It was during the waning years of the Bush Reich that I decided my peace of mind would be enhanced if I just stopped listening to the news every day. Most of it was dire and almost none of it concerned events over which I exercised the slightest control, so I turned off the car radio and started stuffing the changer with selections from my classical CD collection.
Something resembling sanity may have returned, at least temporarily, to our nation's capital, but most of the news isn't significantly more encouraging and I still have no control over it.
All of which is just a roundabout way of explaining why I'm apparently the only one who didn't know about a subway collision in Boston that injured 49 people - including the nitwit operator of one of the trains who, it turns out, was texting his girlfriend when the crash occurred.
As reported in Computerworld, the agency that runs Boston's underground has, predictably, responded by calling for a ban on operators even carrying mobile devices - a response which largely missed the real problem.
That problem (as I noted here a little while ago) isn't that some lamebrain was texting while driving a multi-ton commuter vehicle. The problem is that he was giving his attention to something other than driving a multi-ton commuter vehicle. He was trying to multi-task despite the fact that human beings don't (indeed, can't) multi-task.
We can (and so) switch attention among different tasks, but that's not the same thing. If you're texting, smoking, drinking, eating, putting on makeup, or talking on a phone you are NOT attending to the rather demanding task of piloting a heavy vehicle at high speed. And it only takes a second of inattention to at the wrong time to create a disaster on the rails, the road - or in the sky.
Operating vehicles while impaired is what needs to be banned. Laws focused on specific sources of distraction (such as texting) miss the point and run the risk of becoming obsolete as soon as they are passed.
