Mondays with Mike: Traffic cop

Budweiser’s been running a very popular commercial against drunk driving that takes a novel approach: Be careful, be responsible, and get home safe…to your dog, who’s counting on you, after all. It’s really effective, all the more if you have a dog thing. You can watch here if you haven’t seen it.

The effectiveness of the dog angle in that little ad reminded me of a David Sedaris story called April and Paris. It opens with a bit of advice for anyone raising funds in the wake of disasters like Hurricane Katrina: Show animals in distress, not people—you’ll get a lot more donations that way. You can read April and Paris here, and it’s well worth the time, like pretty much anything Sedaris does.

Back to drunk driving, I’ve always had an offbeat opinion on the subject. It goes like this: I don’t care why someone does something stupid in a car that results in accident, injury or worse. Driving is serious business, and stupid is stupid. If a driver is perfectly sober and blows a light or changes lanes abruptly without signaling and hurts or kills another person, I don’t care why they did it—but it should carry consequences, whether or not the driver is drunk.

Driving drunk is bad because we know it increases your chances of driving poorly and endangering yourself and other people. But it’s the driving poorly part that is the issue. If you’re guiding a two ton missile and you’re texting or listening to angry hateful radio or you’re thinking about something other than driving safely, you’re as dangerous as a drunk driver. Because it’s an enormous responsibility, not an entertainment and it’s not a right.

This opinion is informed by having ridden a motorcycle on public streets for decades. I always realized it was risky, and to reduce the risk I wore protective gear, and practiced what I learned in multiple riding school sessions. On a bike, you learn to expect the absolute worst behavior from drivers, and the drivers consistently deliver. And when it’s your life, you tend to treat a driver’s failure to yield as a federal offense.

As a pedestrian commuter in a busy city I witness horrible, irresponsible driving, every single day. (And that includes some bicyclists who give bicyclists a bad name.) And off course, Beth’s written about her near misses in traffic here in the past.

I’m not saying that drunk driving is OK. The cultural and legal shift to preventing was absolutely necessary and it’s done a lot of good. I don’t think we should lock people up for failing to use their turn signals (though, sometimes…). We’ve got too many people in jail as it is. I’d just like something of a cultural change that recognizes that driving is serious business. And that enforcement of existing traffic laws (not just speeding) were better enforced, and that penalties for any kind of bad driving were stiffer.

It’s touchy, because we’ve all done stupid things in a car and I think we cringe at the thought that what we consider an honest mistake would be compounded by losing our license or worse. That puts me in a minority about this hawkishness on sober bad driving, and I have learned to mostly keep it to myself. But I began thinking of it again when I read a heartbreaking op-ed called Why Drivers Get Away with Murder by the mother of a 9-year old who was killed by a driver who didn’t see the boy—who was holding his father’s hand as the pair walked across a New York Street (in the crosswalk).

She makes her own argument, and I hope you’ll read it–as well as the comments, many of which are pretty thought provoking. There might be a tendency to dismiss her thoughts as natural, and overwrought, in the wake of a tragic loss. I think the tragedy simply awakened her to the kind of crazy risks lots of us take, every day, that we’ve somehow numbed ourselves to.

So let’s be careful out there, okay?