Door to Door: The Magnificent, Maddening, Mysterious World of Transportation by Edward Humes Page A

disinterestedjudge—abetted by an inept department of motor vehicles—who conducted a forty-seven-second hearing without even reviewing the facts of the case. The system, designed to process as many tickets in a day as possible, had neither time nor concern for the death of a three-year-old. 8
    Such outcomes are the rule, not the exception, although in most cases stiff initial changes are rarely filed in the first place. In 2014, the Wall Street Journal combed through traffic and criminal justice data to show that 95 percent of traffic fatalities in New York City led to no criminal prosecutions. 9 A similar analysis in Oregon showed that sober drivers in fatal car crashes in the Beaver State had little to worry about, either. 10 Drivers, it seems, enjoy an exalted position in a U.S. criminal justice system that is otherwise viewed as one of the toughest in the developed world. 11
    No other single product has shaped the law, the landscape, and public opinion as radically as the car. As revolutionary as the horseless carriage was at redefining travel in America, other changes instigated by cars went deeper, none more than the revealing evolution of how we describe car violence. A common term of the 1920s, “motor killings,” has morphed into today’s “fatal accidents.” The gulf between the two ways of describing road death—the early term, angry and accusatory, and the current phrase, blameless and bureaucratic—perhaps explains what might otherwise seem inexplicable: the American public’s willing acceptance for decades of cars designed and used in such a way that they have become the number one killer of our children and teenagers and everyone else under forty.
    S heriff’s investigators combing the wreckage on the night of February thirteenth in Forsyth County, Georgia, concluded high school senior Taylor Oliver was using his cell phone to send textmessages in the moments before his Ford pickup truck drifted off a county road. When he realized his blunder, Oliver appeared to try to steer back onto the asphalt, but he overcorrected and lost control. His pickup slid sideways across the centerline and into opposing traffic. A “Super Duty” Ford F–350 pickup truck—towing a twenty-four-foot trailer with a Bobcat front-end loader onboard—broadsided the passenger side of Oliver’s pickup. Both trucks careened off the roadway and down an embankment. The driver and passenger in the bigger truck were not injured, but Oliver, alone in his Ford, suffered fatal head injuries.
    Investigators in Greensboro, North Carolina, theorized that some sort of distraction also sent UPS Store worker Roger McHenry to his death when his car careened into the “gore point” where Interstate 40 splits, and in Flagstaff, Arizona, where the driver of a semitruck hauling a load of beer died when he drove off the road and into a culvert on Interstate 40, closing the westbound side of the freeway for half a day because of spilled beer and debris. And Mandy J. Theurer died on the familiar rural road where she lived, another likely distracted driver, careening into a ditch she had driven by safely countless times before. The twenty-six-year-old cosmetologist who worked at the Cute as a Button salon in Portland, Indiana, did not have her seat belt buckled, and when her car overturned she was ejected, suffering fatal trauma. Fifty percent of all car crashes occur within five miles of home.
    Because of the prevalence of such accidents, distracted driving—particularly when it involves using cell phones—has in recent years become the focus of public debate, legislation, police crackdowns . . . and considerable misunderstanding.
    The problem is not cell phones per se—it’s the human brain and what the National Safety Council calls “the myth of multitasking.” 12 This is the common but incorrect belief that humans are good at doing several things at once,