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We need to slow down and spare the men and women who care for our highways
Plus: Phone calls and driving don't mix
By all accounts, Donald Lichliter was a good man. The kind of outgoing fellow who belted out a song on a karaoke machine at his own birthday party.
Saturday, August 1, 2009 7:21 AM PDT
A guy who loved riding a 2000 Buell Thunderbolt motorcycle.
A family man with a wife and four children.
And a worker who didn't flinch when asked to work a late shift or take on overtime.
Now, Mr. Lichliter is gone, the latest Caltrans worker to be killed on the job. He was struck while carrying out the job of applying fertilizer to the Eucalyptus trees along Highway 99 in Lodi.
Ironically, Mr. Lichliter, 53, told his family that, if he should die on the job, he'd like them to spread this message:
Slow down.
He was part of the high-risk but little-recognized community of highway workers who put their lives on the line every day.
Each year, according to the Federal Highway Administration, more highway workers are killed than police officers and firefighters combined.
Nationally, three highway workers die in so-called cone zones every five days.
Mr. Lichliter lived in Modesto but worked out of the Caltrans office in Lodi, and he had 27 years of service with the state agency.
The accident that took his life remains under investigation. The driver of the truck which struck Mr. Lichliter has not been cited, and we don't want to reach conclusions prematurely.
Yet this is quite clear: Caltrans workers are in peril.
Since 1924, there have been 172 Caltrans employees killed on the job. Some of these deaths, clearly, could have been prevented. For example:
Caltrans has numerous safety innovations in place, such as trucks equipped with a large vacuum that lets workers pick up litter off the roadway without leaving their vehicle.
Still, the dangers may only grow as nearly $20 billion in transportation improvement projects move forward and the number of registered vehicles in the state grows.
So, please: Slow down.
The worker you avoid striking could be a loving husband, a doting dad, a good fellow who belts out karaoke at his own birthday party.
Talking while driving — even with hands free — is dangerous
Slowing down is one way to be a good driver. Hanging up the cell phone's another.
We've worried that talking on a cell phone while driving, even with a hands-free device, is dangerous.
Now we're backed up by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration which agrees that any use of a cell phone creates a significant "cognitive distraction" for drivers. Here's a quote from an NHTSA research report summary:
"While the precise impact (of drivers' use of cell phones) cannot be quantified, we nevertheless have concluded that the use of cell phones while driving has contributed to an increasing number of crashes, injuries and fatalities ... both hand-held and hands-free cell phones increase the risk of a crash. Indeed, research has demonstrated that there is little, if any, difference between the use of hand-held and hands-free phones."
The agency finds that all sorts of distractions add up to the cause of a quarter of all traffic accidents.
The hands-free devices have helped retailers sell gadgets. The gadgets haven't made us safer drivers.
— Lodi News-Sentinel
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Reader Feedback
lodiborn wrote on Aug 6, 2009 1:50 PM:
Great American Trucker wrote on Aug 4, 2009 7:59 PM:
You should see the bozos who whiz by at 90+ mph. with a phone stuck in their ear! Some nearly collide with each other as they jockey back and forth between lanes to pass anything in front of them, as though it were some sort of race.
They make me laugh, and provide me with much needed entertainment after a 14-hour day at work. BUT, you couldn't pay me enough to stand on the ground with a vest, tending to trees on the side of the road. The way people drive these days, it's WAY too dangerous working anywhere near these morons.
But I like the message this man left:
SLOW DOWN!
Will anyone here actually get it? "
glad2beout wrote on Aug 3, 2009 5:26 PM:
Cogito wrote on Aug 2, 2009 5:53 PM:
jbhiker wrote on Aug 2, 2009 8:06 AM:
wtf wrote on Aug 1, 2009 5:01 PM:
It's been proven that the human mind cannot hold more than one thought at a time. I would think that this would apply to "multi-tasking" while driving as well. "
Jerome R. Kinderman wrote on Aug 1, 2009 3:08 PM:
Could it really be the "dialing" of these devices that is the source of the cell-phone tragedies; not the chatting? If so, then the newly enacted hands-free law should be having absolutely no affect whatsoever.
For those who give little thought to the absurdity of the laws that are passed merely for the sake of appearing to do something, either this most current silly one should be repealed or driving while talking, eating, drinking (non-alcoholic), smoking or any other activity that might distract the driver from paying absolute attention to the task at hand should be enacted.
Or perhaps we as drivers need to be just a bit more vigilant as we drive these machines hurtling down the freeways at 65+ MPH. "
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