Freeze! Should You Restrict Smart Device I The Workplace?

By Phil La Duke

The ubiquity of smart devise and myriad ways to stay in touch has blurred the lines between the traditional workplace and the rest of our lives.  There was a time when there was no expectation that workers would respond to requests when they weren’t “on-the-clock”. But email, voicemail, cellphones, Wi-Fi, and texting have changed all that.  The concept, at least for salaried professionals, of being on the clock has effectively disappeared. Customers—internal and external—and supervisors have a much more aggressive idea of exactly what constitutes a reasonable response time.  Professionals are essentially on the clock 24/7 and the workplace can be a restaurant, the grocery store, and most perilously the car.

As my hometown, Detroit, prepares for its international auto show, the media is abuzz with all the new features that will make it easier to conduct business in a car or truck.  In one news spot, a spokesman extolled the features that “could make the difference of a contractor getting the job or not”.

I find this trend troubling; according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, one of the most consistently lethal professions (the jobs that are most likely to result in a worker death) are sales jobs, and the most frequent sales death are resultant from traffic accidents.

You Might As Well Be Stoned

To make matters worse, studies have found and reaffirmed that the nature of the distraction is largely irrelevant, and that the nature and duration of the distraction is the real source of danger.  One study found that the largest and potentially most dangerous source of danger was a conversation with a passenger. Another study concluded that driver distraction was at least as dangerous as a driver that is moderately (well above the legal limit) intoxicated and in some cases even MORE dangerous.  This makes sense; while the impairment comparable may the degree to which drunk driving interact with other drivers is statistically less (the later in the evening the more intoxicated drivers on the road) than otherwise distracted drivers (people are texting, talking on cellphones, etc.) who do so in both high traffic circumstances as well as when traffic is light. Driver distraction is a real threat to public safety, and I find it unreasonable to believe that adding everything from Wi-Fi to waffle irons to vehicles will lesson driver distraction.

Laws Aren’t Enough

An increasing number of municipalities are moving to restrict distractions while driving, but most miss the mark.  Exemptions for hands-free and global positioning systems in many of these laws ignore the fact that the primary hazard is the lack of attentiveness of the driver not merely taking one’s eyes off the road. Keeping one’s EYES on the road but failing to keep one’s MIND on the road is a recipe for disaster.

Similarly, many organizations are taking increasingly aggressive measures to mitigate the risk associated with distracted drivers, and they should.  Think of the liability associated with an employee who is conducting company business—from a simple business phone call, to reading and responding to email—who subsequently is at fault in a fatal car accident.  Most companies have existing CYA (cover your assets) policies forbidding such activities, but if there is a policy with complicit breaches (and by that I mean, a case where company forbids an activity but then encourages it by rewarding results that are only possible by violating the rules or punishing people when for failing to achieve results that are only possible when people violate the rules) these policies aren’t like to provide much protection.

Staying Connected Is Killing Us

The temptation to stay connected is often far greater than the desire to comply with company policy and both employer and employee have a shared burden for ensuring that the spirit of the requirement is met.

First, companies should adopt zero-movement policies for smart device and phones.  One company adopted such a policy when a forklift killed a worker while he was talking on a cellphone and walking through an area that was off limits to pedestrians.  The distraction of the pedestrian was the proximate cause of the fatality, although other factors contributed to his fate, the company quickly enacted a policy where people were not allowed to be in motion while talking on cellphones, reading mail from a smart device, or engaged in any activity that would distract one from hazards in the workplace.

Taking It A Step Further

While this policy is laudable, I think we can do better.  Companies need to use a parallel strategy to attack his problem. First, ban communication devices from the vehicles.  Drivers and pedestrians should be prohibited from using any electronic communication while in motion, including hands-free devices. I have taken to stowing my iPhone in my center console while driving.  (I got this idea from a top safety professional that admitted that he struggled with the temptation of using his PDA during his commute. Although I didn’t adopted it until I was pulled over for monkeying about with my phone while driving.) Secondly, and perhaps even more importantly, organizations must recognize that travel time is, in and of itself, work and no more should be expected of the individual while driving. This means the company has to adjust its expectations of responsiveness and recognize that individuals will not be able to maintain constant contact.

