Distracted Driving

Yesterday I took a hundred mile trip south down I-55. It’s a newer car, a ‘24 I bought last year after my new ‘23 was totaled. These new cars have a lot of safety features, like automatic braking to avoid obstacles (Volkswagen’s commercials would have you think only their cars have it, the dishonest sons of bitches. They ALL do).
They’re badly needed, because other new technological marvels work to take your eyes off of the road, chiefly that damned screen that replaced knobs. Now, touch screens are fine in a living room, but NOT to control the stereo or the heater in a car, where taking your eyes off of the road can kill you!
Luckily for me, my car has a few minor controls on the steering wheel so I don’t have to take my eyes off of the road to adjust the volume or change stations or skip to the next song. But the damned HVAC controls should be equally easy to find! They should be on the steering wheel like the radio and cruise control, or just use old fashioned knobs like have been in cars since at least the 1920s. I should not have to take my eyes off the road to adjust the temperature!
This may be a design flaw of one model, but my car annoyingly adjusts its temperature to 82°F whenever I go through a drive through fats food joint. Worse, it doesn’t always do this (warning, prospective Hyundai buyers). So after I roll the window back up and get back on the road, the car gets HOT inside and I have to take my eyes off of the road to put the temperature back to normal for a human. I hope whoever engineered this horror sees the error of his ways!
The safety features themselves can be distracting. Several times on a trip to St Louis, a bell would ding alerting me to a message I had to take my eyes off of the road to read, that informed me that radar was blocked and some front safety features were disabled. What stupid designers! When the front safety devices are disabled is the absolutely WORST times to take your eyes off of the road.
Then there are the idiots in government who distract our driving while passing laws against distracted driving. First, allowing businesses to construct movie screen signs. Back when drive-in theaters were common and I worked at one, it was illegal to build a screen visible from the highway. Now there are flashing, moving screens all up and down a city street, where you REALLY need to pay attention! This in the century where everybody seems to have ADD!
Worse, the government can deliberately distract you! On my trip yesterday were messages on the programmable signs that have been slowly going up for twenty years that yesterday read “I see orange in your future. There is a work zone ahead.”
How about fewer words and larger letters? What’s wrong with “Work zone ahead” in larger letters? Easy to do on that particular signboard. One second to read as opposed to three, and you go quite a way in two seconds at seventy miles an hour (60 mph is 100 kph). Note that many people are doing eighty or faster.
Is the Illinois government paying people to be clever? All I saw was dangerous stupidity disguised as cleverness!
But I’m distracting you from more important things...
9/1/2025