Gadgets and lives in our hands

OK. I'll go first.

I almost hit a guy at 23rd and Jackson last month. I was on my cellphone.

A couple of years ago, I was looking for a song on my iTouch while driving down Fourth Avenue. I rear-ended a car. Inside were a man and his daughter.

Anyone else? Please?

"I almost hit somebody in a crosswalk," Charles A. Wiley confessed at Safeway the other morning. "I was on the phone and thought I had the light and she popped up. She even slapped the car.

"It scared me so bad, I don't use a cellphone any more."

That may not be a matter of choice, if state Sen. Tracey Eide and Rep. Reuven Carlyle have their way.

This week, they will propose legislation that would strengthen the state's ban on driving while using a handheld cellphone, or driving while texting or e-mailing.

Those everyday acts would become primary offenses, which means that if a police officer spots you, you get a ticket. No other violations required. (Fifteen states have already passed similar laws.)

The fine would be $124. If you cause a collision, it would jump to $550; even more if someone is injured.

The law would also ban teen drivers with an intermediate license from using all electronic devices.

All kinds of research shows that increased awareness is not enough to change driver behavior. Everyone thinks they're special, that this call or this text is really important and no, it can't wait.

Only strong laws will stop it.

But I don't need to tell you this. We know who we are, what we've done and the awful things that could have happened.

A man named Frank (he didn't want his last name used) told me of being hit in a crosswalk by a driver who was putting on her makeup.

Barbara Schwartz, who teaches people how to make pies, has a "personal policy" of never using her cellphone while driving.

"I knew I wasn't as good a driver" when on the phone, she said. She compared driving while using a cellphone to smokers "who know that it's bad for them, but do it anyway."

But if you can't listen to these folks or to your own conscience, then please listen to George Sargent.

In 2002, he was sitting in the front seat of a car driven by his friend John Poston. They were waiting for a light to change while their wives, Eleanor Sargent and Joanne Poston, were chatting in the back seat.

A young woman in a Jeep Wrangler slammed into them at 60 mph. She had been reading a map. The women died instantly.

There was not enough evidence to charge the driver with vehicular homicide.

"Whether or not people realize it, driving is a full-time job," Sargent wrote to me after the accident. "Driving while talking on a cellphone, reading a map ... These are a few of the 'ordinary' distractions that kill people."

I can't speak to the issue with more knowledge or eloquence, but I will say this: The gadgets in our hands shouldn't mean more than the lives we hold in them.

Before I left him, I asked Wiley whom he was talking to that day when he almost hit that woman in the crosswalk.

"I can't recall," he said, then shook his head. "And that is a heck of a thing."

Nicole Brodeur's column appears Tuesday and Friday. Reach her at 206-464-2334 or nbrodeur@seattletimes.com.

Now she pulls over or lets it ring.