What About Emergencies?

Such policies invite excuses and “what ifs?”  Chief among these complaints is the objection in the name of safety.  If I comply and there is an emergency I can’t communicate and be touched.  The answer is that a cellphone in the glove box can be used after the driver is safely parked.

But Is It Practical?

I don’t like the idea of not using my cellphone for the 90 minutes a day that I commute, and I recognize that many of you may see this policy as one of those “safety guy goes overboard with overly zealous rules”, but there are an increasing number business leaders who are recognizing that this problem is not going to go away without intervention.

Filed under: Phil La Duke, Safety, Safety Culture, communication and safety, dangers of smart devices, driver distraction, Driving while distracted, expectations of productivity, texting while driving

People Don’t Respect You Because You Act Like An Idiot

Somewhere, right now, in a LinkedIn discussion group someone is posting the 245^th  opinion on “Should a Company considering itself world class have the right to fire employees for their private unsafe behaviors? For example, if employees are seen during lunchtime jaywalking, or riding a motorcycle without a helmet (where legal), using stairs without handrail, etc. How about during the weekend at a non-mandatory Company picnic? Do you think a “world class” company should be protected from lawsuits when letting go these employees? Or, is the Company going too far?” As simple-minded as this topic is, it has generated a mob-mentality thread where people seem to shout out opinions without reading the other posts.

At the risk of offending my esteemed colleagues this thread is what is wrong with safety these days.  As governments chip away at safety regulations in the name of saving jobs, as businesses actively order shortcuts that undermine workplace safety, and as 50 years of progress in worker safety is threatened to be rolled back, THIS is how safety professionals choose to spend their time. THIS is the problem that they decide to commit time and energy.  I’m stunned. For the first time in history, safety professionals from all over the world can virtually gather and discuss the most compelling issues in worker safety.  We can share ideas and debate the best methods for solving lingering problems.  Manufacturing can talk to Oil and Gas, Energy and Utilities can share the wealth of experience with Logistics and Aerospace and yet time after time we see threads like this.

Earlier in this blog I used the term “simple-minded” to describe the thread.  That was unkind; true, but unkind none-the-less. Before any of you wet yourselves allow me to break it down and tell you exactly WHY this debate is so stupid.  Let’s start with the first bit, “Should a Company considering itself world class have the right to fire employees for their private unsafe behaviors?” I’m going to ignore the capricious capitalization of the word “Company” (it is not a proper noun so it should not be capitalized), the lack of a hyphen in the word “world-class”, not because I think it’s acceptable, but because I routinely butcher the English language not out of ignorance, but from sheer laziness, arrogance, and indifference. Let’s focus on the fact that the asker doesn’t tell us for what the company considers itself “world-class”.  If the company in question considers itself an overly controlling corporate douche bag, then I would have to agree. But if it considers itself a world-class safety organization, I would have to say that they are perhaps a bit misguided. Without knowing exactly what context in which the company is considering itself world-class, no one can proffer an intelligent response (which by the way, didn’t stop me from posting not once but multiple times).  And what precisely, does considering oneself world-class at anything have to do with whether or not one should be protected from lawsuits?

The next part of the question is an attempt to clarify the asker’s point: “For example, if employees are seen during lunchtime jaywalking, or riding a motorcycle without a helmet (where legal), using stairs without handrail, etc.” The asker really doesn’t get into substantive examples here.  What company would ever consider firing someone solely for lunchtime jaywalking? Sure they may use this as an excuse but show me a company who fires workers for something this petty and I will show you a company about to unionize.  As for riding a motor cycle without a helmet? Well I guess if I was the Human Resource director and some half-baked safety manager came to me with this, I would be questioning the competency of the safety manager, not the motorcycle rider.  And not using the handrail? Please. I used to work in construction and I was told by people who design and build structures that hand rails are not in place so people can hold on to them every time they walk up or down stairs, they serve to protect people by giving them something they can grab to break their fall.  To even suggest that someone would fire an employee for not using a handrail, and while on their own time and off company premises is beyond stupid.  When I read this topic heading I was embarrassed to ever to have been called a safety professional.

