My wife and I decided to take advantage of the spring-like weather this past week and head for the beach. We were not surprised to find that others had the same idea. Foot traffic was so thick on the boardwalk that we could move only at a sluggish pace. We didn't care. We were there to look at the dark, beautiful winter water, gently lapping up close, frothy further out. Visually, we drank our fill.
But what struck us as remarkable was how many of our fellow promenaders had no interest in the view. These were the cellphone zombies. There they were, on a crowded beach on the warmest day of the year, faces buried in their phones. Had the Long Island Sound vanished in a silent puff of mystical energy, I doubt they would have noticed. How the cellphone zombies avoided colliding with each other is a question best left to Stephen King.
Whatever works on the boardwalk, it fails on the roads. Lately we read that drivers using their phones are causing so many collisions that insurance premiums can't keep up. Half of teenaged drivers surveyed admit to texting while behind the wheel, and a two-second glance at the screen exponentially increases the likelihood of an accident. Holding a phone in the hand makes things worse, but, as Tom Vanderbilt notes in his 2009 book "Traffic," statistics for hands-free phones are not much better.