Just imagine if while texting he missed seeing the red light.
Texting or talking on the phone while driving or operating a train is highly irresponsible.
Numerous studies have shown that talking on a cell phone while driving is incredibly dangerous.
The main reason why is that your brain is trying to form a visual picture of the person you are talking to at the time which distracts it from the task at hand.
How many times have you been driving while talking on the phone and arrived at your destination and could not recall how you got there.
If you don’t die in a crash, then, the brain cancer probably will kill you, it will just take a little longer:
Just imagine if while Obama was texting he hit the red button!
“Just imagine if while texting he missed seeing the red light.
Texting or talking on the phone while driving or operating a train is highly irresponsible.”
That’s probably what happened.
Where I work, it’s against the rules to use a cell phone while at the controls of a train. It’s even against the rules to copy railroad-related instructions from the train dispatcher, while in control of the train. In the latter case, either the train must be stopped first, or someone else must do the copying.
Of course, it’s premature to speak with certainty before the post-accident investigations are completed, but from the results, you can well understand WHY they don’t want the engineman distracted while running the train.
- John
Iirc, the probability of a serious accident increases by a factor of 4 for any distraction from driving. I have seen drivers texting while operating an automobile. (Add that to the list: reading newspapers/books, writing, diddling with the stereo (presumably from where they were reaching), eating, changing clothes, doing make-up, having 'intimate' relations, playing video games (the little portable ones), etc.).
The excuse that insurance companies used to up the rates on auto insurance for drivers who smoke was that they were distracted by smoking, and this increased their chances of being in an accident.
For that matter, while some people are far better at multitasking than others, any person is most competent at a given task when they can devote their entire attention to just that task. That seems obvious, but a study was done on that, too.