair: any kind of distracted driving can be dangerous. I once ran my car into a Jersey barrier because I was trying to change a CD. People who eat or drink (non-alcoholic beverages) while driving are arguably just as distracted as the person talking on a mobile phone. Even holding conversation with someone else physically in the vehicle can be distracting enough to cause a crash.
In the latter case, that second set of eyes can make up for the distraction. In the first three, even though you must take your hand off the wheel and focus elsewhere for a moment, it’s only for that moment. The CD or radio station gets changed and you’re done; the bite of a burger or sip of coffee is ingested and you’re done. But the cell phone’s distraction is constant; your hand is up at your ear as you try to maneuver into that sinister turn with one hand and an elbow. It’s still there as you crane your neck around to check for oncoming traffic, still there as you slam on the brake to avoid the car that you didn’t see. Every time someone cuts me off, or forces me to swerve at the last second, or decides to play judgement stop with my vehicle as the traffic cone, they are invariably speaking on a cell phone or from North Carolina. Or both.
Naturally politicians have jumped on the issue, passing cell phone bans first in New York City, then expanding outward to the whole state. Several other localities have joined in, though a nationwide effort died in the Senate (which is just as well, because there’s a freakin’ amendment for this type of thing). They typically ban only hand-held cell phone use by the driver, advocating the new hands-free models instead.
Also, naturally, there’s been a backlash against the new laws banning cell phone use by drivers. In an article last December for Wired News, Lauren Weinstein argues that “evidence exists that hands-free cell-phone conversations in vehicles produce about the same level of distraction to drivers as handheld cell phones.” Regardless of whether or not this is true (it’s the about the same level of distraction as any conversation), it’s not the distraction of the driver that is most important–it’s the reaction time. If you’ve got to put down the phone in order to grab the wheel and evade danger, it’s those extra few moments that mean the difference between ramming whatever’s in front of you and stopping just short.
Weinstein goes on to say that the delay of this study in California indicates that “merely talking on a cell phone doesn’t necessarily mean the phone contributed to an accident,” and that the “study’s results were inconvenient for cell-phone ban proponents” because they only included collisions in which the cell phone was the causative factor. Yet the Bay Area Times article states that because of a California Highway Patrol policy, cell-phone use only counted if there was a witness or definitive evidence–evidence easy enough to hide in one’s pocket before the cops showed up. And even if it wasn’t the immediate cause for the accident, cellular usage’s tendency for both distraction and increased reaction time don’t offer much plausability for having prevented it, either.
There’s a tendency in American culture to claim a right to just about everything: the right to speed, the right to a huge car, the right to own the latest gadgets and use them as they please. Cell phone usage in cars is one of these new spontaneous rights, and unfortunately, it does infringe upon the rights of others. And let’s face it: would it kill you to wait until you got home or to your office to use a phone? Do you really need to check your email while merging lanes at eighty miles per hour? Fine. Use mass transit. But stay the hell off the roads.
Occasionally, the government actually has to step in and prevent people from being stupid. Cell phone bans are not a cure-all solution to the me-first attitude of today’s drivers–there isn’t one–but they do contribute to making the roads safer. In an age when we freak out about possible terrorist attacks that are much less likely than being killed in a car crash, a few minutes without conversation for meditation won’t hurt a bit. Oh, and can you not tell me about how your leg was all bloody while I’m sitting at the coffee shop? Thanks, man, I’m just trying to read.