In case you or someone you know doesn’t quite understand what the big deal is about staring at a tiny screen full of tinier words while piloting several tons of metal at speeds of around a mile-a-minute, maybe show them this. It’s a dump truck driver causing a huge pileup outside of London, because the dummy was staring at his phone.
The wreck involving the “tipper lorry” (as the Brits call it, adorably) happened last March, when 30-year-old Razvan Rusu caused the multi-car accident on the M1 in northwest London.
Interior camera footage of the wreck shows, painfully clearly, that Rusu was staring at his phone, just stealing the occasional glance up to see if anything interesting was happening out the windshield. Eventually, something very interesting did happen, when he ran headlong into the cars in front of him.
The car immediately in front of the truck managed to swerve out of the way, but the van in front and one or more cars in front of that weren’t so lucky.
Rusu, a Romanian national, was just sentenced to eight months by a British court, the Daily Mirror reported.
I kind of want to know what the guy was looking at. He’s focused on that screen for a solid two or so seconds at a time– if we assume the truck was doing a normal highway speed of about 60 MPH, that means each little burst the driver is staring at the phone, the truck travels 176 feet. That’s a surprisingly long stretch.
Detective Sergeant Stephen Pidgeon gave a statement to the Mirror that almost makes him seems quietly delighted with the obviousness of the negligence committed:
“Rarely is it possible to see such a clear example of the risks some drivers are willing to take with mobile phones and the danger that using them whilst driving can cause.”
It is a pretty clear example. I’ll try not to be a similar sort of idiot.