Meet Tim. It's 5 p.m., quitting time, and Tim is meeting a friend for a pint at a local North Shore pub, a 10 minute drive from his house (longer in 5 p.m. stop-and-go, but that's another story).
Tasty stuff — a proper 20-ounce Imperial pint of golden-hued IPA, a product of B.C.'s growing craft brewing industry. Tim and his buddy chat about the Canucks' recent overtime win, take opposing sides for the Grey Cup, make wish lists of the mountain biking gear they're going to get at Christmas.
One pint becomes two, along with a plate of wings as Tim skipped lunch. His buddy has to get back for supper, so they make their way out the door and Tim climbs into his late model Tacoma and heads off down the road. He's slightly buzzed from the litre of beer in his stomach, but it's only 10 minutes.
Meanwhile, Mary is running late from work, yet again. Like any job, hers is one where there are those who take responsibility, and those who coast on the efforts of others — Mary is one of the former. She's a full hour late because her co-worker dropped the ball yet again and the client was ticked off to no end.
Mary is good at her job, very good, and has things smoothed over in just a few minutes of conversation. However, there are emails to send, and then a few more to-dos on her regular list, and suddenly she's half an hour late to pick up her 12-year-old daughter from piano lessons.
She opens the door of her older Ford Escape, cranks it over and zips out of the parking lot just a little too fast. Her phone buzzes in her purse: a text received.
"I'm coming!" she mutters, reaches into the purse and grabs the phone.
Swipe, enter passcode, reply to text.
So what happens next? Do these two meet at an intersection with the crunch of metal and a lesson learned? Do they both get clipped by the RCMP and receive tickets, suspensions, and points on their licences? Do they each, individually, miss a darkly dressed pedestrian and kill someone tonight? Which one is the worst driver?
Statistically speaking, who gives a flying . . . um . . . care? Both these fictional people are engaging in very risky driving behaviours, and the risks they are taking are not just with their own lives. Neither one is what you might consider a dangerous criminal — they're not street racing or swigging from an open bottle of vodka while heading down the wrong way on an on-ramp — but both are being dangerously careless. Worse, both are doing things that far too many of us think we can get away with. Sneaking a peek at a received text, or "just one more for the road": it's the same thing, and it needs to stop.
Drinking and driving is, of course, already something we all know is wrong. If you are convicted of it, you will be pilloried in the court of public opinion. If Tim struck a pedestrian on his way back from the pub, he might lose his job, face heavy fines and prison time, maybe lose a friend or two.
If Mary also hit someone, well that's different, right? A moment's inattention — it could happen to anyone.
No. In fact there are any amount of statistics out there to show that distracted driving is actually more dangerous than drinking and driving. In the latter, your reflexes are slowed, vision skewed, and you make dumb decisions. In the former, you're looking at your lap as your two-ton machine barrels down the road, essentially driverless.
Modern cars are designed to be smooth and quiet at speed, eliminating the sensation of velocity in exchange for a secure feeling of confidence. Half of me feels like driving fatalities would go down if everyone was forced to drive in open-framed machines coated in spikes. You'd never go above 30.
But in your metal box, travelling at the speed limit, you don't feel like you're going all that fast. The phone pings and you palm it low, taking a quick glance. Let's say you don't respond, just read it. Grab, swipe, passcode, look. Five seconds maybe.
Fifty kilometres per hour is 13.9 metres per second. In five seconds, you travel nearly 70 metres. Seventy. That's near enough a city block, and more than enough to be coming up on a stale green light and have someone step off the curb, perhaps engrossed in their own private electronic world.
I know, I know: pedestrians in Vancouver operate with all the personal awareness of lemmings wearing welding goggles. It doesn't matter. You're driving the thing that can kill them, so it's up to you to pay attention.
So, how do we solve the distracted driving problem? There are a few schools of thought here.
The first is enforcement. We've seen both the RCMP and the local police conducting more cellphone checks, even resorting to posing as panhandlers at crosswalks to catch people out. This seems unfair, especially as sneaking a quick look when you're stopped at a red light doesn't seem all that unsafe, but the rules are the rules. As with drinking and driving, there's no grey area here — if you're behind the wheel of your car, on the road, you leave the phone alone.
The next idea is that somehow the technology that tempts will end up saving us. Cars are fitted with speech-to-text functions, integrated hands-free, and other ways to help keep our eyes on the road. Trouble is, studies show that most of this stuff is equally distracting, taking away from concentrating on the task at hand.
Ah, but what of the semi-autonomous car, fitted with self-braking and pedestrian detection? Fine, but the bugs are still being worked out, and neither our fictional Mary or Tim have machines new enough to have the technology.
In my opinion, distracted driving is never going to cease being a problem until it is treated with the same societal scorn as drinking and driving. Tim's buddy says, "Another one? Dude, you gotta drive — get a Coke or something." Mary's daughter says, "Mom, you texted me while driving? What's wrong with you?" That's the question we should be asking any time we see someone sneaking a text or a chat on their cell — what is wrong with you? Knock it off, it's God damn dangerous.
"Yeah, but. . . ." Yeah but nothing. No excuses. Leave the phone in the footwell or shut it in the glovebox if you can't resist. It's not just a ticket you're risking, it's someone's kid, father, grandmother and a lifetime of regret.
Brendan McAleer is a freelance writer and automotive enthusiast. If you have a suggestion for a column, or would be interested in having your car club featured, please contact him at [email protected]. Follow Brendan on Twitter: @brendan_ mcaleer.
