By EWAN KENNEDY
24 March 2008

A while back I reported on a near miss between my car and a pedestrian. The young lady, who very nearly didn’t get to be a middle-aged lady, stepped off the edge of the footpath just in front of my car in a busy shopping strip. Thank goodness there was enough of a gap between my Peugeot and the kerb for her to fit into. ‘Thank goodness’ because she was so close there was nowhere near enough time for me to swerve and/or hit the brakes.

As I was only travelling at about 20 km/h at the time, she might have survived the crash with nothing more than a few broken bones. But the wrong set of circumstances could have seen her crippled, or dead.

She was on her mobile phone at the time, deep in conversation and obviously totally oblivious to her surroundings.

A recent report from Britain showed Australia is not alone in the problem of dopey pedestrians wandering along with no thoughts on their minds but talking or text messaging. This particular bloke (they can be just as silly on mobiles as the female of the species) had walked into a light post on the footpath and managed to damage himself.

The really bizarre thing about the news report is that there has been a call to strap padding around potential obstacles in Britain to stop people from hurting themselves by walking into them. And as a result of this dopey pedestrian walking into the pole, ugly looking padding was being fitted to many obstacles in the precinct.

Sounds silly? It sure does and I’m glad to report that I am not the only one to think so. A spirited electronic blog conversation has arisen from the original story. A lady said she was surprised that the date on the news report wasn’t April 1st. A man wrote that if padding covered all objects then the idiots wouldn’t learn from the error of their ways.

Another said that he would prefer spikes to be fitted to the posts instead of padding. That way we could weed out the silly people by way of natural selection. I reckon Charles Darwin would approve of that attitude.

All jokes aside, mobile phones are killers. It’s all but impossible to gather definitive data on how many fatalities have been caused by them. But there is an increasing body of evidence suggesting they could be causing more road deaths than alcohol, failing to wear a safety belt and driving at a speed too high for the conditions.

Even using hands-free phones whilst driving doesn’t seem to be as safe as once thought. Apparently it’s the concentration going into the conversation that’s the killer, not just the fact that your hand is off the steering wheel.

Then there are the pedestrians, bike riders, boat drivers, the sad list of clowns just keeps on and on.

ewan@marque.com.au

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