ON-RAMP

I was almost killed by a car phone recently. Well, OK, it was more the car than the phone, but the point is that a man driving a Beemer and chatting away forgot, for a moment, the purpose of a dividing line and almost sideswiped me at about 70 mph. He didn’t even notice. I am still recovering. So I called the LAPD to see if I had just missed becoming a statistic in a rising tide of carphonicides. I expected to hear something like, “Car-phone users receive 75% of all moving violations.” But Officer John Beesom informed me that although car phones distract the driver, “they don’t cause any more accidents than a woman putting on makeup, a man shaving or a teen-ager spilling a Coke in his lap.” Far worse than car phones, it seems, are cassette tapes. “Dropped cassettes cause some of the deadliest accidents we have,” Beesom said, recounting a harrowing tale of a driver on Sunset Boulevard who killed several bicyclists when she leaned down to retrieve a tape.

The California Highway Patrol confirms the LAPD’s opinion of the almost half million phones traversing the highways. Officer Chris Burch informed me that the highway patrol believes car phones help curtail crime and traffic. “What’s more unsafe (than car phones),” Burch offered, “are people reading newspapers while driving, putting on makeup or changing their clothes.”

Changing their clothes? It seems that there are more dangerous things on the road than are dreamt of.