What to do with cellphone-addicted drivers?

Katie Smith’s Saturday article in The Guardian on distracted driving reminds me of the first cellphone accident I saw.

Standing on my deck, looking at traffic on Queen Street (need to get a life), three north-bound cars had stopped to allow a southbound car to make a left turn (Island politeness).

Just as I turned away, there was a large, extended crash. A truck from a plumbing company (my lips and fingers are sealed) had hit the third car, driving it into the second one which hit the first one.

Without braking, all the metal in that truck got to use all of its kinetic energy. Four scrunched vehicles.

The driver of the truck got out, finished his conversation on his size 14 shoe phone (those were the days) and then called the police on the same phone. The cause of the crash became the instrument of rescue.

This was the heyday of Maxwell Smart, and therefore of huge shoe phones, er . . . cellphones and no plastic in your plumbing (made the truck very heavy), and behold, cellphone-distracted driving was already a problem.

Our behaviour has only gotten worse. I recently saw a driver who was texting run a red light while making a left turn, going past the right shoulder after crossing six lanes who all had the green light and were moving. They all missed the invitation to crash.

The driver looked up briefly when the car ran onto the far grass. By the time it was back on the road, straddling two lanes, and with no thought of the excitement that had just been caused, the driver’s eyes were down on the phone, again.

What to do to with cellphonedistracted drivers? The cruelest thing, (so let’s do it) would be to take their phones away from them, forbidding any use of any phone for two years, and publishing a list of offenders to all cellphone suppliers. They would not be permitted to sell a phone to anyone on the list. It would be an offence to lend such a person a phone.

A second offence would cause them to wear a sign saying that they were a recovering cellphone addict.

When they got past their withdrawal symptoms, would their thumbs grow back to normal size? Would their frontal lobes reconfigure themselves into a human brain? Would they look up and see the other vehicles on the road? Would they look up and see what a lovely place we Islanders live in.

I could hope for things to happen. all of these