Screeching Halt

If you live in the San Francisco Bay Area chances are you have to commute to work especially if you are like me and live in the "City" and work "down on the peninsula" in Sunnyvale about 50 miles away. Now, normally I travel the wide open I280 where you can pretty much go as fast as you want so the driving time to my work isn’t all that bad. I can usually make it in less than an hour.

The other day I had the occasion to go home from work using US101, the main street of Silicon Valley, which runs parallel to I280 but about five miles further inland. It was early afternoon so there wasn’t the usual bumper-to-bumper traffic which is usually why I don’t take it. For the past couple of years the California department for highways, Cal Trans, has been upgrading 101 and repaving it, among other improvements. It has been quite some time since I last traveled 101 from the Valley and was admiring the nice new smooth freeway surface. As I was making my way toward San Francisco I noticed something that was quite disturbing. This freshly resurfaced roadway was inundated with tire skid marks and scrapped paint marks on barriers. They were all over everywhere. The road looked like the landing point on the runway at SFO except here the skid marks were swerving in all different directions. You could just see where people suddenly realized they were going to hit someone in front of them and in a panic, slammed their foot on the brakes, cut the steering wheel sharply right or left. Almost always there was an abrupt stoppage of the tire marks; a definite smudge at impact. They either hit the center divider or whoever was ahead of them. I used to travel this road a lot and I never noticed such a multitude of skid and impact marks before so I was wondering what was going on when I got the familiar ping on my iPhone signifying an incoming email. I instinctively pickup up the phone and glanced down to see the message and like a lightning bolt striking, I knew why there were so many skid marks.

People, it will ruin your day and the day of the other person(s) ahead of you that you crash into for the instance it takes to look away at an email or, God forbid, send a text message while you are driving a vehicle. So STOP IT! No matter how important you think you are or how urgently someone needs to reach you, it can wait.

I love mobile devices particularly smartphones and have devoted the past several years my life driving Serial Port Memory Technology into this market to give these great gadgets ever more capabilities. But we simply have to be sane about where we use them. Behind the wheel of a 4000 pound moving mass of metal and plastic isn’t one of them. Enough said.