The author goes on to ask “How about during the weekend at a non-mandatory Company picnic?” the more he asks the dumber the question becomes.  A non-mandatory company picnic? Okay, so apparently there are now companies out there somewhere who are mandating picnics—but then I digress.  Finally, the author asks,  “Do you think a “world class” company should be protected from lawsuits when letting go these employees? Or, is the Company going too far?”  On what legal basis would there be any expectation of protection from the company? How could any rational person believe that the company is doing anything but going too far?

What is more troubling than the simple-minded question is that it elicited nearly 250 responses so far and the count is still rising.  To paraphrase the Social Network they did this instead of doing what? The fact that so many safety professionals felt compelled to weigh in on this topic is bone chilling (made even more upsetting were the numerous safety professionals who thought the company had every right to behave this way.) When I asked, on several occasions, exactly what company had the resources to engage in off-work  surveillance of its workers, I was ignored; why let logic torpedo a good conversation? I also asked how many of the respondents knew of any company that had the safety of its workplace so completely under control that it thought the only way to improve was to meddle in the personal lives of its workers.  Again, the silence was deafening.

But the issue here isn’t about worker privacy rights.  The larger and more disconcerting issue is that hundreds of safety workers think that this is something that is worth discussing (some of which I think we can safely assume were doing so during work hours).  I hear safety professionals bemoan their lack of stature in their organizations, that Operations leadership doesn’t take them seriously, and that in general, no one listens to them.  Well if this is the kind of dreck that you find worthy of your time and the kind of dreck that you want to talk to leadership about, well… no wonder people think you are a fool; you most probably are a fool.

Filed under: Phil La Duke, Worker Safety, ASSE, Attitude, Behavior Based Safety, Behaviour Based Safety, contingency planning, culture change, don't hurt yourself, driver safety, Driving while distracted, Fabricating and Metalworking magazine, Loss Prevention, Phil LaDuke, Philip La Duke, Philip LaDuke, privacy, Safety Culture, simple-minded safety, Stop trying to prevent every possible accident, variability in human behavior, Worker Safety

Are Safety Professionals Endangered Species?

