By Steve Ludwig of Lopez Island
A few of our County Council Members are determined to help out the enormous US wireless industry by drafting a new ordinance that makes it easier to locate cell towers in tiny SJC. Bad idea C.C.! Improving cell phone service is essentially a form of manslaughter.
New data and studies show that texting and talking on cell phones are turning our roads into a bloodbath. The National Safety Council calculated that at least 1.6 million crashes are caused each year by texting and talking on cell phones, that’s 28% of all traffic accidents, over 10,400 killed.
From 2001 to 2007 cell phones caused 16,000 deaths on US roads alone. This may be only the tip of the iceberg – until cell phone records are routinely subpoenaed in accident investigations, we will not know the full extent of the carnage. Worse yet, the new laws prohibiting phone use while driving are having no effect.They may even be causing drivers to deny and hide their phone use, again obscuring the full extent of the problem.
The saddest part of this story is that most of the people killed and permanently disabled by cell phone caused accidents are young – mostly under 30 and predominately teens. That’s not to say that older law-abiding drivers can relax, you or someone you love could be the target of one of these speeding bolides with a texting teen at the wheel.
The wireless industry spends billions on advertising and so it’s not surprising that people now don’t feel “safe” without cell phone service. The human mind is no match for a well-crafted propaganda campaign. But as long as we are compelled to drive motor vehicles, cell phone service will shorten far more lives than it prolongs. To put it another way, cell phones do save lives, but not nearly as many as they ruin.
The best thing any community can do for its young people is to strictly regulate cell tower and antenna placement. Federal law gives us this right, and we should use it!
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I agree. One only needs to look to Europe who are way ahead of us in citizen protection. We do not get the truth here in America. Corporate interests drown out the truth. Israel has also taken sever steps to protect their people. This council while well meaning, “our friends and neighbors”, seems incapable to handle something as simple as garbage. (County taxing district) Holding down taxes is a noble cause but. Ask the public what they think.
Steve has all his stats right and they are alarming but what is wrong with Steve’s solution for correction is the lesson we Americans can never get right. When seat belts were introduced I was an accident investigator for The Hartford Insurance Company and the opposition to the belts sited the alarming statistic that several thousand people died each year while trapped in a vehicle by their seat belt following an accident. That statistic is still alarming but when legislation didn’t work, authorties resorted to education and the results 35 years later are dramatic. Human behavior cannot be changed by legislation. We need to start education for cell phone use at the elementary school age and maybe in 30 years or so we can see the same drop in cell phone related accidents that we now see in seat belt use.
In the meantime maybe we can find some acceptable technology that will allow providers to make cell phone use available to those of us who don’t have it and while they’re at it, allow “911” calls to be transmitted by cell phone.
And one last thing. Cell phone use is indeed a major cause of vehicle accidents but so are radios, ear phone music, yelling spouses and prescription drugs.
To reduce cell phone use by drivers, short pullouts could be constructed along our county roads in the vicinity of the new low wattage cellular signal boosters.