Here we go again — another fatal Central New York motor vehcile accident caused by distracted driving. Cell phones, smart phones, texting devices, gps navigators — what will they think of next to tempt drivers into distraction?
The latest victims of distracted driving? News sources report that the bus driver who crashed into the Onondaga Lake Parkway railroad overpass near Syracuse has admitted he was distracted by his personal global positioning system (gps) device.
A spokesman for his employer, Coach USA, had previously said that Use of any GPS device while driving was against company policy. The driver had resorted to his GPS after he missed the turn to the bus terminal, and ended up off track. I have previously blogged about this Syracuse bus crash here, here and here.
I have blogged about the upsurge in motor vehicle crashes caused by distracted driving several times (read them here, here and here). In my job as a Central New York automobile accident lawyer , I have represented, and am representing, victims of distracted driving, including a client who was rear-ended by a driver who was reading a map, and another who was struck head-on in a cross-over accident by a teenage driver who was texting while driving.
Fiddling with a personal GPS navigator is no different than texting, phoning or looking at a map while driving. These activities should just not be done without first pulling over and stopping.
Let’s all take a valuable lesson from this unfortunate, and totally avoidable, tragedy. Let’s put our cell phones, GPS’s and other devices down and just look where we are going!