The safety professional has been falling in status of late. I suppose one could blame the economy after all, troubled companies just don’t have the money that they might have ordinarily spent on new fangled safety processes. One could also blame the politicians—some the vacuous gas bags that pass as politicians on both sides of the Atlantic have characterized safety as costing jobs, being overly protective of workers, and in general needlessly wasting business’s valuable time. But I prefer to place the blame squarely on the safety professionals themselves. Safety, in its present form, really hasn’t been around that long. Sure there have been attempts to protect workers—most notably the efforts of organized labour to improve working conditions and the safety of the work environment—but safety as a mega industry is a relatively new phenomenon. The rise of safety has seen the function move from the position companies stuck good-natured and well-meaning dim-wits to the rise of snake oil salesmen who fancy themselves Machiavellian grand master puppeteers capable of manipulating the behavior of the workers with a bell and some pizza. And as funds get tighter and resources increasingly scarce there isn’t a whole lot of adaptation happening in the safety community. Too many safety professionals still try to compel that which they cannot inspire. After 15 odd years of trying to change things Safety remains a police force, although now some try to do police the populace with complex schemes dressed as culture change. When the environment changes only the most adaptable are able to survive and thrive. And while changes to the business landscape have been profound the reaction from the safety community have been all but imperceptible. To find one of the best examples of the “let them eat cake” mentality one need not look very far. The American Society of Safety Engineers (ASSE) is sponsoring a people-to-people safety delegation to Brazil. The cost per individual is substantial, and it’s fair to say that most of the participates won’t be doing so on their own dimes. I am not trying to denigrate the program, although personally I can’t find a sound business justification for sending a safety professional to Brazil to attend meetings with their South American peers. But forget the specifics of this program and focus, if you will, on how out of touch a safety professional has to be to even suggest that his or her employer. Even with my relationships with several safety magazines I wouldn’t dream of suggesting they fund this boondoggle. The problems facing the safety profession go deeper than expecting companies to make expenditures on questionable trips. Safety still hasn’t found its Deming, when Deming developed his revolutionary approach to quality, an approach that would ultimately form the foundation for Lean Manufacturing and Six Sigma, he didn’t immediately go door-to-door like Moze Pray hawking Dixie Bibles. Safety professionals, conversely, show very little decorum in their haste to commercialize every half-baked scheme that flashes across their minds. And if the theory has holes in it, no problem, just sponsor a research study that supports your junk science. A good safety process should be malleable and evolve over time. Once an organization has mastered compliance it needs to concentrate on lowering injuries through hazard management. Solid hazard management works very well in injury reduction, but too often safety professionals lose steam after the low-hanging fruit has been picked. From there Safety professional need to be prepared to tackle the tough problems of serious injuries occurring seemingly randomly. To face those challenges safety professionals need to have a significantly deeper understanding of probability and statistics. Throughout this evolution safety professionals need to do a better job at linking their activities to strategic initiatives of the overall organization. If Safety is going to survive it needs act quickly and decisively. First, safety professionals have to demonstrate the value they provide to the organization and to advertise the contributions that they make to the overall operating efficiency. If your overly complex safety initiatives are costing the company more than it can ever hope to recoup you need to simplify your process and connect it to the continuous improvement of business systems. If Safety can’t directly impact the bottom line, it can indirectly impact the cost of injuries by reducing its expenditures, or at very least it can stop pissing away profits on non-essential safety activities. The economy will eventually rebound and recover, but unless Safety begins to see itself as a partner in making the workplace more efficient it may not survive in any meaningful way. Those safety professionals who ignore the changes in the business landscape will go the way of the Moa, the dodo, and the Tasmanian Tiger, but hell, they got a free trip to Brazil out of it.

Filed under: Behavior Based Safety, Loss Prevention, Phil La Duke, Safety, Safety Culture, ASSE, ASSE People to People, Attitude, Attitudes toward safety, Behavior Based Safety, Behaviour Based Safety, Brazil, Can Safety Survive this downturn, contingency planning, culture change, don't hurt yourself, Driving while distracted, Fabricating and Metalworking magazine, increasing efficiency, Just Cause, Michigan Safety Conference, National Safety Council, oil and gas, Philip La Duke, Philip LaDuke, rockford greene, Rockford Greene International, Safety Incentives, Worker Safety

Safety Expert Dies in Fall

About two months ago while retrieving an item from the loft in my garage I fell approximately 8 feet onto concrete. I miraculously escaped any serious injuries.  For the last couple of days I’ve been engaged in a spirited debate on a LinkedIn safety forum about the extent to which an employer can discipline a worker for legal, albeit unsafe behavior.  It got me wondering about a couple of things one of them I’ll address here and the other that I will address in www.rockfordgreeneinternational.wordpress.com

(shameless plug for both my consulting company and the other blog that I write weekly.)

Given that safety is essentially an expression of the probability of emerging uninjured from a given circumstances or activity and that virtually any activity carries with it some assumption of risk on the part of the person so engaged, at what point does the risk become so great that it rises to the level that it should be construed as the much touted “unsafe behavior” bugaboo.

This is more than mere intellectual pursuit.  Blaming worker injuries on unsafe behaviors has a long and storied tradition in safety.  From it’s earliest roots accident investigations have found that most accidents are rooted in the carelessness or recklessness of workers.  I won’t beat the dead horse that is my seemingly limitless condemnation of Behavior Based Safety and the slow-witted brutes that continue to swindle industry with bold promises of behavior modification (the equivalent of using phrenology as pre-offer hiring screening).  I will, rest assured, return to my epic diatribe in due time, but for now, I wanted to leave that alone and assume for a moment that the half-baked premise is correct and explore exactly where the line between normal, acceptable behavior lies.  Unless we know where the line is with out needing to cross it then BBS is little more than a “no shit” observation. A “thanks captain obvious” factoid that does little more than to make the expert feel even more superior than usual as he nods knowingly and  patronizing in baleful, clucking shame.

