Text or drive, not both

A few weeks ago, I watched a car pull out of a gas station and noticed a wallet was sitting on the trunk of the car. I attempted to get the drivers attention as they pulled out but could not get them to notice me. I then pulled up beside them at a stop light and again tried to get their attention but could not get the driver to even look up. It turns out they were very preoccupied with their phone. The light turned green and the car behind them honked its horn, so the driver started speeding up, but I noticed they were paying more attention to their phone than the road. It ended up taking my lights and siren to finally get their attention. I handed their wallet to them and then had a friendly visit about the dangers of driving and texting. In today’s world, almost everyone has a phone and they use it throughout the day. Text messages, e-mails, weather, stock prices, shopping … the list of things many people do on their phone is a long one. I remember waiting 10 minutes for a computer to connect to the internet (using dial-up) and now we get impatient if our phone takes a few seconds to load something. It can be very hard not to pay attention to a phone while driving. You just want to glance and see who it is, then you just want to reply quickly before you forget. But that quick “glance” at a phone when you are driving 30, 40, or even 70 mph can be the difference between life and death. It is not uncommon to find people in vehicle accidents who were in the middle of texting or using their phone when the accident occurred.

I once went to a training class in Springfield and as I was pulling into the parking lot a man sitting in a car just off the road flagged me down. I rolled my window down to see what he needed. He noticed I was in a police car and asked me if I was also going to the training because he was having trouble finding the place on his phone. I was a little confused and asked him how he was having trouble (because we were sitting in the parking lot at the location of the training) and he said he had been following the directions on his phone but could not see where to go next, so he pulled over to try and figure it out. I pointed at the building in front of us and he looked a little embarrassed as he said, “I guess I should have been looking at the roads and not my phone.”

Phones are great devices that can make life much easier when it comes to communication but driving down the road in a giant piece of metal is not a good place to focus on a phone. When you are driving you are not only responsible for yourself, but your actions could affect every life around you as well. If you need to respond to a text so badly that you cannot wait until you arrive at your destination, pull over for just a few seconds and do it safely. It is not worth the risk of what could happen from being a distracted driver. Keep your eyes on the road and help keep everyone a little safer!