To the Editor:
Last Wednesday, I dropped my kid off at Staples High School at 7:25 a.m. and headed for the Merritt. The traffic has been extra heavy due to the construction at Cross Highway and Compo Road North, so when I turned onto Weston Road I was in bumper to bumper stop and go traffic.
Gazing into the Audi convertible in front of me, I realized that there were moving images on the GPS display. I looked more carefully and saw that the driver had his cell phone propped up in the display area and was live streaming a talk show to watch while “driving.”
Sitting there in traffic, I watched the eyes of the Audi driver in his rear view mirror and he was barely glancing at the road: so much so that when the car in front of him took his turn at the stop sign, the Audi driver coasted right through behind almost getting t-boned by the car from Main Street, who had the right of way.
Even more alarming is that the Audi driver got on to the Merritt, pulled into the left lane and sped away. I prayed that he got to his destination safely and without hurting anyone else.
This afternoon I was driving up North Avenue once again and spotted a young man sitting outside of the rear window sill , his arms spread on the roof of a small black Kia with only his legs inside of the vehicle.
I stopped my car, fearing for this young man’s life, and discovered a car jammed full with young people, maybe eight or nine of them. They only gave me a blank stare as I kept repeating “You could kill yourself! One false move and you could kill yourself!!”
The driver looked at me and said, “I did nothing wrong” before pulling into the oncoming lane to drive around and past me.
Walking back to my car, the driver who was between our two vehicles said she had seen the boy hanging out of the car and didn’t know what to do. She asked if I knew him ,and I told her I did not know him, but that I’m sure his mother would want to know someone was looking out for him.
In all honestly, I was so upset that I was shaking and instead of being calm and reasonable with the children in the car I was screaming. For a second I imagined my own kids doing something stupid and hoped that someone with sense would have the wherewithal to give them a little road side parenting.
Anyone who has driven around town can tell you that an alarming number of people are driving while holding cell phones, looking down to text, and being otherwise distracted.
We are distracted, we are reckless and we need to stop. We need to take driving seriously. We need to impress upon our children that driving comes with an immense responsibility.
We have the safety of other people in our hands every time we get behind the wheel. We have to change our attitude as a community, and we need to open our mouths and enforce these common sense and safety rules before tragedy hits home.
Amy Horowitz
Westport
Thank you for writing this letter Amy—it needed to be said and needs to be said often.
We live downtown at an intersection of two residential roads, one of which is now consistently used as a “cut through” to avoid Post Road traffic. There is a 3-way stop at this road—at which no one ever stops.
In fact, the Westport Police Department has repeatedly (to no avail) done traffic enforcement and logged speeds on the road approaching the Stop signs—they are generally 15-20 miles over the speed limit and up to 40 miles over on a regular basis.
This is during peak hours when children wait on the same street for school buses.
So—seeing people race through a Stop Sign without a glance in any direction as you experienced, is pretty common for me. But, to your larger point, what I NOW see is people doing 65 in a 25, and racing through the stop signs, while they are looking at their phones.
As I said: this is on a street where children regularly take multiple school buses, dog walkers walk to the park, young parents stroll their infants and residents walk to patronize the downtown area which Westport is working so hard to make viable and vibrant.
In fact, we have never allowed our child to take the school bus because of our fear of the distracted, speeding, traffic-law disobeying drivers
To bolster your point further—the very SCHOOL BUS we do not allow our daughter to take because of fear of the unpredictability of other drivers was REAR ENDED in a hit and run on the way to school this morning.
It’s time we as a town (and a nation address) address the truly fundamental aspect of distracted driving—that to drive while distracted is predicated on the belief in our own importance:
*I* need to check this email (and so putting other drivers in danger doesn’t matter.)
*I* want to watch this show (and so, it doesn’t matter if I drive dangerously slow or fast.)
*I* want to send this text (and so other people will pay attention when I’m not doing so.)
The problem with this thinking is that if we are a society of “I”s where everyone is too important to mind their own driving behavior then where are the “them—the “others” who are allegedly being vigilant on their behalf?
We’ve lived through two Westport administrations (1 of each political party) refusing to address the problem—no one wants to “upset” our local drivers by asking them to obey the law. Traffic stops usually result in a “warning” not a ticket or a suspension.
I agree, Amy, that we need to change our individual ways, but I also think that we need our law makers to enact harsher punishments for this anti-society “me first” behavior.
Update: In the interest of begin accurate in my observations, I understand that the hit and run driver of the Westport School District Bus this morning reported the accident after the fact.
He left the scene in order to make sure his son got to school on time.
While the kids on the bus he hit, en route to the very same school, were, presumably, late as the bus driver followed the legal protocol and waited for police to arrive.