So here’s where we sit.  Unless we can trace the precise moment where safe behavior becomes unsafe we can’t really do anything to move the proverbial needle towards a safer workplace.  The extremes are easy to spot. At one end the continuum we have sitting doing nothing—not moving or interacting at any level with anyone else or anything in our environment. At the other extreme are those clearly dangerous activities like driving drunk or juggling cats or a howler monkey opening paint cans with a chainsaw.

Engineers are the first to try to determine where the line lies, and they are frequently mocked for it.  In our zeal to reduce “frivolous lawsuits” special interest groups have tarred most product warnings as ridiculous outgrowths of a litigious society.  There is even one self-important fellow at a Michigan University who runs a “wacky warnings” website where he gleefully makes fun of those dedicated engineers who try to foresee every potential way a product can hurt us. I heard him on All Things Considered  on National Public Radio. I am particularly interested in who funds this ivory tower half-wit and why NPR would give him a national soap box on from which to spew his smug condescension. But engineers do try to define the line between safe and unsafe and arguable made great progress.  Products have gotten safer and fewer people are injured doing stupid things.

A different approach is to take the other extreme and analyze the situation one element at a time.  In the case of a howler monkey opening paint cans with a chainsaw, we can apply the hierarchy of controls to work on the howler monkey, the procedure for opening paint cans, or the tool with which the cans are opened. So in this scenario we can probably agree that a person using a chainsaw to open a paint can is safer than a howler monkey, or a spider monkey, or well… chose your monkey.  Similarly, a person opening a paint can with a screw driver is, all other things being equal, behaving more safely than one opening a paint can with a chainsaw, We can move along the safety continuum even further by providing the person with a paint can opener and training in the correct procedure for doing so. But at this point we can’t pronounce the behavior as completely free of all risk of injury.  There are just too many variables, too many things that can go wrong, and too many possibilities for different outcomes.

Deviation from the Norm

The degree to which a person behaves safely is essentially the extent to which that person adheres to the defined process AND the extent to which the defined process is being performed in the anticipated circumstances.  That may sound more complicated than it needs to be.  Essentially the safest conditions are those where things are going as planned, but unfortunately things seldom do.

The Handrail Conundrum

Recently, in three separate conversations, I’ve had three people cite the use of handrails while walking down stairs as an example of people not following a basic safety procedure.  We’ve all walked down stairs and I for one seldom if ever touch the handrail.  Why? not because I am reckless, stupid, or derive pleasure from the adrenaline rush of not using a handrail.  I don’t use a handrail because I have never seen a janitorial crew washing down or disinfecting a handrail and I judge NOT touching the handrail as the healthier, if not safer, thing to do.  Additionally, I have always viewed the handrail not as something I should be hanging on to prevent a fail, rather as something I could take hold of and break my fail and mitigate injury.  Of course I have never been trained in walking stairs or in handrails.  And yet everyone seems to assume that the purpose of a handrail is not to break a fall and mitigate injury but to prevent injury. As a contingent safety device handrails make sense, but as a preventive measure they are a piss poor safety device.

If we extrapolate the handrail conundrum to other situations, safety devices, and household/day-to-day experiences we will find that we have received scarce little training in what is the safest way to do things or in how the misuse of these things can cause us harm.

Filed under: Behavior Based Safety, Loss Prevention, Phil La Duke, Safety, Safety Culture, Worker Safety, Attitude, Behavior Based Safety, Behaviour Based Safety, culture change, driver safety, Driving while distracted, efficiency, Fabricating and Metalworking magazine, increasing efficiency, increasing productivity, Process Improvement, rockford greene, Rockford Greene International, Safety, safety at home, Safety Incentives, Stop trying to prevent every possible accident, variability in human behavior, Worker Safety

What Will The Rising Tide Against Organized Labor Mean For Workplace Safety?

