What is it with Times scribe Maureen Dowd these days? When did it become acceptable for a prominent columnist to pen, as a contribution to perhaps the foremost newspaper in the free world, a basic rehash/summary of another writer's article — an article from the Times itself, published just days earlier, which means that a vast audience has already taken note of those very same facts?
Here's what I'm talking about:
• Dowd's column bemoaning the cell-phone use of motorists.
• Matt Richtel's NYT article from two days before, same topic.
Dowd cribs almost exclusively from Richtel's reporting. Some eighty percent of her column's sentences are reworked ones from Richtel's earlier article. That doesn't rise to the level of plagiarism, but it's certainly strange. And annoying.
More troublesome still is Dowd's facile insistence — also prevalent, though more latently, in Richtel's multiple pieces on the subject — that The Government Must Finally Do Something. That means, the Times team says, that we need laws that forbid drivers from using cellphones — even hands-free ones.
What might be instructive is to first take a level-headed look at the scope of the problem. Over a ten-year span, from 1997 till 2007, the number of reported traffic accidents in the U.S. went down from 6.7 million to 6 million a year, at a time when cell-phone use increased by a factor of more than 30. Interesting, isn't it?
Risky as I'm sure it is to drive and dial, and then to drive and yap, those numbers don't exactly point to an out-of-control bloodbath.
The argument advanced by David Strayer, a professor who researches distracted driving, has some merit:
"We've spent billions on air bags, antilock brakes, better steering,
safer cars and roads, but the number of fatalities has remained
constant. Our return on investment for those billions is zero. And that's because we're using devices in our cars."
It seems a bit short-sighted, though, to point to the use of "devices" as the only or even the leading reason for why we're not decisively winning the War on Traffic Accidents (though we're doing pretty well). There are other factors at work too. One of them is that as cars become safer, with airbags and crumple zones and digital lane-change alerts and onboard collision-avoidance computers, our sense of security increases to the point where we are likely to take more risks. These irksome unintended consequences are of course plenty ironic: technologies that are designed to make us safer in fact often tempt us (well, not you or me, natch, but others) to slip into chancier-than-before behavior.
Besides, many lives are saved by the same mobile gadgets on which Dowd and Richtel and Strayer cast a weary eye. It's now a completely common occurrence for people to report an erratic, swerving driver from their cell phones, while driving. And rather than passively rubbernecking, multitudes of motorists call 911 from behind the wheel as soon as they witness a car crash or another calamity.
By the way, I'm a bit suspicious of Strayer's indiscriminate use of the word devices, because it seems to point to his having a problem with all manner of electronics used in cars. Is he talking about GPS navigators too? I would argue that Americans now save themselves millions of miles on the road, no longer vexed by endlessly trying to find the correct address. That can't help but have a mitigating effect on the number of accidents. Or perhaps the miles not traveled and the increased collisions caused by GPS distractions cancel each other out. In any case, it's a bit bizarre that Strayer and the sympathetic reporters who quote him spare no thought for the other side of the coin.
I don't deny that there are serious safety risks involved in dialing while driving, or programming a satnav (GPS) while driving. I wish people didn't take those risks — just as I wish that 1980s drivers had all kept their eyes on the road while fumbling for their Prince and Hall & Oates audio cassettes, and motorists of all eras would simply refuse to get distracted by the wailing toddlers in the backseat.
This, I think, goes to the heart of the matter. Which behaviors should be deemed too risky to be allowed to continue, on penalty of law? Richtel makes much of the notion that a phone conversation is extraordinarily distracting to a driver because it mentally whisks the talker to a different place.
But talk radio, or a Garrison Keillor radio play, can easily be said to do the same thing (I frequently mutter things at Limbaugh and Hannity, sometimes in an almost out-of-body kind of way, during the time I can stand to have them on the dial). Do we therefore outlaw radio in cars? CD players? iPods? GPS screens? Eating or drinking behind the wheel? Lighting a cigarette (I know, quaint, isn't it)? Applying makeup? Looking at a road atlas? Having unruly kids in the back?
Where do we draw the line, and why there?
Most states already have a catch-all law on the books that lets cops dole out fines for "operating a motor vehicle without due care" (the language of these statutes differs, but that's the gist of it). Why would we need extra laws cracking down specifically on electronic devices in general and on cell phones in particular?
And more importantly: What of the states and municipalities that have already introduced specific legislation to restrict motorists' use of cell phones? Have crashes and fatalities gone down appreciably in those areas, in a statistically meaningful way? It's possible, but by no means self-evident. The Times — remarkably, for all the space it's been devoting to the topic — is largely mum on the subject. Given that people tend to overestimate their own ability to drive and simultaneously yap on the phone, and given that the paper quotes experts who say that cell phone use is quite literally an addiction, compliance with any new laws is likely to be pretty low.
To me, real as the dangers are of mobile technologies being used by distracted motorists, it seems like a problem that legislation cannot effectively address. No doubt more cell phone bans will be passed though, and they will be mostly a false panacea that serves no use other than legislative theater — "Look, your elected representatives are doing something, isn't that grand?!"
No, it isn't grand at all. It's damn near useless.
Want to really do something about the problem? Slap a one-dollar tax on each gallon of gas. Why? It's right there in Richtel's article, staring him and Dowd in the face:
The number of driving fatalities has remained around 42,000 a year for
most of the last decade, though it fell to 37,261 in 2008, when gas
prices rose sharply and Americans drove less.
Introducing a hefty gas tax would do more to staunch the human toll of driving than dozens upon dozens of cell phone bans ever could. But of course, such a move would never fly with politicians interested in keeping their jobs. Instead, they're reduced to (eventually) crafting new feelgood legislation that is wholly unnecessary and overwhelmingly ineffectual.
Or, as they call it on Capitol Hill and in State Houses across the nation, "Business as usual."
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