U R 2 Stoo-pid 4 WDS!

Please indulge me for a minute or two on this. This matter has nothing to do with politics really, but I read about it in the Philadelphia Inquirer yesterday and I thought I was going to lose my mind.

This front page story has to do with the trend of individuals, primarily teenage girls if the story is any indication, of sending text messages with their hand-held devices while driving, including cell phones.

It is obvious to many upright-walking life forms (but not all, apparently) that any kind of distracting activity that takes place behind the wheel of an automobile is highly dangerous (driving being a responsibility after all, not a right). And yes, I’ve done dumb things also, like eating take out while driving or flipping through a pile of papers looking for a note of one type or another, excessive fiddling with the radio presets or the CD changer, or calling a pre-set number on a hand-held cell phone while driving in New Jersey (in violation of one of the most totally ignored laws I have ever seen). And many years ago, I drove a couple of times after leaving a party when I know I would have failed a breathalyzer had I been pulled over.

Dumb, dumb, dumb, I’ll admit.

But as you read the Inquirer article, you realize that not only do the girls who are interviewed have no sense of contrition – “OK, you got me, I won’t do this any more” – but they’re actually proud of themselves for sending text messages while driving (or, as noted in the story)…

Maddie Kelly, 18, of Newtown Square, says her mother forbids her to use the cell phone at all while she drives.

But Maddie will continue to text while driving. It's a kind of rebellion. "My mom will try to text, but she doesn't know how," she says, smiling. "But I do."

Now really, how dumb do you have to be to admit something like this to a newspaper reporter knowing it quite probably will make its way back to her mother and she will be punished anyway?

Outside of any parental restrictions placed on Maddie Kelly, she should automatically lose her license for at least a month. A PA State Trooper should come to her door and notify her personally; nothing like having one of these representatives of law enforcement approaching you to whip “the fear of God” into you right quick.

(I’ve dumped on the Inquirer a lot lately, but I give them credit for writing this story and publicizing this issue; my only qualm is that Alfred Lubrano, the writer, didn’t find out what the penalty is for this, since it surely is a violation of some type - if not spelled out precisely in the law, it could be part of some "catchall" category.)

And also in the story, there is a photo of a collection of young Main Line women sitting around a table at their favorite “haunt” smiling and holding up their portable devices, so proud they are of creating such a potentially dangerous nuisance.

There are a lot of reasons why this story got under my skin. Like many of you I imagine, I spend a good deal of time on the road for work-related reasons. And I don’t need to deal with more road hazards, I need to deal with fewer ones.

Also, I conducted corporate training at another point in my career, and if there’s one thing that made me want to spit, it was some idiot sitting there “texting” somebody while I was trying to teach (and I can tell the difference when someone has to deal with a legitimate work-related issue that pops up and when someone is continuously chatting with their buddies or making arrangements for happy hour). When that happened, I would make a point of finding out who this individual was after class and notifying their employer about it. They didn’t always like to hear this from me, but I didn’t care. I was a prick about it, but to me, there was a principle involved.

This New York Times article from 1999 describes another reason why and many other people feel so strongly about not using cell phones or other devices on the road unless absolutely necessary due to an emergency…

In Pennsylvania on Nov. 3, a 2-year-old died of injuries after her mother's car was struck by another whose driver said he did not see a stop sign while dialing. This caused State Senator Joe Conti of Bucks County to press again for a bill he introduced in the legislature to outlaw drivers' use of handheld phones.

Maddie Kelly should speak to the mother of this 2-year-old; I believe it was a little girl. Somehow, I don’t think she would be so proud of herself any more.

Conti was on the right side with this issue as he was with others when he served in the PA State Senate (and who’s to say that he would have lost to Patrick Murphy last November had Conti been the U.S. House Rep instead of Mike Fitzpatrick, but luckily it was Mikey instead). I don’t believe Conti’s bill has ever passed or even come up for a vote.

The long and short of it? If you want to text somebody, clean out your car glove box, play with your trip odometer or have sex, then get the hell off the road and stop creating a problem for everybody else!

Update 8/16/07: State Rep. Eugene DePasquale (D-York County) is my hero to introduce a bill to ban texting while driving (here); good luck.

Update 11/28/07: As noted here, NJ Governor Jon Corzine signed into a law banning the use of hand-held items including cell phones and texting devices on Nov. 2nd (here); no word on what is happening in PA with DePasquale's bill (he can be contacted here).