Organized labor world-wide is losing the battle for public opinion.  Governors in Ohio, New Jersey, and Wisconsin have openly stated their intentions to change the law to weaken the rights of workers toward collective bargaining. Many safety professionals take great pleasure in the seeming waning influence of organized labor; those that do are wrong.

Organized labor stood at the forefront for the fight for worker safety.  At the risk of sounding melodramatic, many protections for workplace safety were forged in the blood and misery of early organizing efforts.  But what does one have to do with the other? It’s not like organized labor is the reason  that workplace safety regulations exist, or is it?

As recently as six months ago a national politician in the UK openly asked publicly if the laws in his country that held managers and business owners liable for workplace injuries weren’t too over reaching, and many governments are reconsidering safety laws and wondering if these laws don’t, in fact, make it too hard to do business.

Somewhere in this mix seems to be the idea that because it is so expensive to injure workers that government’s had, in these tough times, roll back some of these protections in favor of lower fines, and less severe penalties for work place safety violations.

I want to be clear, my intent is neither to support nor oppose organized labor, rather, I hope to raise awareness among safety professionals that these attacks on workers’ rights to organize and collectively bargain, if successful, will have a profound detriment on worker safety world-wide.

I completely understand the argument that worker injuries are expensive, inefficient, and undesirable, but easing these restrictions and lessening the penalties for non-compliance is not the answer.  In light of the mining disasters, oil and gas deaths (and unprecedented environmental fallout) and even the response to the Japanese nuclear plant one would think that worker safety would become more of a priority not less so.  But in a climate where soaring unemployment and sluggish recover have people looking at their neighbors and asking if they don’t perhaps make too much money, it’s easy to equate workplace safety with job losses and generate public support for safety rollbacks.

Safety professionals and unions have long had a love-hate relationship.  Many safety professionals resent what they categorize as unwarranted defense of unsafe behaviors by organized labor while many safety representatives dismiss their management counterparts as puppets  for the company.  In many cases, neither side can get past their differences and the safety committee meetings degrade into gripe sessions.

And we need to face facts, in many workplaces the cost of sustaining safety incentive programs, safety observations, and dozens of safety meetings a month have made the cost of prevention disproportionate with the risk of worker injuries.  And yet, if businesses suggest abandoning safety bonuses or exploring low cost alternatives to existing safety programs they are accused of not caring about worker safety or (shudder) caring more about profits than they do about human life.

The reality is this problem is big, and promises to get bigger.  The 1990s and millennial decade saw unprecedented growth in safety prevention as a business.  As businesses realized they had to reduce the cost of injuries a cottage industry of safety providers sprang up seemingly overnight.  In flush times, safety professionals were able to implement safety prevention programs that added heads, and made more and more demands on the resources of the organization.

The danger goes deeper than companies feeling the financial pinch and unions fighting on other fronts.  Cut backs in the enforcement arms of regulatory agencies make it less likely that companies that openly defy the law are far less likely to be found out and almost certain to avoid any meaningful punishment.

So what’s the answer?

For starters, safety professionals, both union and management, need to look for ways to do less with more.  Incentive programs that offer cash and prizes for workers not getting hurt (or more likely reporting injuries) need to be scrapped.  As one manufacturing vice president once said to me, “I refuse to pay extra for something everyone should do intuitively” and as one union bargaining chair put it, “they think we’re stupid and careless.  For them to pay a bonus for not injuring workers is insulting to us.”  But discontinuing a financial incentive when so many people are struggling  for every nickle is likely to be met with fierce resistance.

Next, take down the safety posters.  A cutsie safety poster has never saved a life, and while children’s poster-contests may be popular and tug at the heart strings, it’s not likely that someone who disregards safety rules will suddenly be shocked into responsibility because of a crayon drawing.

