(Literal) Road blogging, a whole new art

Well this will be interesting - you know, as in potentially deadly.

Despite knowing that traffic deaths are up because of cell phone use (or rather, the reduction by tough drunk driving and seat belt laws has been erased because of people who can't wait 5 seconds to pull over before making a phone call*), Chrysler is offering in its 2009 models Wi-Fi access and Internet connectivity.

It's supposedly for the kiddies in the back.

Bad idea, says Randall Stross in this account in the New York Times.

Ya think?

J. R. Peter Kissinger, president of the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety in Washington, calls “distracted driving” one of the leading threats to “all of us who drive or walk in this country.” Will drivers exercise good sense and not use their laptops while driving? He is not sanguine: he knows of few drivers who follow the example of a colleague, who locks her P.D.A. in the car trunk before setting out so she won’t be tempted to put it to use while driving.

A laptop will pose a similar problem, even if it remains on the lap of a front-seat passenger. Mr. Kissinger said: “I can picture two teenagers in the front and the passenger pulls up a YouTube video. I can’t imagine the driver saying, ‘I’m going to pull over and stop so I can safely watch what you’re laughing at.’”

Of course, as Stross points out, people can already do this, if they have a wireless card or built-in cellular wireless access on their laptop.

My laptop has wireless access. Just think, all this time I could have been driving along, smoking, applying makeup (when I actually bother) and blogging all at the same time! Oh, and snapping the occasional photo, as I am prone to do.

Heck, I could even download the photos to my Flickr account, if I had one.

Too bad I don't have an automatic transmission. I could add a couple of other things in there if I didn't have to shift every so often!

* I confess to sometimes being one of these.