From Slate, an argument for outlawing driving with even a powered up cell phone. Sound draconian to you? Then I guess you haven’t yet had the privilege of a near death experience at the hands of some moron texting at 65 miles per hour. I have.
First there was last year’s train crash near Los Angeles, with 25 dead and 130 injured. In three hours of work before the crash, the engineer received 28 text messages and sent 29 more. He sent his last message 22 seconds before impact, just after passing a signal that would have alerted him to the disaster ahead.
Now comes the Boston crash, in which one trolley went through a red light and rear-ended another…Officials say the operator of the second trolley “was text-messaging his girlfriend” and “was looking down at his phone and could not apply the brakes quickly enough when he looked up and saw the trolley in front of him.”
If texting can cause crashes on train tracks, which prevent lateral drift, think how much more dangerous it is to text while driving a car.
Duh.
I’d go so far as to argue that the police check the text and call logs of every cell phone at every accident site and charge accordingly.
