Phones have significantly changed

Unless you have been living under a rock, or are a complete shut-in, you’ve undoubtedly heard the term distracted driving by now.

Several highway patrol agencies have even addressed the issue by placing signs and, in the case of our neighboring state to the east, they have implemented “targeted enforcement areas” where they increase patrols and penalties for such infractions.

In my travels all over the U.S. and Canada as a commercially licensed driver for more than 30 years now, I’ve certainly seen the encroachment of technology into our daily lives.

Of course, for the layman driver who only commutes to and from work daily, their biggest temptation for distraction is the mobile device constantly in their hand. 

Admittedly, I was once as guilty of this as anyone, especially in the early days of reasonably affordable cell phones.

I say reasonably affordable, because to those too young to remember, my first cell phone literally took a day for a professional technician to install. The phone consisted of a black “brain box” about the size of a shoe box in the trunk, then a handset mounted on the transmission hump in the floorboard and the ubiquitous steely, squiggly wire glass mount antenna directly in the top dead center of the rear glass.

That phone was not only expensive to purchase outright, but each and every call could add up to serious money at that time because of the fact that so few towers were up in those days that virtually every call was charged “roaming fees.”

Today we take the phone with no itemized call charges so for granted that the vast majority of us no longer even use or need a regular home telephone anymore.

Now it’s only one of a myriad of devices that can, and absolutely do, distract me on a daily basis.

A modern tractor trailer unit now is easily going to have a telephone, a windshield-mounted GPS navigation device, a dispatch portal/device, an electronic logging device (they are sometimes but not always linked to the dispatch device), a forward collision avoidance mitigation system, lane departure warning sensors with annoying audible warnings, cameras that show forward, side and in some cases inward to the cab images in real time and interactive cruise control. 

Some of us who have been at this for a lot of years still use a two-way radio. The vast majority of trucks no longer have a two-way/CB radio, but at one time they were hugely popular in trucks nationwide.

Today, as I pass a sign stating that the next few Ohio miles are a “targeted enforcement area” for distracted driving. It’s difficult to suppress a good laugh at just how much of the aforementioned “technology” is the distraction that they are adamant about enforcing, especially on a bright, sunny day when the forward collision avoidance mitigation system “sees” a dark shadow on a white concrete highway from an overpass and decides on its own to throw on the red lights in the heads up display on the windshield and, oh yeah, slam on the brakes, too.

Technology is a truly amazing thing.

I could certainly do without a good bit of it as I drive my final few years and last leg of over 4.5 million miles into retirement.

It can’t come soon enough.