Close your eyes and picture this scene for a moment. A woman is driving her two children to school in the early hours of the day. The weather is murky and the road is still wet due to a heavy overnight rainfall. A DJ's voice filters out softly through the radio speakers inside the car as it pulls out of a secondary road and turns onto a busy three-lane road.
The two children, a young boy and a little girl, are strapped well to the backseat, glancing quietly outside through the wet glass panes of their respective door. Suddenly, their mother's mobile phone, resting on the passenger seat, emits a powerful vibrating tone. An incoming message has been received. The woman, without thinking twice, picks up the phone, hits the inbox key and goes quickly through the message, leaving her attention from the road for just a few seconds.
A loud panicked cry from the back seat grabs her attention... a second before her car pulls savagely into the back of the car in front, the car which had just overtook hers.
Those few seconds were enough to distract the driver's attention from the road and place her life and that of her kids on the line. Fifteen minutes later, the woman and her two kids are declared seriously injured by a paramedic doctor and are rushed to a nearby hospital. Additionally, the driver of the first car, who happened to be well in his age, is confirmed as being in a critical condition.
This type of tragedy could have been easily avoided if the woman never answered her phone while driving. Who will have the courage to call the man, her husband, the father, and give him the bad news? What will it take for anyone to understand that texting or talking over the phone while driving is outright unsafe? Does it really need to be a fatal accident for us to understand the perils behind this veracity?
The scene depicted above might very easy become a scary reality if anyone of you out there on the road ignores the writing on the wall and keeps playing with one's own precious life.
I have dug up some information from the net and found out that on January 3, 2008, an American woman by the name of Heather Leigh Hurd was killed by a truck driver who allegedly was texting while driving. Her father, Russell Hurd, has been actively supporting a law in various US states, called Heather's Law, which would prohibit texting while driving.
The Chatsworth train collision, which killed 25 people on September 12, 2008, was blamed on the operator sending text messages while operating the train.
In 2009, a crash on the MBTA Green Line of the Boston area was blamed on a driver who was texting. This occurred nearly a year after the Newton, Massachusetts rail accident, on May 28, 2008, that was blamed on the operator using a cell phone while running the train.
Moreover, a simulation study by an Accident Research Centre of a US University, provided strong evidence that retrieving and, in particular, sending text messages has a detrimental effect on a number of safety-critical driving measures. Specifically, negative effects were seen in detecting and responding correctly to road signs, detecting hazards, time spent with eyes off the road and (only for sending text messages) lateral position. Mean speed, speed variability and lateral position when receiving text messages and following distance showed no difference.
In 2007 alone, we have had 1,209 casualties in Malta. Of these, 695 drivers sustained injuries: 550 suffered slight injuries and 137 had grievous ones. Eight accidents were fatal.
In today's fast track life, it is already very easy to get distracted by all the sounds in our developing urban environment, so imagine how the introduction of our mobile communication systems in our daily lives, and now even in our automobiles, has dangerously raised the calamity percentage factor to an all-time high. The most recent and most complete research shows that distractions that take drivers' eyes away from the road for an extended period of time are a factor in nearly 80 per cent of accidents.
Maltese drivers need to take this issue extremely seriously before a large tragedy occurs before their own eyes and which can even involve the lives of their loved ones and others who are absolutely not at fault.
On the legislative side, the authorities need to take some very strict measures on this issue. Penalties should be harsh. Unfortunately, and I mean this literally, messages to be cautious sometimes fall on deaf ears, so a good harsh penalty is the only measure that can make an offender realise it really does not pay to repeat his/her offence. Playing about with such a delicate subject when there could be our own lives involved is simply foolish.
So, please, let us all make an effort as a nation and respect each other's lives. If we really look forward to top some EU excellence list, why not excel in one that will keep us alive and make us a proud and responsible nation. One person's irresponsible behaviour could lead to another person's death and even his own. Nobody needs to die today.