Yesterday morning I was standing at the bus stop, looking in one direction to see if the bus was coming. A walking and texting person crashes into me from behind, sending me flying and falling. I ended up with two scraped and bruised knees, and my one good (right hand) is swollen, bruised, and has a good cut in it.
While I was screaming at the idiot, a police officer pulled up and took a report. The person is 6’4" and weighs 230 pounds. I am 5’5" and weigh half that. The texter is being charged with assault and causing bodily injury. Having a severe phobia about my right hand being damaged, I could have thrown him under the nearest bus and gotten away with it.
No story, but I’m happy to report that using a phone while driving is now against the law in Oregon. In fact, I’m pretty sure the “distracted driving” law also includes things like eating or other activities that take your mind off the task at hand. One of the legislators who wrote the bill was stopped and ticketed for cell phone use not long after its passage. ::Nelson laugh::
My son was a passenger in a car waiting at a red light. They were rear-ended by a woman who was texting (or doing something else with her phone). Their car was totaled and my son was treated for a concussion. He received an offer to settle, which we negotiated and settled out of court. The woman was ticketed for “failure to pay full time and attention,” a generic violation in Virginia, and the penalty was minimal. A lawyer told me that that drivers are seldom cited under Virginia’s no-texting law because it’s so hard to prove, unless an officer sees it. Even then, using GPS and making calls are allowed, so it’s still hard to prove they were texting.
A near-miss: I was driving with my young son in the car on a small countryish road with one lane on each side and a yellow stripe divider. A woman driving in the opposite direction was looking down texting and swerved right at me- I had to swerve over to the dirt shoulder to avoid her (fortunately there wasn’t a ditch there). I don’t know if she even realized what a close call she caused- she never looked up from her text. Hope it was important.
That reminded me: my daughter was rear-ended in that same scenario. Knocked her clear through the intersection and gave her a severe case of whiplash. She still has neck pain to this day. She’s been told that an operation could relieve the pain, but she’s rightly frightened by someone messing about with spine elements.
I don’t know how this works in practice. Do police confiscate phones at the scene if texting is suspected? What would constitute probable cause? He did cite her for something else so it probably wouldn’t make much difference if it were instead a different violation. Neither one was criminal.
I was rear ended by a police cruiser (twice) and shoved into the middle of the intersection by a police cruiser whose driver was looking at something on his computer and failed to see that the traffic light had turned red. The city actually tried to claim ‘soveriegn immunity’ and even force me to take an intoxication test many hours after the accident was reported and investigated despite the fact that the investigating officer (from a nearby municipality) found the police officer driving the vehicle to be at fault and no evidence of intoxication or impairment of either party. The city, which is self-insured, settled the vehicle damage claim but we’re still litigating the personal injuries for which I just asked compensation for medical bills and the few days lost time at work, no ‘pain & suffering’ or anything requiring adjudication. So it isn’t just texting; it is all manner of distractions owing to peoples’ need/addiction to being connected at all times and unwillingness to take the couple of minutes it requires to pull over and focus on reading some presumably important message rather than trying to perform two separate actions requiring attentional focus simultaneously.
I sincerely hope that autonomously piloted vehicles achieve maturity as soon as possible because people are already driving as if the car is piloting itself, as any commute on a highway with people texting or watching videos while driving at 70+ mph will evidence. Unfortunately, [THREAD=851358]we’re not quite there yet[/THREAD].
The crash doesn’t have a timestamp, though. Say it can be shown that the last text was sent at 1:23:45. How long before or after that time did the collision occur?
Actually, with modern automotive datalog systems it is possible to find the exact time of the crash from accelerometers or anomalies from impaired systems. And if A-GPS is enabled on the phone, it is possible to link a location down to a few meters to when the text was sent. So, provided the information can be subpoenaed from the phone’s owner and/or carrier, it would be possible to determine if someone was texting proximate to the time of the accident.
The reality, of course, is that we aren’t going to stop people from texting or streaming videos or browsing the Internet while driving, because people are stupid and believe that an accident won’t happen to them until it does. “You know, people like blood sausage, too. People are morons.”
Well sure if the person was actually texting and not doing one of the thousand other things they could be doing on their phone. People tend to say “texting” in these situation when they really mean “doing something with their phone that is distracting.”
I was hit by a girl talking on her cell phone. Nearly did me in. Completely destroyed a rare and valuable motorcycle, too. The frame, twisted like a pretzel, hangs from my garage roof.