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17/08/2011
By EWAN KENNEDY
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I’ve had a lot to say against mobile phones in cars over the years. I regard them as real killers in far too many circumstances due to idiot drivers using them when they should be concentrating on safe use of a vehicle.
But there are some positives in the use of mobiles as well, a couple of which I've witnessed in recent times, so let's silence my critics - who believe they can concentrate fully on doing two things at the same time - by writing a good-news piece on mobile phones.
I was once driving to the office when I saw a prang a few hundred metres in front of our car. A driver mistakenly changed lanes into the front of another car and both vehicles headed off at different angles.
The car that caused the crash bounced back into the lane it had come from with a minimum of damage. The other driver wasn’t so lucky as his car was shoved into the guard rail at the side of the road. Everyone in the traffic flow was alert – sadly, not always a common circumstance – and slowed down as they approached the scene of the crime.
A good mate was sitting beside me and before we even got to the mangled cars he had dialled 000 on his mobile. We passed on information to the police and said that that no-one appeared to have been hurt in the crash, but that we couldn’t be sure.
He then rang our local ABC radio station and advised the people there about the prang. Within five minutes we heard other drivers being warned of the crash over their radios.
This sort of near-instantaneous communication is a huge improvement over the days when you would have to have found a public phone (one that hadn't been vandalised) and make a call from it.
This crash was a minor one, but there are certainly circumstances where lives have been saved by the quick use of mobile phones.
Another day I was driving over the Gateway Bridge east of Brisbane. For those of you who don’t know it, the Gateway has an arched roadway that make visibility over the crest of the slope limited. I noticed a small car broken down on the other side of the road so asked my convenient mate to go through the process of ringing the police and the radio station to report the blockage. This time we weren’t so lucky as the ABC’s phone line there was continually engaged.
We gave up after a while and hoped that no problems would arise. Sadly we were wrong. On the return trip about half an hour later we noticed three tow trucks at the scene of the broken down car. One to remove it, the other two to take away two vehicles involved in a big tail-ender.
Properly used, mobile phones can be life savers. Badly used, and the situation seems to be getting worse by they day, mobiles are killers. It’s probably never going to be possible to get accurate statistics, but I suspect the number of people who die due to the misuse of mobiles is far greater than the number of lives saved by them.
So please: Always keep two eyes on the road, two hands on the steering wheel and all your attention on the road. Anything else is dangerous.
ewan@marque.com.au |
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