FOLLOWING our article at the beginning of the month on the dangers of using mobile phones to send and receive text messages whilst driving, the Murdoch press across the country is this weekend taking up the campaign to rid our roads of this scourge with the potential to needlessly kill.
Back on the first of June, I posted an article about idiot drivers on our roads who pay more attention to their mobile telephones than they do to the road; God forbid they actually concentrate on their driving.
Today — refreshingly — the same issue is being pursued by the Murdoch press across Australia, and it is to be hoped that their campaign makes some impact.
Readers can access the version published in Melbourne’s Herald Sun here if they are yet to see the pieces in question.
It’s a problem that just seems to be spiralling out of control; in the four weeks since I published the earlier article on the perils of texting and driving, it seems that everywhere you look now, when on the road, there are people engaging in this insidious habit.
Indeed, just this morning I was given “the finger” by a driver ahead of me who remained stationary at an intersection, typing a text message, after traffic signals had turned green; I gave him a toot of the horn — and he in turn proceeded to drive and continue texting, narrowly missing a row of parked cars as he swerved all over the road in Melbourne’s affluent inner eastern suburbs.
There are some — there are always some, whose excrement-filled brains are impervious to common sense and sanity — who will dismiss all of this as some kind of finger-wagging wowserism.
The reality is that it is no joke, nor something to be dismissed at will; those who engage in this practice are a menace to themselves, and to other road users, and the sooner they are either stopped from doing it or removed from the road permanently, the better.
Clearly, with others picking up the cudgels on this issue, I wanted to reinforce it through this column.
I encourage all readers to heed the message, and — if you know people who do this, on the “it can’t happen to me” principle — to find some way of getting through them.
It will be far preferable to see them alive and inconvenienced, for whatever period of delay is required before they can get off the road and take or send the messages they are currently tapping away at when they are supposed to be driving, than it will be to attend their funerals.
Or those of the people they end up killing.
And if they have so little regard for the safety and welfare of other road users — if not for themselves — then firmer measures are well and truly justified to try to stop them.
