Opinion: When driving, keep mind on road — not on distractions

Talk about it

My wife would tell you I’m a little crazy about distracted driving, whether the distraction is a text message, a phone to the ear, a newspaper open across the steering wheel or a driver fishing for something on the floor mat on the passenger side of the vehicle.

I’ll admit I pay attention to those things — maybe more attention than is good for my mental well-being.

I’ve read too many crash stories that involve distractions.

Besides, I used to say to Nancy, I’m not like my little brother. Kevin yells at people who are using their phone as they drive past him. I’m not breaking any family confidences here. He wrote about it in a column in his newspaper a while back.

He shouts things like “Hang up the phone and drive” when people motor past him with a cell phone plastered to an ear.

I’m not like that. I notice, but I don’t yell. At least, I didn’t until last week.

Here’s the deal. Sometimes I walk to work. It’s a path that takes me past the Capitol building and Georgia Morse Middle School.

When school is in session, the intersection is terribly busy just about the time first period starts at the school and the 8 a.m. workday begins at the Capitol and other government buildings in that cluster. The intersection is a “T,” with the Capitol on the northeast corner, South Dakota Retailers on the northwest corner and the middle school stretched across the south side.

The other morning — and, my heavens, it was a fine morning, one of a string of them so far this October — I walked my usual route to work on the usual route, passing the Capitol at a brisk but not hurried pace. I reached the intersection as the light turned in my favor. With a white silhouette of a pedestrian showing on the street light, I strode into the marked crosswalk and headed for the far curb.

As I reached the middle of the street, I noticed a car approaching the T from my right.

The vehicle was nearing a red light at an intersection where a turn was required (unless the driver intended to plow across Capitol Avenue and into the middle school gymnasium wall.) Still, I could see the car wasn’t slowing much, so I stopped in my tracks.

Good thing, too, because the vehicle slid past me with about a foot to spare, slowed just a bit and turned right onto Capitol. The driver had the window down.

The left hand was holding a phone to the left ear. The right hand, with a cigarette in it, was on the steering wheel. I’m pretty sure the driver had no idea I existed or the sidewalks were full of middle-school students trying to cross the streets.

“Nice stop,” I shouted. Oh, man, just like my brother, and I might have felt a bit of remorse for hollering on a public street except for this. The driver of the vehicle didn’t slow, didn’t look in the rear-view mirror, as best I could tell. What the driver did, using the free hand — and by free I mean the one holding the cigarette and the steering wheel — was offer me what in gentler days of newspapering was described as “a rude street gesture.”

Yes, of course, the driver had to let go of the steering wheel to do that. I guess the gesture was only a momentary distraction from an otherwise totally distracted drive through one of the busiest weekday morning intersections in the capital city.

The problem of distracted driving is getting a lot of attention across the country these days.

I’m not sure it is humanly possible to craft a safety message that would reach the motorist I encountered the other morning. Even so, it makes sense to keep trying.

I know this: I’ve been more cautious about leaving curbs and entering crosswalks the past several days, right of way or not. I got the message.

Terry Woster’s columns are published on Wednesdays and Saturdays in The Daily Republic.

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