And finally, we need to recognize the costs associated with watching workers complete tasks and telling them to work more safely.  Programs that require supervisors to spend significant time observing workers are inefficient.

That’s not to say that we should concede the fight and give up trying to protect workers, but we need to be pragmatic and sensible.  Safety professionals of all stripes need to take a hard look at the efficacy, cost, and value of the way they are doing business and look for ways that not only protect workers, but lower operating costs (like reducing downtime, employee turnover, or defects) and increase overall workplace efficiency.

There are a lot of people counting on us.  Yes, hurting workers is expensive, so we need to stop doing it.  But the answer can never be discount the penalties for skirting the laws or openly flouting worker protections.  If safety professionals don’t step up to this fight, who will?

Filed under: Loss Prevention, Regulations, Safety, Safety Culture, Attacks On Organized Labor, Attitude, Attitudes toward safety, Behavior Based Safety, Behaviour Based Safety, culture change, don't hurt yourself, driver safety, Driving while distracted, efficiency, Fabricating and Metalworking magazine, increasing efficiency, increasing productivity, Phil La Duke, Phil LaDuke, Philip La Duke, Philip LaDuke, Process safety, rockford greene, Safety Culture, Unions and Safety, Worker Safety

Unsafe At Any Speed (With Apologies to Ralph Nader)

Note: This is a reposting of a blog I wrote prior to putting the blog on hiatus.  Unfortunately, the original posts were lost and this is based on a back  up  Word document

We interrupt this blog to bring you a special rant by Phil La Duke …

There is a bill before the Michigan electorate that would ban texting while driving, and I’m against it. It’s not that I believe that driving while texting is a safe thing to do, or a wise thing to do, or a smart thing to do; I just don’t think we need another unenforced law on the books.

Several days ago while making my 40 minute commute home that traverses no fewer than five expressways I was barraged by drivers floating in and out of their lanes, tailgating, illegally changing lanes, speeding and in general driving like fool.  As I passed three different drivers who were impeding traffic by driving 50 mph in the passing lane I noticed that one was dialing on a cell phone, one was reading map quest directions, and one was elderly.  Since none of these drivers was texting, however, none would presumably be subject to penalty under the new law. (I haven’t read the bill, nor am I likely to, but I think it’s safe to say there are no “driving while elderly” provisions in it.)

Let’s be clear, I believe that driving while distracted represents a major threat to highway driving, and the National Safety Council has research to prove it.  But in a world where people routinely and cavalierly run yellow (if not red) lights, cross the double yellow line to illegally turn left, and speed with no fear of enforcement why should we have yet another law for texting.  What’s next a law forbidding us to make omelets while driving?

I once asked a police officer why he sat idly by while 3 people turned left after running a red light and he said that there was no point in writing tickets because the judges would just throw it out.  Interesting.  We stop enforcing the law because 1 in 10 (I’m guessing) would go to court and contest the charges, and another 1 in 10 would have the charges dismissed.  Meanwhile drivers violate the law with no fear of punishment; another law will not change that.

But many of you have seen pieces I’ve written that deride discipline as a means of making sustainable change, so if another law isn’t the answer, what is?  I think if we look at the root causes of this problem it is an issue of indoctrination and training.  My daughter took her driver’s ed course at our local public high school as I did at my local public high school twenty years prior.  It wasn’t a perfect system, but it was a good system Michigan has since privatized driver’s ed and it is no longer available through most public high schools.  Now instead of learning to drive from a public school teacher our young learn to drive from retail outlets that I seriously wouldn’t trust to sell me a lawn mower.

We need to shore up driver’s education requirements and maybe, instead of suspending licenses and gouging those drivers with poor records on insurance rates, we should require those poor drivers to retakc driver’s ed.  If we truly want to improve highway safety we need to do more than pass esoteric laws aimed at addressing the issue of the month.

Filed under: Phil La Duke, Safety, driver safety, Driving while distracted, texting while driving, Uninforced lawas