Showing posts with label drunk driving. Show all posts
Showing posts with label drunk driving. Show all posts

Tuesday, September 3, 2013

WALKING, AND OTHER DISTRACTIONS





I only just got round to reading an article I tore out of the paper a couple of weeks back.  It was in the New York Times but it was about walking in Los Angeles, written by David Hochman, and titled “Hollywood’s New Stars: Pedestrians.”  His point was that walking has become cool in some (strictly limited) corners of the Hollywood universe, and of course some celebs are all over it like a cheap leotard. 

Hochman recommends, unironically I think, that meetings should be taken not in an office or over lunch but while walking.  He tells us that Janet Tamaro, who created Rizzoli and Isles “sometimes spends 10 straight hours walking through rewrites (many days her pedometer registers 50,000 steps).” I’m not sure if that’s actual steps pounding the street, or at one those treadmill desks, I suspect it’s the latter, but impressive either way.  Here is Janet Tamaro with Angie Harmon: a couple of very fit looking women.


Actually the most interesting “fact” in the article is that an Australian study has concluded that for each additional hour of TV a person sits and watches each day, the chance of dying rises by 11 percent.   This raises a lot of questions in my pedestrian brain.  I mean, additional to what?  Additional to none?  Surely not, because “chances of dying” are absolutely 100 per cent whether you walk or not.  Chance doesn’t really come into it.  But equally if you suddenly watched 9 and a bit hours of TV a day, would that increase your chances OVER 100% and result in sudden death? I have evidence that it wouldn’t.

There’s a friend of a friend of mine, now in a nursing home here in Los Angeles, who has been unable to walk for the last several years, and I would estimate that he watches TV from his bed for at least twelve hours a day.  He has not died, though he constantly says he wants to.

Anyway, this got me thinking about another article, this one in the LA Times, dated August 5, and headlined “Rise in pedestrian deaths may be due to texting while walking.”  I’ve shared this with a few fellow travellers and the response has been equally split between, “Duh, you think?” and “Hurrah, serves the bastards right.”

To be fair, the article is simply quoting an announcement from Secretary Anthony Foxx of the Department of Transportation who is worried about “distracted walking” in general, and he reckons that texting or listening to music, or even taking drugs, may perhaps all play their part.  That’s why he gets the big bucks.


Alcohol too, naturally, plays its part. I know I’ve banged on about this before, so I’ll bang on about it again, and the article repeats a new version of an old statistic, “Alcohol was involved in half of traffic crashes resulting in pedestrian fatalities, and 37% of pedestrians had a blood alcohol concentration above the legal limit, compared with 13% of drivers involved in crashes.”  This is for the whole of America I think, and is certainly not news to me.  Drunk driving is clearly very bad and wrong, and of course illegal.  Walking drunk on the other hand is not illegal, but is far more likely to kill somebody.  Usually the walker, of course.

Sunday, July 21, 2013

THE DANGERS OF PEDESTRIANISM


Of course there’s nothing funny about walkers being killed by drunk drivers.  And there’s not actually anything very funny about mooning, and yet who can resist an ignoble snigger, followed by a swift twinge of shame, upon reading this headline on the Fox news website in Phoenix:

Pedestrian 'mooning' cars fatally hit by drunk driver

The news items reads:

 “Police say a pedestrian who was walking in the road and flashing his buttocks to drivers was hit and killed by a suspected drunk driver early Saturday morning. 

25-year-old Lee Cole Koontha was allegedly ‘mooning’ drivers and laying down in the roadway near 20th Avenue and Indian School Road. According to police, he was likely drunk or had taken drugs. 

Although his friends tried to get Koontha out of the road, officers say he was eventually struck by 48-year-old Stanley Stafford. 

Police say they believe Stafford was also impaired by alcohol or drugs. 

Koontha was taken to a hospital where he later died. 

Stanley was arrested and booked for aggravated DUI.”

I’m glad that Lee had friends who at least tried to get him out of the road.  He looks like he may not have been a very easy man to befriend.