KEY POINTS:
In the year since we last argued that cellphone use by drivers should be banned, nothing has happened to change our view. The horrific deaths of Samuel and Beverley Keating simply strengthen the case.
The Ashburton couple died in September but the full story emerged only this week when the driver who killed them came to trial.
The two, both in their 70s, were driving home after celebrating their 49th wedding anniversary when 19-year-old dairy worker Robert John Stonestreet, 19, who had been drinking, drove straight through a stop sign and ploughed into their car. They died at the scene. Stonestreet told police that he had been so preoccupied reading and sending text messages that he had not seen the stop sign.
Many people who can remember the invention of the mobile phone take the view that it has not been an unqualified boon. Certainly it has cost us much in terms of common courtesy: it is lamentably rare for a face-to-face conversation to be conducted without electronic interruption and it seems - remarkably and regrettably - to have become accepted that we may suspend a real conversation to take part in a virtual one.
The instantaneity of communication afforded by mobile phone has been matched by their users' increasing impatience: because we can read and respond to that text message now, we must. The idea that it might wait for even a few minutes is quite intolerable. Technology, rather than liberating us, has ensnared us. We answer its demands, not it ours.
Nowhere is this capture more evident than in the use of cellphones in cars. The suggestion that you should be able - and therefore permitted - to talk on a telephone while driving would have been laughed at only a generation ago. If you had gone further and proposed that a driver could read and write messages in tiny characters using a keypad the size of a large watch-face, people in white coats would have probably detained you.
To be fair, few people defend the right of drivers to send and receive text messages but the chorus of protest at the suggestion that cellphone use in cars be banned entirely remains a noisy one. Yet it is difficult to understand. Almost 50 countries have now banned all cellphone use in cars. Many more restrict it. Californians, who virtually live in their cars, will face fines from July and drivers under the age of 18 there are already banned from using a cellphone, even with a handsfree kit.
Australia and the UK, jurisdictions comparable to our own, have seen fit to impose bans, as have the French and the Germans. Fines vary, but in some places are stiff: in Ireland, a third offence can get you jailed for three months. In India and Italy where most drivers seem to have a death wish, cellphone use in cars is banned. The world's most enthusiastic cellphone users, the Chinese, are similarly restrained.
What do all these countries know that we don't? That a telephone is, by definition, a distraction. It is impossible to use without impairing driving ability.
Opponents of change mutter darkly that their freedom is being abridged, but Samuel and Beverley Keating won't be lamenting such a loss of liberty. Yes, radios and cigarettes and pies are distractions too but that doesn't make it right to allow the use of a technology which is actually designed to attract the user's attention.
Cellphone use contributed to 446 crashes in the 10 years to 2005, killing 34 and injuring 587. Transport Safety Minister Harry Duynhoven has said that drivers should be banned from using handheld cellphones, but there is no proposal before Cabinet. He might like to explain why a policy he favours is not being advanced. Those mourning the Keatings' deaths would surely be interested.
