When Darrell Martin talked to the media about the death of his brother Lee, the soundbite that emerged was: “Dog walk text message killed my brother”. What actually killed Lee Martin, though, was the arrogance, stupidity, irresponsibility, lies and casual defiance of 30-year-old Christopher Gard.
Gard crashed into the 48-year-old father of two, who was taking part in a cycling event, because he didn’t consider that he needed to focus and concentrate while driving a van at 65 miles an hour. This was not because Gard hadn’t been warned that using a phone while driving was dangerous and illegal. He had been convicted of the offence at least six times before, the most recent just weeks before the crash when he had persuaded a magistrate not to take away his driving licence, promising to lock his phone in the boot from then on.
Here was a man who thought he knew better than the fools who reckon that you need hands, eyes and attention to hurtle a heavy, potentially fatal object through space. According to Darrell Martin, Gard had nine seconds in which to see his brother and act accordingly, nine seconds that he chose to spend sharing the trivial minutiae of his own day, thereby robbing another man of his life. Gard deleted the three messages he had sent while speeding towards Lee, in an attempt to evade punishment. He was jailed for nine years and banned from driving for 14.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of Christopher Gards around. Accidents involving mobile phones are now so common that the police refer to them as one of the “fatal four”, along with speeding, drink driving and failing to use a seatbelt. But an RAC survey this week found that almost a third of motorists flout the law, using their phones to talk, text and take photos or videos.
Many of these not-so-petty criminals believe that they’ll never get caught, by which they mean convicted. Statistics back their gamble. Between 2010 and 2014 convictions for mobile phone use while driving halved to 16,000. Much of this is blamed on cuts in traffic policing. But if fewer people are getting caught, the sensible thing would be to beef up the consequences when they are.
Currently, it’s only a £100 fine and three points for a first offence, and “getting caught” on multiple occasions didn’t stop Gard. How can you get it through to people that rather than getting caught, ploughing into another human is the thing they should be afraid of? How do you get it through to people that they are risking their own and others’ lives?
In the past the answer has been massive public awareness campaigns, painstakingly spelling out the dangers as shockingly as public decency allows, again and again and again. Campaigners are pinning their hopes on the idea that a similar blitz on mobile phone use would work.
Yet these tactics have limitations. People still endlessly complain about speed cameras and speed bumps, because simply warning people that speeding is hellishly dangerous isn’t enough. People still declare that they know their own alcohol limits better than any breathalyser does, or that smoking skunk actually helps them to drive better. The psychology of driving is itself, I’m sure, part of the problem.
I don’t drive myself – too useless – so I really notice the driving mentality. The massive increase in physical power that getting behind the wheel confers seems similarly to boost egos. People feel impregnable in their cars, more in control, oblivious to the fact that these are machines that deliver injury and death every day. Sometimes people feel intensely that their car is a totally private space, a tiny peripatetic kingdom over which they rule.
Being a driver makes people feel free. That’s why it’s so easy, behind the wheel, to persuade yourself that the rules don’t apply to you. Other drivers empathise with that. The hapless magistrate who was persuaded to let Gard continue driving – it’s likely he too believed that taking away the right to drive was taking away liberty. The liberties this man took at the wheel? Somehow, they weren’t seen as important signals that Gard wasn’t free but instead was out of control.
My dad, a rightwing libertarian by instinct, was furious when it was made illegal to drive without a seatbelt, and furious that so much cash was being spent on telling him what to do with his own life in his own car. In the US, of course, such fury is much more widespread, which is why airbag technology had to be invented along with bossy cars which remind you that somebody hasn’t been good. My dad, who wasn’t a big drinker and wasn’t into speeding, was much less annoyed about the campaigns telling people not to do that stuff. In fact, he rather approved.
That’s the odd thing about public awareness campaigns. They often preach to the converted. People who already accept that it’s dangerous to drive and use a phone will listen. People who are used to telling themselves this doesn’t and shouldn’t apply to them, will not.
Maybe drivers need a self-awareness campaign, telling them that anyone who feels a sense of invulnerable autonomy the minute they click their car door shut is a dangerous, self-deluding fool and general menace to society. In the meantime, the bereaved relatives of the victims will have to carry on drawing attention to this state of affairs, time and time again.
