Why I get Angry with People who Text and Phone while Driving

Riding my bicycle along a busy London street, I noticed a large car up ahead moving very slowly, not keeping pace with the traffic in front of it. Then it stopped altogether. Then it jerked a few feet forwards. I made a small bet with myself about what I would find when  I caught up with it. And I won that bet, for the driver was – as I suspected – busy peering at some sort of hand-held screen while driving.

 

I rapped on the window and told her she was breaking the law.  She jumped as if jerked from a doze, which in a way she had been. Again, as so often, she was unembarrassed and sulky, rather than ashamed or worried that she might be in trouble. I sometimes explain to these people : ‘It’s not you I’m worried about, it’s the person you are going to kill’.

 

It’s not just texting, though I think this has caused the habit. I was nearly sideswiped, quite a while ago now, by a bright red expensive car going at about 50 miles an hour through Kensington. I chased after it, and caught it up (as you usually can in London, on a bicycle, because all that aggressive speeding merely means shorter intervals between red lights) and found its owner was driving while filling in her application for Kensington and Chelsea Residents’ Parking. Far from being embarrassed or sorry, she was arrogant and dismissive.

 

Perhaps I’m sensitive about this because, at the age of 17, I caused a serious road accident myself – the great mercy being that nobody was killed, and the only victim who was badly hurt was me. I suffered a very painful twist fracture of the ankle, which was also very unpleasant to look at when I collected myself enough to inspect the damage. My pillion passenger, thanks to a great mercy for which I give thanks quite often even now, more than 40 years later, suffered no more than a broken toe.

 

I suspect that,  had the lorry I hit with my motorbike not been equipped with a two-way radio, and managed to summon an ambulance quite quickly in that pre-mobile phone era, I would probably have lost a leg. The experience has been useful to me ever afterwards. If you have ever experienced really severe pain, an electric blaze of red, black and orange agony just on the edge of blacking out, I think you are bound to be more grown-up than those who haven’t. This is one of the reasons why women who have given birth tend to be so much more sensible than supposedly adult men.

 

I am especially careful, on high mountain paths, not to scale any slope I am not confident of getting back down again, and this might serve as a good metaphor for life in general.

 

The point about this is that I caused all this trouble through a moment’s inattention, while in charge of a powerful machine on the public highway.  I am lucky to be alive and whole, and in a way even more fortunate to have nobody else’s loss on my conscience. So I am particularly distressed to see many others, far older than I then was, behaving in the same unforgiveably stupid fashion now.

 

A few years ago one of the Welsh police forces (Gwent) produced a video which is quite merciless to the viewer and (I warn you) very distressing - but unlike so many arty films which claim that their violence has a moral purpose, this one really does. It is here   

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUlY5YSdr60

 

and it should be compulsory viewing in every school, college and university in the country, but should plainly be shown to adults as well.

 

In my view, as well as about six weeks in a labour camp breaking rocks and eating gruel, any driver caught texting or phoning while driving should be compelled to watch this film, night and day,  till it gets into their dreams and they cannot forget it.

 

It is particularly accurate about several things. These are, the appalling speed with which normal life turns into ghastly tragedy, the way in which road accidents appear to go on and on forever if you're in the middle of one, and then the terrible silence when the thing is over, the way in which mechanical things carry on happening even when the crashing has finished, and the way in which the person responsible is also a pitiable victim, simultaneously receiving help and sympathy yet the object of righteous wrath, and of his or her own everlasting remorse.

 

It is (because it has to be, for dramatic purposes) very inaccurate about how long help takes to come. It is much longer than that, and feels even longer than it is.