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WE JUST got my husband’s car back from the panelbeater and it looks better than it did when it went in. (We’ve found a panelbeater who smoothes out random damage at no extra charge and gives little old ladies – my mother – a discount. Heaven.)
It’s almost worth a week of careful scheduling (“You going to use your car tomorrow?”) and juggling meetings. But of course, the car should never have needed Mr Miracle’s services in the first place.
This was the accident I’ve been waiting for, the other shoe that finally dropped, the prang caused not by a slippery road surface or a child running across the road or a drunk driver, but by a cellphone.
My husband was turning left into a driveway when a small truck hit him in the rear. The cause: texting while driving.
Scientists in Australia this month published an article outlining some tests they did comparing driving while drunk to driving while mobiling. The result?
Having a conversation on the cell that demands your attention while behind the wheel is as dangerous as driving after drinking twice as much as the legal limit. (And answering text messages was the equivalent of driving way above the limit in any country in the world, apparently.)
And by the way, the study showed it was just as dangerous talking on your hands-free as holding your cell tucked up to your ear. The issue is not what you’re doing with the phone, clearly, it’s how much of your attention it is stealing
It is an offence to drive while using a cellphone or other electronic communications device, but you’d never know it on our roads.
A couple of days ago, on a nightmare rush hour trip from Rosebank to Sandton in Jozi, a black Jeep driven by a smoothie – you know, the sort of young man who has his chest waxed and each hair on his head individually snipped and styled – slid out of a side road without stopping and joined the stream of traffic, oblivious to the fact that he had just made about 40 cars, driven by 40 already fed-up drivers, slam on anchors.
I passed him immediately afterwards, and saw why he couldn’t look right before turning: he had his cellphone attached to his ear like a sucker-fish.
In the States, the estimate is that more than a quarter of all accidents involve the use of cellphones, and they reckon at any one time about 11% of drivers are using their phones – my guess is it’s at least twice that in South Africa.
There are, after all, nearly 30 million cellphones in use in this country.
And consider this: “...motor vehicle accidents are estimated to cost the country over R60bn each year,” according to an article on www.cover.co.za in December 2012.
Spare me and my family for a year or so, please, we just made our contribution – and without bothering the short-term insurance industry either, as the driver who banged into my husband was not insured and will have to pay up.
Every motor accident is the stone-in-the-pond, with ripples that spread amazingly far.
It’s not just the cost of repairing the car: there are the medical costs (for those who survive); the burden on other family members (think of our case, and how much time this really minor little accident wasted: sharing trips to clients, trying to work in coffee shops while waiting for the other partner and the like); the employers who have to deal, at the least with an employee who might not be able to be at work on time, at worst with an employee who is off work for months in rehab.
Rehab... rehabilitation. The very word reeks of money, doesn’t it? All that costly equipment in hospitals, the innumerable sessions with hard-working therapists, the repeated hospital admissions for more patchwork in the surgery.
About 15 000 people are killed on our roads each year, but about 10 times that number are injured. “Every day, more than 20 people are injured so severely on our roads that they are permanently disabled,” says Mansur Cloete, president of the South African Society of Physiotherapy.
“Disabling injuries require extensive rehabilitation, which is a huge burden in both the private and public sector – not to mention the mental, emotional and physical toll on the injured person and his or her family.”
Even accidents which don’t cause very evident disabilities can affect you over the long term: whiplash and other neck injuries which we don’t treat as terribly serious can in fact leave you with months of eye-hand coordination problems, imperfect balance, less accurate use of hands and arms.
All of which could add up to an increased risk of other accidents, in vehicles or elsewhere. Who needs that?
Unlike other countries such as South Africa and New Zealand, Japan bans all use of cellular phones while driving. Given the dangers of driving under the influence of cellphones, I wonder if we should not do likewise?
Oh, and if we plan to ban selling booze to them, maybe we should ban the sale of cellphones to 18-year-olds, too? (Waits for explosion… Just kidding, folks!)
- Fin24
*Mandi Smallhorne is a versatile journalist and editor. Views expressed are her own. Follow her on twitter.
