[s-cars] NAC RE: PSA on doorings: check your mirrors!

[JC]

Yep. Agree with all said. Count me in as one of the paranoid cyclists, I
hate riding along lines of parked cars in the city and keep my fast road
riding (which I do a fair bit of) to suburbs and countrysides. Any time I
see a head in a parked drivers seat I get nervous.

A friend of mine's flakey girlfriend killed a motorcyclist a couple of years
ago in Belgium. He was coming up from behind her in the left lane, she
drifted right and then suddenly banged a U to the left, causing him to
t-boned right into the BMW X3. My friends have some story for why it was the
bikers fault, but I have always had a a hard time buying it at all. X3 was
totaled. Guy is dead.

Along the same lines, even-more-than-usual it seems to me, EVERY SINGLE
DRIVER is talking on a cell phone without a hands-free these days.
Constantly I'll notice a driver seems out of it and driving
bizarrely/stupidly and when you get up to the windshield you see they are
yacking away in distraction with the phone plastered against their cheek.
Every single time... (I of course use my phone in the car but strictly
adhere to hands-free as I believe it has a huge impact on concentration and
focus - something about holding something in your hand takes away much more
of the attention and ability to concentrate - I suspect it's a right-brain /
left-brain thing.)

But it's no wonder this kind of stuff happens. Would be nice if the
penalties for really bad behavior like this were signficant, instead we have
a focus on penalties for speeding violations regardless if they were
'speeding that caused increased danger' or 'speeding down an empty highway
where it was easier to ticket you'...



> -----Original Message-----
> From: s-car-list-bounces at audifans.com
> [mailto:s-car-list-bounces at audifans.com] On Behalf Of Richard
> van der Hoff
> Sent: Friday, September 25, 2009 20:45 PM
>
> In short, check your mirrors, yes. But more than that: have a
> fricking clue what else is going on around you.
>