Pay attention to the road, you idiots
Current Affairs, Film 07/28/2004 |Years ago, while driving around Anchorage, I glanced to my right and saw a couple guys driving around with a portable DVD player sitting on the dashboard of their car, quite happily watching a movie as they motored around town. Very unamused by their obvious disregard to the safety of themselves and those around them, I made sure to move a lane over so that I wasn’t next to them, and then spent the next few minutes ranting to whoever I was in the passenger seat about the idiodicy of trying to drive and watch a DVD at the same time.
Well, with the boom in fancy car toys over the last few years, including things like in-car DVD players, the inevitable has finally happened: two people in Alaska were killed by a driver watching a movie on a dash-mounted DVD player.
In what may be the first trial of its kind in the nation, prosecutors have accused the pickup truck’s driver of second-degree murder for watching a movie instead of the road when he crashed head-on into the Jeep.
The pickup’s driver, Erwin J. Petterson Jr., denies using the DVD player as he drove north on October 12, 2002 and contends he was only listening to music from a compact disc, said his attorney, Chuck Robinson. […] After the crash, Petterson and his passenger, roommate Jonathan Douglas, were transported to an Anchorage hospital. Within hours, Douglas called his ex-wife and told her he was not sure how the collision occurred because he was “spacing out on a movie they were watching,” according to prosecutors. The woman is scheduled to testify. David Weiser, 34, the son of the slain couple, said only two people know what happened in the cab of the truck. But equipping a truck with entertainment options that can be used while driving goes beyond a momentary distraction of putting on makeup or using a cell phone, he said. “This takes forethought, this takes methodical steps,” David Weiser said. “You have to go to the store, plop over money, install it, and install it so it can be used without a brake employed. “I view it as no different than walking into a bar, having five beers within an hour and getting behind the wheel,” said Weiser, who quit an eight-year career as a loan originator in Boston to attend the trial.
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p>It’s very simple, people. If you’re driving a car, then drive the damn car. Don’t jabber on a phone (I don’t care how many times you tell me it doesn’t affect your driving — studies show that cell phone usage while driving is at least as dangerous as driving under the influence of alcohol, and if I know that you’re calling me from a cell phone while on the road, I will hang up on you), don’t watch a damn movie, and for God’s sake, pay attention to driving!
(via /.)
iTunes: “Entrada and Shootout” by Goldenthal, Elliot from the album Heat (1995, 1:45).
[See also: DVD driver acquitted | ‘Hands-free’ isn’t accident free | That’s gotta hurt… | Just Hang Up | Mars Dead or Alive ]
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4 Responses to “Pay attention to the road, you idiots”
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Bryan
Michael Hanscom
Prairie
Ryan Waddell
July 29th, 2004 at 10:23 am
Dammit, I had a big long comment up here, and I was getting timeouts trying to contact Typepad… grrr… And then our power went out and I lost it. So the gist of it is thus:
1) Just because this guy had it set up to pop out when he turned on the ignition, doesn’t mean that it automatically played a movie every time he drove anywhere (or that he was watching it the night of the accident). Chances are MUCH better that he just thought it was cool to have the dvd player pop out when he turned on the car.
2) It IS possible to pay attention to the road while talking on a cell phone, the same way it IS possible to pay attention to the road while having a conversation with someone in the passenger seat. If you’ve got a hands-free for your cell phone, I don’t see how it is really any different at all.
July 29th, 2004 at 11:07 am
1) True enough, and this is what trials are for — to (try to) get the facts. However, given that his passenger said in the phone call that the movie was in progress while the car was in motion, if the screen is mounted such that the driver can see it, I find it very hard to believe that that wouldn’t be a distraction at all, even if the driver thought he was paying enough attention to the road.
2) I’d say there’s at least one potential major difference: a passenger, able to see the conditions of the road, weather and traffic, will know when to shut up and let the driver concentrate on driving the car effectively and safely. Someone on the other end of a phone conversation won’t be able to make those judgments and is more likely to keep talking during times when it might be better not to distract the driver.
The articles about the tests studying reaction time and cell phone usage that I linked to in my post seem to support my feelings, too.
Even if you don’t agree with the numbers — and the articles do include competing statistics from other studies (funded by cell phone companies) — all of the people involved in the studies have agreed on one thing:
As I’ve said before: hang up and drive.
August 12th, 2004 at 12:16 pm
Followup: not guilty.
August 12th, 2004 at 12:37 pm
DVD driver acquitted
This originally just went into my linklog, but considering my previous rant, I wanted to follow up on this one. The Alaskan driver accused of killing two people due to watching a DVD while driving has been acquitted.